For David O’Neal, resurrecting old recipes is labor of love

Published 8:59 am Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Generally, whatever was found between the pages of these cookbooks was trashed, like the old recipes handwritten on whatever scrap was handy, recipe cards neatly typed, recipes clipped from magazines and newspapers.

“After a couple of years, I decided to save them,” O’Neal said.

Many are stained, a common occurrence when recipe cards share space on a countertop surface with a mixing bowl, greasy measuring cups and sticky ingredients.

Tossing these bits of culinary and family history into a basket near his desk, he didn’t think much about them until after the pandemic and hurricanes hullabaloo. Now he is in the process of photographing and posting recipes on the social media site, Resurrected Recipes. “That’s what we’re doing, you know, giving life to these old recipes, to the people who took the time to write them down and have more than likely, passed on.  I don’t want to offend anybody who might discover their mother or grandmother’s name associated with one of these posts. I thought about marking out the names, but I just want to pay tribute to them,” he said.

O’Neal hasn’t tested all the recipes, he’s warned, and he hopes others will comment and post a photo – good, bad and ugly – if they try one.

One of the recipes is for Shrimp Pealue, which can also be spelled pelau. Pelau is a traditional rice dish of the West Indies, and according to handy-dandy Wikipedia. It shares its origins with pilaf and paella. The recipe is super simple, maybe intuitive for some cooks. Specific instructions at the very end of the recipe state, “Stir twice.”

O’Neal has been stirring the pot since he was a teen.

“My mom was a beautician, and we had an intercom system between the house and the shop,” he said. “When I was hungry for something, I asked her what to do.”

Sometimes, his mother walked him through each step. Sometimes, she left the customer at a strategic point to lend a hand. O’Neal also lived with his grandmother, and described her as a “great cook.”

The favorite thing she made that he makes today is steak and gravy with fried cornbread.

“When I’m cooking it I feel like she’s looking right over my shoulder,” he said.

Monday through Friday, he keeps the dishes he prepares simple. On weekends, he cooks whatever he is hungry for, and has never learned how to cook “a little bit,” O’Neal said. He is often asked by friends to bring his from-scratch chocolate cake with chocolate icing with seven-minute frosting filling to get togethers. He says he’s comfortable in the kitchen, but that doesn’t mean everything comes out perfectly every single time.

“I wanted a chocolate meringue pie and googled a recipe for it,” he said. “It turned out great. A few weeks later, I wanted to make one for Jo-El Sonnier, a friend, because his wife was out of town. I took it over to him in the pouring rain right out of the oven.”

Sonnier told him he’d cut it later. O’Neal suggested he post a video when he did.

“He did alright. It was a video of him cutting it, taking a bite, then throwing it in the trash,” O’Neal said with a laugh. “I thought I had found the same recipe on Google, but I guess I hadn’t.”

If O’Neal could ask anyone, living or dead, to prepare him a meal, he said he’d like to dine in one of Paula Deen’s restaurants.

“I love butter as much as she does,” he said. He keeps plenty in stock, buying in bulk everytime he finds a butter bargain. His grandmother, on the other hand, used Shedd’s Spread. The refrigerator was full of the containers, which she used for leftovers. “If you were looking for the butter (margarine), it was the last thing you found,” he said.