Monday Memories—The Secret Ingredient

In Taste of Home magazine there was (is?) a page where readers share the secret ingredient they add to make their recipe “special”—a-tablespoon-or-two-of-grape-jelly-added-to-my-spaghetti-sauce type tips. If Mrs. Duffy turned Ms. Melbourne were alive, she could have written in lots of ideas.

First she was Mrs. Duffy and then about half way through my grade school years she became Ms. Melbourne. She was our school cook. She cooked in the lunch room upstairs of our old brick school building. She made the noodles for chicken and noodles. She also made the bread, cinnamon rolls, hotdog and hamburger buns she served. On bread days she made extra loaves to sell to the teachers and then bought potato chips and ice cream bars for our lunches with the money earned. I thought she was one of the best cooks on earth, and I wasn’t a hungry girl. I grew up around good cooks.

One of my favorite lunches was served on Fridays: tomato soup. At first I thought it was homemade because it didn’t sting my throat like Campbell’s tomato soup, but her recipe didn’t taste a thing like mom’s. I saw industrial sized cans of Campbell’s soup on the lunchroom shelves and that only added to my confusion. For years I wondered what her magic ingredient was. Years, and I do mean years later, I realized all she did was add milk instead of water. Ms. Melbourne’s tomato soup secret was milk.

The same thing happened with her apple crisp. The top was rich, thick, and crusty. Always looking for a recipe that matched hers, I finally found one in the newspaper twenty years later that tasted just like hers:

Apple Crisp

1 ½ cups packed brown sugar
1 cup flour
10 Tbsp butter (butter tastes best, but margarine may be substituted)
7 cooking apples
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine sugar, flour, and butter in bowl until crumbly, set aside. Peel, core, and slice apples. Add cinnamon and nutmeg to the apples and pour into greased 9” x 9” pan. Cover apples with crumbly sugar, flour, and butter mixture, spreading evenly. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour until topping is crisp and apples bubbly. Serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, dollop of whipped cream, or with half-and-half.


I still think of her every time I make it.

Ms. Melbourne added maple flavoring to her cinnamon roll frosting. Just a tiche, but it transformed them from a regular cinnamon roll into a donut realm. If I’m not frosting our cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting, you can bet they’ll have maple in them.

She also introduced the school to taco burgers. She browned and crumbled hamburger and served it on her fresh baked buns, then added grated cheese and chopped lettuce to it. I don’t know if she was out of taco shells that day, or if she didn’t have enough hamburger to give us each a patty, or didn’t want to make sloppy joes. All I know was they became a regular.

I thought Ms. Melbourne’s son was the luckiest kid alive to get to eat her cooking every night, but one time we went trick or treating at her house and her house didn’t smell anything like the school lunchroom. She confessed she didn’t cook much at home.

I’m certain Ms. Melbourne had no idea how often I would think of her through the years or how often I would imitate her recipes. But more than a little of this or a little of that, the secret that I learned from Ms. Melbourne is to never underestimate that what you’re doing won’t have an impact somehow, somewhere, on someone.