My Family Recipe

I Live in the City Now, but Cheesy Bread Will Always Have My Small-Town Heart

The lasting power of my mother's Iowa dinner party staple.

September  3, 2019
Photo by Julia Gartland

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that's meaningful to them and their loved ones.


I walk into Jenna and Bradley’s apartment and hug them hello. I hand a bottle of wine to Jenna and a covered pan of dessert bars to Bradley. I wave hello to the handful of college friends who have arrived before me as I walk through the living room to my standard post: the table with the snacks.

Bradley joins me as I dip a shrimp from a seafood platter into cocktail sauce.

“Where’s this from?” I barely make eye contact as I dress an oyster.

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“I would love it either way, but I (almost) always make a recipe the first time as it’s written so I don’t want to stray from that with yours”
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“I picked it up at Chelsea Market today.”

“Oh, wow. Must’ve cost a fortune.”

He lets out a small laugh, but I can’t discern whether his expression is a slight smile or a grimace.

“I’m really proud of that cheese plate,” Robyn gestures to it as she approaches. “Isn’t it pretty?”

It is.

We have wine until it’s late. Then we have dinner until it’s later. Dinner is eclectic. Bradley is from New Orleans and made jambalaya. We supplement it with Domino’s. New York pizza is great and this is far from it, but that’s part of its charm. The Domino’s is delicious, but it’s also nostalgic from college, and there’s something New York in that—eating a worse alternative because it’s familiar. Before we eat, Lauren takes a picture for her Instagram.

We finish the night with my dessert bars, which I made after climbing out of a Pinterest blackhole. Funfetti mix is transformed into something denser and sweeter than cake thanks to a generous helping of shortening. There’s a thick, gaudy layer of sprinkles on top. Lauren takes another picture.

MY FAMILY RECIPE (THE PODCAST!)

As I come up on my 12th anniversary of living in New York next week, I’m reflecting on how it’s different than Dubuque, Iowa, where I grew up. But I’m also doing a lot of thinking on how New York City has changed me.

In land-locked Iowa there were never seafood platters. Sometimes there was shrimp, but it was always frozen and it was often too expensive to be a dinner party staple. The first time I had a tuna steak, I was 16 and ordered it because I thought myself cosmopolitan. I wasn’t aware of how it was meant to be prepared and neither were my parents. It arrived medium-rare (as appropriate), and we sent it back three times before it was fully cooked through.

We had meat and cheese platters growing up, but they were either bought from Hy-Vee, our local grocery store, or they comprised local flavors like venison jerky in place of jamón serrano. They were never curated by Brooklyn-based cheesemongers, and the concept of a smear of jam on the platter was foreign to me until my 20s. The meat and cheese platters of Iowa wouldn’t have gotten many likes on Instagram.

An even more striking difference was the energy of Iowa dinner parties. They always turned out a little like The Great British Bake Off. Everyone was lovely to each other, but whenever the dinner party was a potluck, it seemed as if everyone was competing.

It’s because of what was at stake. Iowa kitchens are bigger than New York kitchens; the expectation was that everyone cooked. But more than that, in Iowa, recipes were currency.

We placed more value on recipes that had been published and republished in church or community cookbooks. There were dozens of variations of the cheesy hashbrown, an Iowa staple. A thousand ways to make corn. I grew accustomed to neighborhood families bringing the same dishes to picnics, for better (scotcheroos) or for worse (green bean salad).

In high school it was normal to receive a call from a friend that went, “Come over. My mom made Oreo fluff.”

I always felt that my mom cooked better than most of my friends’ parents. Reflecting back, I think it was because of the cookbooks in her arsenal. She grew up in a small Iowa town with fewer than 500 people called New Vienna (aptly nicknamed the eNVy of Iowa). There, my grandma collected recipes from friends and cookbooks, which she transcribed onto lined note cards: sour cream coffee cake, sugar cookies baked with secret ingredients (nutmeg and sour cream), and of course, cheesy hashbrowns. On the recipe cards, my grandma called for imprecise measurements: “a little salt,” “sugar to taste,” “just enough baking soda.”

I grew up on those recipes.

My mom’s cookbooks, from New Vienna and beyond, still live in her kitchen. One is called The Settlement Cookbook. Its faded parchment cover alleges it’s “the way to a man’s heart,” and is laughably illustrated with a line of women in aprons reading it.

