Keepers
An Index to the Foods of Gideon Lawton Lane

Keepers began life as a cookbook in a small three-ring binder with spatter-proof pages. Over time, copies found their way to kitchens in the United States and Spain, creating version problems and update difficulties. Posting to the web seemed a decent solution.

This index gathers all of those Keepers recipes, sorts them by genre, and provides links to the full text. There are 47 recipes in the Keepers archive. To narrow your search, select:

Canning | Baking | Hors d’oeuvres | Soups | Main Dishes | Side Dishes || All Recipes

Bread, Pies, Tarts and Other Bakery

Granny Smith Apple Tart
An unusually tasty tart shell, based on a recipe that may have originated with James Beard. The choice of apple is crucial; crunchy and tart is the goal.

Blueberry Buckle
This is a very dense coffee cake, a few shades away from a blueberry pie. Fresh blueberries are essential — four cups of them, which means you should have about eight blueberry bushes in your yard.

Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins
With eight blueberry bushes out in the garden and lots of berries in the freezer, this quickly became a household standard.

Blueberry Cheese-filled Tart
Farmer’s cheese is sometimes difficult to find. Ricotta works in a pinch, but it is possible to make farmer’s cheese out of fresh buttermilk.

Anson’s No-Knead Bread
An artifact of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, when everyone was sheltering in place, restaurants were closed, and baking suddenly became important. The recipe fits easily into a day’s routine, but a five-pound bag of flour was often difficult to find.

Barbara’s Carrot Cake
A mercifully easy recipe that yields an indescribably good result. Most adult McMillans have a handwritten copy and have made at least one cake.

Carrot Spice Muffins
This is the legacy of a last-minute Labor Day weekend trip to Bar Harbor. While preparing for an afternoon of sea kayaking, we chatted with a young Indian couple who were staying at our bed and breakfast. The man regretted that the kayaking would make him miss the carrot mini-muffins that our host set out around four o’clock. We had no idea, but made it a point to be at the B&B the next afternoon.

Sour Cherry or Blueberry Oatmeal Tart
The tart shell is like a giant oatmeal cookie. The recipe began as a blueberry oatmeal tart because the garden had eight very productive blueberry bushes. A couple seasons later, the Montmorency sour cherry trees reached fruiting size, and the sour cherry alternative became the dominant tart.

Shortbread Cheese Crackers
Originally from the New York Times. The flavor and texture improve somewhat by using a pastry cutter and muscle power rather than the food processor, but the difference is slight.

Eierschwer: Biskuit oder Schwammkuchen [Heirloom]
Mueller weddings and other ceremonial gatherings were never complete without a dense yellow sponge cake, often served with berries or other fruit. The Muellers called it “Eierschwer” (egg-heavy) because the recipe listed its ingredients based on the exact weight of the eggs.

Molly’s Fruitcake
Molly McMillan — Nana to most generations — sent fruitcake to family members every Christmas. Her handwritten recipe credits the Minnesota Centennial Cookbook as a starting point but includes her own refinements. Where the original called for two cups of water, Molly replaced a half cup of the water with an equal amount of scotch or bourbon.

Lebkuchen
The flavor of the holiday season in a wonderful, durable, hard cookie that that stands up even to international shipping.

Cheese-filled Linzertorte
One of the oldest Keepers recipes, it arrived in a Cuisinart publication a few months after Alli and I had received a Cuisinart as a wedding present from the Nickel brothers.

Stollen: A German Christmas Bread
A lighter, tastier, more wholesome Stollen without a hint of candied fruit. Stollen baking is to be done only between Thanksgiving and the following January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. It is legal to bake a final loaf on the sixth, slice it, wrap it in portions, and freeze it to enjoy later in the year.