Her words are sensible and her advice thoughtful.
She takes good care of her family and is never lazy.
–Proverbs 31:26-27

There is a delightful children’s book titled My Favorite Dress. As the little girl grows taller and bigger, her mother keeps her happy by finding creative ways for her daughter to hold on to her favorite dress. It first becomes a blouse with a ruffled hem, then a short skirt, a playsuit, a scarf, footies, and finally a hair bow. It was a good lesson in making the most of what we have.

My mother was a master of doing this. Someone gave Daddy a huge bolt of flannel fabric once. He probably accepted it as payment for some work he had done. Mother turned the navy flannel into several blankets. The edges were bound in light blue from fabric scraps she had saved. The blankets, warm and lightweight, turned out to be our favorites.

I learned from Mother how to turn the collar on a man’s shirt when the inside became frayed from rubbing against the neck. By removing the collar, turning it over to the “good” side, and then stitching it back in place, you could never tell. I did that once in my early days of marriage when money was tight and I felt very proud of knowing how to save one of my husband’s favorite shirts.

Mother made a big pan of biscuits almost every morning. She made the best! They were light as air. If any were left over, they were turned into a bread pudding for dessert. Topped with a lightly browned meringue, Biscuit Pudding was delicious hot or cold.

Muscadines were plentiful in our backyard. They were beautifully preserved as jelly, but Mother found another use. She made muscadine cobblers. I mentioned Mother’s muscadine cobblers to a friend who said she had never heard of using them that way. I doubt Mother had either, but here was this bountiful crop of muscadines and her determination not to waste anything, so we had muscadine cobblers. Different and delicious.

Mother’s spring garden gave us all the strawberries we could want. Sweetened, mashed fresh berries were usually in the refrigerator for shortcakes with whipped cream, or spread over hot buttered biscuits. Then there were her strawberry custard pies and strawberry dumplings! They belong in this blog because of the timing of when the strawberries were used. When a bowl of sweetened strawberries held in the refrigerator began to get just a little past fresh, that’s when Mother used them in a meringue-topped pie or dropped pastry strips into a thickened and boiling strawberry mixture for dumplings. I can’t even describe how wonderful both of these desserts were!

Like the little girl with a favorite dress, I was blessed to have a creative mother. Her mother and my mother knew how to extend the pleasure of good things. I heard Mother say many times

Use it up,
wear it out,
make it do,
or do without.

Mother’s Biscuit Pudding
6 cold homemade biscuits
1 c. hot water
Pour water over the biscuits and let soak a while. Crumble.
2/3 c. sugar
¼ stick margarine, melted
1 t. imitation vanilla
2 eggs (use beaten yolks in the pudding and save the whites for meringue)
2 c. whole milk
Mix and add to the crumbled biscuits. Stir well. Pour the pudding mixture into a Pyrex dish. Bake at 350 deg until set. Spoon a meringue on top and brown.

Meringue:
2 egg whites
2 T. sugar
Beat the whites until frothy and then slowly add the sugar while beating until it holds peaks. Spoon onto the pudding and put it back in the oven just long enough to brown the meringue.

Notes:
I watched Mother make the pudding and wrote this down back in the 60s. Then, we mostly used margarine because we didn’t know it was harmful and was much less expensive than butter. I would use butter today. It was a long time before I switched to pure vanilla. We never had that in our house when I was growing up. So, I would say use ½ t. of pure vanilla. To know if the pudding has “set,” stick a knife in near the center, and when it comes out clean, it’s set. I would begin checking at 30 minutes.

My parents, Louise and Walter Luffman