Elizabeth Jeanne Montague

Good food and the Great Depression in new cookbook

BY SOPHIA ALDOUS
S-E Staff Reporter

    With her cream colored sweater and flapper hat, both adorned with a tasteful brooch, Elizabeth Montague is reminiscent of a time where if you went to town, even to buy a gallon of milk, you dressed up. She holds a small three by four photo of herself, dressed in pink with a feather boa draped around her neck and shoulders. A slightly vampy, but sincerely happy expres­sion greets the viewer.
    “Not bad for an 85-year-old, right?” she laughs.
    Decades ago that Montague remembers like it was yester­day, long before she moved to Stevens County where she has lived for the past 60 years, she was the second child and only girl in a family of four.
    Born October 1923 in South­ern California, Montague’s family were among the thousands of families all over the United States whose livelihood was dependent on whatever money they could scrape together during the Great Depression.
    “It’s funny, because I think we were happier back then and we barely had anything,” muses Montague. “Nowadays ,we as people have so much, but I don’t think that makes you happy. My parents worked real hard to make sure we didn’t go hungry, and we didn’t. Those really were some hard years growing up, but they are also some of my best memories.”
    Those are recollections that Montague has compiled in a lively cook­book aptly titled Ranch House Favorites of Years Gone By and Memories of the Great Depression Era. The book is sprinkled with recipes that Montague grew up eating, along with pictures of her and her family as they traveled through California into Oregon and Washington. The simple, but flavorsome dishes are often accompanied by an­ecdotes of Montague’s ad­ventures growing up.

Save some for me!

    “We moved quite often to wherever papa could find work,” Montague says. “I was just a little kid so I didn’t un­derstand how much he worked to keep food on the table. But mama was always doing delicious things with whatever we had. She could whip a good meal out of nothing.”
    One of Montague’s favorite dishes her mother concocted was Tapioca pudding made with dried Tapioca beads. This writer has never been an en­thusiast of Tapioca pudding, but after putting Montague’s recipe to the test, it’s safe to assume this traditional des­sert has a new convert.
    “The trick is to use real Tapi­oca beads, not minute Tapioca,” explains Montague. “It takes longer to make, but that’s how we made it back in 1928 and it is well worth it.”
    So worth it, that it brought on Montague’s first scolding from her father, Joe, for for­getting her table manners. One night, Montague’s mother, Beth, made the family small dishes of Tapioca pud­ding, to be consumed only af­ter all the children had cleared their dinner plates.
    On this rare occasion though, Beth set a large bowl of the creamy dessert on the table, meaning the family could have seconds after they had finished their first serv­ing.
    Montague’s older brother Bob, who was about 12 at the time, was going for a second helping of Tapioca. Montague feared Bob’s appetite would leave none left for her, so pointing at him she ordered, “Don’t you take it all; save some for me!”

Catching clams

    Apparently her father thought her tone was less than respectful. Pushing her pointed finger down and looking her directly in the eye, he told Montague to leave the table and go to her bed. Con­sidering the family of six shared a two-room cottage, she didn’t have far to go. Wounded more by the reprimand than by missing out on the coveted Tapioca, Montague dashed to the bed she shared with her little brother Georgie and began to weep profusely.
    “That was 80-years ago, and I still remember how much that hurt,” Montague says of her father’s admonishment. “I can’t remember him ever dis­ciplining me before that. I was the only girl in the family so I thought of myself as his pet. The thought that I had dis­pleased him was terrible to me.”
    Montague sobbed so hard, Georgie began to cry as well, and her father ultimately ended up holding her and rocking her back and forth until she stopped crying and fell asleep.
    To this day, whenever there’s delicious food being served at a family gathering, someone will invariably glance at Montague and good-naturedly tease, “Save some for me!”
    “I laugh about it now,” Montague chuckles. “When­ever I make Tapioca pudding, it takes me back to that din­ner on that day.”
    In 1929, Joe got a job work­ing on the Pacific Coast High­way, or Highway 101. Montague and her family were staying with Joe’s father, Grandpa Sam, who lived in a cottage off the highway about a quarter of a mile up a dirt road. Her brother Bobby, who was seven years older than Montague, was forever coming up with new schemes to help the family make money. He got the idea for he and his siblings to set up two apple boxes with a board between them by the highway where Montague, or “Betty Jeanne” as her family called her, would wave down cars and try to sell the occupants fresh clams. Whenever the tide was out, the kids would go down to the beach and dig the clams loose.
    “When I tell people that, some of them act shocked like they can’t believe our parents let us do that without an adult around,” says Montague, who smiles and then waves her hand in a dismissive gesture.  “Of course our parents let us do that! Mama even made signs for our booth with black crayon and cardboard. Even little Jimmy carried his own bucket, and he was two. Par­ents coddle their kids too much these days. Our par­ents trusted us to have a little common sense and look out for each other. And because of that, we got to have a lot of fun and responsibility.”
    The trick to catching a clam, states Montague, is to keep one’s back to the ocean and scan the sand for water bub­bles.
    “When you see one, you need to dig fast and grab the little devil hard, till’ you can pry him free,” advises Montague. “It can be hard to do; if you lose your grip, he digs right down and gets away.”

Make them eat
cornmeal

    When the tide started com­ing back in, the Montague siblings would climb the steep trail back up to the highway and walk the dirt road to Grandpa Sam’s cottage. The clams had to be washed in fresh water pumped by hand from the well, then dumped into a large washtub and sprinkled with cornmeal.
    “That part is important, be­cause they open up to eat the cornmeal which gets all the grit and seaweed out of them,” Montague explains.
    The family would often have a steaming kettle of clams at supper for themselves, since money for extra groceries being scarce. The next morning, Bobby and Montague would take their buckets of clams to their ap­ple boxes set up by the high­way and tie a blue handker­chief to a nearby bush to sig­nal that they were open for business. Passing motorists would pay 10 cents for a dozen clams, usually buying two or three dozen.
    “In 1929, a day’s wages were around a dollar a day,” recalls Montague. “So if three or four cars stopped in a day, we could make that. When we brought that money home, our parents were so proud of us.”
    These are just two examples of the true stories penned throughout Montague’s book. She is currently in the process of looking for a local printer to print more copies of her book, after the first 100 sold out.
    “I’d like to make more cop­ies available for people to pur­chase,” Montague admits. “It’s not that I expect to get rich off of this thing; I’ve just been thinking about writing it for the past 50 years, and now it’s here. At my age, you don’t know if the next day is going to be your last go-round. So why not take this as far as I can?”