Fortune telling cake set is part of Helen D’Ordine’s collection of her Aunt Kathleen’s old recipes.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

Old recipes can tell a story, maybe even the tale of a particular time in someone’s life.

That’s how Helen D’Ordine felt when she opened storage boxes left behind by her beloved Aunt Kathleen and found a treasure of old recipes from a time long ago.

Kathleen Bonde of Pendleton Street in Cranston married Joe Dailey in 1936 when she was 34 years old. They moved to Warwick. The oldest of six children, Aunt Kathleen became the matriarch of the family after her mother died. She and Joe never had children.

“She was very good to her brothers and sisters, as well as her nieces and nephews,” said D’Ordine.

One thing she cooked for her extended family was baked beans.

“I still rave about them,” said Bob Ford, a nephew. “I can still taste them . . . the fragrance! The taste!”

During a polio epidemic in the ’50s, D’Ordine was sent away from her Providence home near Smith Hill to live in Warwick with Aunt Kath. Much later, when D’Ordine was married, Aunt Kath loved to come to her house for a boiled dinner of corned beef and cabbage, along with a whiskey sour.

When her Aunt Kath died in 1985, D’Ordine took several boxes from her aunt’s house and stored them in the basement of her North Providence home. Joseph Bonde, 90, is Kath’s last living sibling.

The boxes sat for more than 20 years, a time D’Ordine was busy raising her own family and teaching.

“I didn’t want to throw anything out because it was hers,” D’Ordine said warmly.

D’Ordine at last explored the boxes a few months ago and unearthed a time capsule from the 1930s.

In the market place, there must have been a lot of competition for everyone’s dollars, and recipe cards and cookbooks were part of the marketing campaigns. Aunt Kath, it would seem, reveled in her new role as a homemaker and saved many of the recipes and tips compiled by home economic departments working for local companies.

The Providence Gas Home Service Department must have been busy sending her piles of recipes nicely printed on index cards. One imagines Aunt Kathleen got them with her bills in the mail.

There’s even one with a crazy recipe for wedding cake. It’s not one of those old-fashioned white layer cakes but a fruit cake with loads of ingredients including a quarter pound of lemon peel. The instructions include this sentence: “This makes a cake weighing about 9 pounds and the flavor is best when it is kept about two or three months before serving.”

Aunt Kath must have had a nice new range in her honeymoon cottage as a 1936 spiral cookbook sang the praises of cooking with an electric stove.

Called The New Art, the book was created by the General Electric Kitchen Institute. It referred not just to a “housewife” but to the “home manager” who now had such a better life thanks to innovations including the electric iron, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the electric refrigerator.

“And now the ELECTRIC RANGE, not only can it save the housewife time and energy, but it can actually work for her,” it promised. Flameless and odorless and designed to keep your kitchen cool, “you merely turn on a switch.”

“Cooking failures are virtually eliminated,” it assured.

Beyond all the paper, D’Ordine found a fortune telling cake set. Little metal charms, the size of pieces for a board game, included a baby, a heart, an owl and an iron. A sheet of paper with corresponding fortunes predicted the future. Wrap each charm in the fortune and then put them in cake batter and bake. Once it’s sliced it up, depending on which piece you got, your future was assured. Parenthood, love, wisdom and a home made for happy prospects. But find the thimble and face life as “a nice old maid” according to this game.

Recipes from the home economic departments of fruit companies were saved. Who knew bananas had a role in attracting the eyes of “the new up-to-date hostess.”

Of course, most hostesses would want to serve a cocktail or two and a booklet of recipes from the Mohawk Liqueur Corporation, of Detroit, Mich., had no publication date but lots of drink recipes.

The Gold Medal Sandwich Book, dedicated to the earl of Sandwich, explained how to make convenient, and delicious, meals with two slices of bread and a variety of meat and cheese fillings. Gorman’s Bakery in Central Falls also had a recipe book celebrating the sandwich. It included recipes for “Substantial Sandwiches” and “Dainty Sandwiches” and finally, “Toasted Sandwiches.”

The grocery stores, too, worked to keep their names front and center with circulars for Your Christmas Menu from the A&P News in 1930. It included a Christmas goose roast and Christmas Pudding with Foamy Sauce.

