Just before Thanksgiving, my sister Darlene Blackford, called me with an idea for a column. She had been looking through her recipes to get some ideas for Thanksgiving dishes, and as she looked through the recipes she recalled warm memories associated with some of them — not just holidays but others as well.

She thought recipe memories might be a good topic for a column. I thought so, too. I took out my files and spent some delightful time looking through recipes and remembering times past.

The first recipe I laid my eyes on was Mom’s “Three Hour Rolls.” Mom baked loaves of bread about once a week and sometimes made cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls and even hamburger buns with this bread dough, but it was a lot of work, so in between she made “Three Hour Rolls.” They were “hurry up rolls” that she could serve up hot for noon meals. During the summer, when Mom cooked for hired men during haying season or neighborhood men during seasonal chores, she baked these rolls.

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I can remember early mornings when Mom was cooking breakfast. At the same time she scalded the milk for the “Three Hour Rolls” because it took a little time for the milk to cool down so that the yeast could be added.

After breakfast she added the yeast, Crisco or butter and flour, mixed it all up and kneaded the dough. She covered the dough and let it rise while she finished the dishes and worked on dinner (our word for the noon meal).

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After the dough had risen, she kneaded it one more time and set it aside to rise, which didn’t seem to take much time. The reason that Mom used the recipe so often was that she could pan the rolls and have them ready to bake by the time she took the meat out of the oven, and the rolls were nicely baked, warm and ready for the table when everyone sat down.

Mom made these rolls so often that she certainly didn’t need a recipe, but she wrote it down for me, and I made the rolls for several years. I remember baking the rolls when I was low on bread and didn’t want to take the time to go to the store. I can remember one summer when I baked “Three Hour Rolls” and used them to make little meat-filled sandwiches that I sent with my sons, Jody and Jamie, for lunch when they were building a pasture fence.

There are lots of memories attached to “Three Hour Rolls” recipe. It follows in this column in case you would like to make the rolls, too.

Three Hour Rolls

Ingredients

2 cups milk

1 ½ teaspoons salt

¼ cup sugar

2 tablespoons Crisco or butter

1 cake (or packet) yeast

¼ cup warm water

About 5 cups flour

Instructions

Scald and cool the milk, salt, sugar and Crisco or butter mixture. Dissolve 1 yeast cake or packet in ¼ cup warm water. Stir into the cooled milk. Then add about 5 cups flour (the “about” is because Mom knew how the dough should “feel.”) Knead on a board. Let rise and knead down. Let rise again and pan. Bake about 30 minutes.

Recipe from file of Judy Osborn’s.