I wish the recipe my mom became lauded for came from that cookbook. But it’s from a church cookbook from my Aunt Kathy’s parish in Barrington, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago). It’s for mushroom cheese bread. Every time my mom made it, people asked her for the recipe. She’d copy it down for them on a lined notecard, and though I never detected smugness, she knew the power the recipe held.

The recipe calls for an excessive amount of butter that’s mixed with dry mustard, minced onion, poppy seeds, seasoned salt, lemon juice, and canned mushrooms (editor’s note: we used fresh). The mix is poured into French bread that’s been meticulously sliced diagonally and stuffed with packaged Swiss cheese.

I’d stand next to my mom while she assembled it, which took longer than one might expect, sneaking slices of Swiss into my mouth. She’d complain that if I didn’t stop, the bread wouldn’t be cheesy enough. (It was always cheesy enough.)

Photo by Julia Gartland

My very first exposure to dinner parties in Iowa was on my 6th birthday. For as long as I can remember, it was a family tradition. Anything they wanted. It was like a death row inmate’s last meal, but infinitely happier.

My sister Sarah always choose filet mignon; my sister Iman’s choices were as inconsistent as mine, which included everything from chicken Parmigiana to veal (I went through a phase when I thought it was very funny to say “Wiener schnitzel”).

No matter what we chose as our main, mushroom cheese bread was always on the menu. Despite how it left your hands greasy from butter and planted poppy seeds in between every tooth, something about it felt elegant.

In my first month in New York, years later, I decided to cook for friends who let me crash on their couch while I found a place to live. I had not yet been deterred by the small kitchens and impossible-to-navigate New York grocery stores, and didn’t yet know about cheese plates with jam and figs.

I made mushroom cheese bread, of course. Since then I’ve only made it a handful of times, and in some ways it’s reflective of the ways New York has changed me. Today, for instance, I find excuses not to make it: the small kitchens, gourmet French bread is too crusty (as it should be, I think), poppy seeds cost a fortune ($10 sometimes!), and the amount of butter in the recipe is enough to make anyone on Keto blush.

But I also make or buy other things to bring: fancy cheese from obscure Brooklyn I found in subscription newsletters; elaborate Ina Garten recipes that mostly serve to name-dropping Ina Garten; and recipes from the internet made for Instagram.

What went missing is the core of how I once approached dinner parties: to focus not just on how good something tastes, but on how good something has always tasted—to bring whomever I was feeding back home with me.

One of the things that makes New York City great is that it has everything. One of the things that makes it tough is how tempting it is to grab something that was once foreign to you (from fancy cheese to crab claws) and pretend it was always yours.

It’s easy to forget who I was; it’s hard to remember that I was once mushroom cheese bread and all that butter.

When I first moved here, I visited my home in Iowa more frequently. Every time I did, a neighbor or high school friend would ask some variation of the same question, “Isn’t New York City so different from Iowa?”

“Yes, of course.”

I’d talk about not having a car or never being alone on the streets. I’d talk about eating dinner (not supper as we called it) at 10 p.m. I’d tell them horror stories about expensive apartments and how no matter how much it cost, there’d be pests. Regarding the pests, I’d outline the hierarchy of horrors: cockroaches, mice, rats, and then bed bugs.


Five years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I made my mom’s mushroom cheese bread at a friend’s country house where I had access to a large kitchen and a suburban grocery store.

After we were back in the city, my friend Katie texted me, “Can you send me the recipe for that bread?”

“Sure,” I replied. I typed it into an email and hit send.

Instead, I wish I had sent back: “I’ll write it on an index card for the next time I see you.”

Recipes used to be physical objects. I wish that I had honored my mom by writing her recipe down in cursive on a notecard that would inevitably fade and grow to be stained by butter mixed with powdered mustard. I wish that I had honored my grandma by amending the recipe slightly so that the measurements reflected “a little of this” and “more of that.”

Even though my mother’s mushroom cheese bread now floats through my friends’ inboxes (and now yours), I’d like to think that it’s still currency—even if a recipe like that may buy you less in New York than it does in Dubuque.

Got a family recipe you'd like to share? Email [email protected] for a chance to be featured.

See what other Food52 readers are saying.

  • Doug R.
    Doug R.
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    SweetiePetitti
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    Matthew Farner
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    Kristin McMahon Kligerman
Khalid is a Brooklyn-based writer and marketer. He’s contributed to PAPER, VICE, them., Hello Mr., and more. He works in tech.