D’Ordine didn’t remember Aunt Kathleen being a big traveler but she had recipe cards from far away places like the Crescent Hotel in Arkansas (for a Huckleberry Cake).

There was a copy of an order form for kitchenware that cost from $1.49 to $3.99.

Aunt Kath’s father was from Norway, she clipped and saved Norwegian recipes and stories, including one for a Norwegian Yule Cake. There’s not similar evidence of her Irish-American roots on her mother’s side.

On a pumpkin pie recipe were notes saying “Made this for Thanksgiving 1942.”

When Kath’s husband Joe died unexpectedly in 1958, the couple was building a log cabin vacation house in the woods of Sterling, Conn. She went back to work for the state in what was then called the Department of Employment Security, D’Ordine said.

She may have still cooked, but there’s no treasure of recipes from those years, save for Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Cookbook. She might well have saved that book, copyright 1961, for its thin line drawings by a young artist credited as Andrew Warhol. He must have drawn his soup cans and all the rest of his pop art as Andy Warhol after illustrating the cookbook.

But that collector’s item can’t hold a candle to all D’Ordine’s memories of her beloved Aunt Kath stored up in a box, and in her heart.

POTTED STEAK WITH PEAS

2 1/2 pounds bottom round steak

6 onions (medium size)

1 cup diced turnips

1/3 teaspoon pepper

1 cup tomato juice

2 cups peas

1 teaspoon salt

Cut the steak in pieces suitable for serving, dip in flour and brown well in drippings. Add the chopped onions, turnips, tomato juice and seasonings and barely cover with boiling water.

Simmer until tender, about 2 1/2 hours, replenishing the water, if necessary, and serve garnished with peas from which the liquid has been drained and heated with 1 tablespoon of butter.

CHICKEN A LA KING

4 tablespoons butter

4 tablespoons flour

1 1/2 cups milk

1 cup mushrooms

1/4 cup green peppers

1 1/2 cups diced cooked chicken

2 egg yolks

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon mustard

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon paprika

Make white sauce by blending butter and flour, and adding hot milk. Cook in double boiler, stirring until thickened. Saute mushrooms, cut into small pieces, add to sauce with the minced peppers and the chicken.

Beat egg yolks, add seasonings, and add to rest of mixture. Cook together for 10 to 15 minutes longer and serve on toast or in patties.

AMERICAN CHOP SUEY

1 pound hamburger

1 large onion, chopped

1/2 pound spaghetti

1 can tomatoes

Pan fry meat and onion in a little fat. Add cooked spaghetti and tomatoes, season with salt and pepper, and cook 5 minutes longer.

CALIFORNIA CHICKEN PIE (MOCK CHICKEN)

1 can tuna (13 ounces)

2 carrots diced

2 medium potatoes diced

1 medium onion chopped

1 cupful green peas

1/8 teaspoon pepper

1/4 teaspoon paprika

1 tablespoon butter, fat or oil

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon salt

Pastry

Boil carrots, potatoes and onion together until tender in a small amount of salted water. Add peas. Make a white sauce as follows: melt the fat, add the flour and cook until bubbling; add the milk gradually and cook until smooth and thickened.

Add seasonings and mix sauce with tuna. Line a baking dish with plain pastry, fill with the vegetables and creamed fish in layers, cover with an upper crust in which vent holes have been made and bake until the crust is brown in a 450 degree oven.

BANANA CREAM PIE

1 1/2 cups milk

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons flour

1 egg yolk

1 tablespoon butter

1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract or 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract

1 9-inch pie shell (baked pastry, corn flake or graham cracker)

4 bananas

Whipped cream or meringue

Scald one cup of the milk over hot water. Mix together the sugar, salt and flour. Add 1/2 cup of cold milk slowly, stirring until mixture is smooth. Stir into hot milk.

Cook until thickened, stirring constantly. Cover and let cook for about three minutes. Stir a little of the hot milk mixture into the egg yolk, and add this to the hot mixture.

Cook one minute longer. Add butter and flavoring. Allow mixture to cool. Fill pie shell with alternate layers of sliced bananas and cooled filling. Top with whipped cream or meringue.

Makes one 9-inch pie.

gciampa@projo.com