19 Comments

Doug R. January 24, 2022
Also from Iowa, lived in Dubuque for awhile as a child, still live in Iowa. I grew up eating this same recipe, only without mushrooms. It's still one of my favorites! And you're exactly right - recipes are gold in the Midwest! But the magic words always seen to be, "Here's the recipe, but that's not how I make it!"
 
andie4193 January 24, 2022
So funny, i grew up in Dubuque and have lived in nyc for 10 years! So coincidental I came across this :) definitely know the Oreo fluff well!
 
SweetiePetitti January 24, 2022
I grew up just south of you in Clinton and agree that handwritten recipes are a treasure. They become even more so as you get older.
 
Matthew F. April 9, 2020
I grew up in Iowa, as well, and can remember my mother making this recipe, including the canned mushrooms. Thanks for sharing.
 
Kristin M. February 1, 2020
I have lived in NYC for almost 30 years now and I treasure my "church lady" cookbooks from Manchester, Masonville, Monti and Ryan, Iowa almost more than my Ottolenghis :-)
I too look at my grandmother's handwriting on the recipe cards she gave me for Thanksgiving stuffing and "angel" cookies and my mother's handwriting on the Texas sheet cake and dinner rolls cards.
Thank you for making me smile with warm and happy thoughts!
 
Rob F. February 1, 2020
This recipe takes me right back to my mom’s kitchen and all the southern love that went into her cooking. Her cooking was worlds different from how I cook today, but it definitely piqued my interest in food and where a great repertoire of recipes could take you. This article is such a great homage to your mother and to your background. I really enjoyed it.

I do have one question about the recipe itself. Is the minced onion the dried, spice-aisle stuff or fresh onion? My gut tells me it’s the dried. I would love it either way, but I (almost) always make a recipe the first time as it’s written so I don’t want to stray from that with yours
 
Martha F. January 31, 2020
Old fashioned, mid-westerner (Wisconsin) me, is writing this down on a notecard to keep in my Land-O-lakes butter recipe holder to become stained and smudged and enjoyed for years to come. Thank you.
 
Maegan K. October 14, 2019
I loved your writing...so cozy and elegant all at the same time!
 
Erin S. September 12, 2019
Oh my gosh...this recipe is almost identical to my moms family recipe for “Bubba” bread. She never used canned mushrooms though. Her recipe had cult status too and she brought this everywhere! Her name is Kathy and grew up in McHenry, but spent a huge chunk of her life in Barrington! What church did your mom get this from??
 
dsschuell September 10, 2019
From another Dubuquer, I really enjoyed reading this. I will definitely be adding this to my recipe collection.
 
Corj September 8, 2019
Can't even express how charmed and transported to familiar places and times your article made me. A classic. Looking forward to making your recipe for my extended family over the holidays and smiling just thinking about it's background- thank you.
 
billy September 5, 2019
there's a lot to be said for the classics... not just everyone's, but each of ours. thank you for taking me back to a place I've never been
 
Stacy I. September 4, 2019
I loved this. There is so much to be said for cooking/baking from a place of nostalgia rather than seeking the ever elusive "wow-factor". Added to my thanksgiving menu!
 
Khalid E. September 4, 2019
Thanks so much! And I assure you, this is the perfect Thanksgiving dish!
 
Katie H. September 3, 2019
First off, this looks like a true crowd pleaser that I promise to handwrite into my recipe book. Second, Khalid, loving this so much because the Settlement Cookbook is one of my kitchen treasures, gifted to me by my Grandma so I could have the secret family Christmas cookie recipe (give the cardamom wafer cookies a whirl, you won't be sorry). The cover always makes me laugh, as do all the recipes with sparse instructions like, "combine as usual."
 
Lallie September 4, 2019
Any chance of sharing the Cardamom Wafer Cookie recipe? It sounds delice.
 
Khalid E. September 4, 2019
Wow -- I can't believe you also have this cookbook!! And I love that I'm not the only one to reread it and take pause at some of the directions.
 
Eleanor M. September 6, 2019
I have that cookbook too, was my (Jewish, immigrant) grandmother's in NYC - early part of the 20th century....
 
SarahWarn September 3, 2019
As a fellow midwesterner turned city girl - I loved everything about this. I'm an avid cook of all manner of cuisines. A bit of a show-off maybe. But yes, focusing on how good something has always tasted is certainly a worthy pursuit. Something I'd like to think about more often.