Aunt Rose’s Buckeye Candy
Peanut butter centers dipped in chocolate, with the familiar uncovered top that makes each candy resemble an Ohio buckeye.
The Family Cookbook Project
Rose Contino Hunter (1924–2021)
The teacher who left her recipes in shorthand
Aunt Rose inherited the flavors of an Italian-American family, but she preserved them in a distinctly twentieth-century way: on recipe cards gathered from relatives, friends, magazines, newspapers, parties, and everyday life. Many were written in the shorthand she once taught—leaving one final lesson for the family members trying to read them decades later.
“Some families inherit a cookbook. From Aunt Rose, we inherited a box of
recipe cards—and a puzzle.”
A Different Kind of Family Cookbook
From an Unwritten Kitchen
Rose was the daughter of Pasqua and Rosario Contino. Her mother cooked largely from memory, measuring by instinct and passing recipes along by watching, tasting, and doing.
Rose belonged to the next generation. Born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, she collected recipes in the style of mid-century America: handwritten cards, clipped ideas, party foods, holiday candy, and dishes exchanged among family and friends.
The Shorthand Recipe Box
Rose earned a degree in business education and taught shorthand and typing. She used those skills on her own recipe cards—sometimes so efficiently that entire instructions were reduced to a few quick marks.
After her death, her daughter began sharing the cards with me. Together, with some help from modern technology and a healthy dose of Recipe Detective caution, we are translating and preserving them one at a time.
A Life That Never Sat Still
This is not intended as a full genealogy. It is the story of the woman behind the recipes—and Rose was far too interesting to be described only as someone’s aunt, wife, or mother.
Teacher
Rose studied sales, advertising, shorthand, and typing, then taught
commercial subjects in Pennsylvania and Maryland and later at the
Robert Morris School of Business.
Competitor
A lifelong golfer, she coached, organized tournaments, played in
championship flights, and continued competing well into adulthood.
Business Owner
When her daughter became interested in horses, Rose bought the Toll
Booth Saddle Shop. The business later passed to her daughter and
supported two generations of the family.
Family Anchor
Rose helped others get started, opened her home when it was needed,
remembered what people liked, and quietly made difficult seasons
easier.
According to Family Lore…
No portrait of Rose would be complete without the stories that cannot always be documented. Family members remember that she won two automobiles in her younger years—one from a twenty-five-cent police raffle and another from a lawnmower advertising contest. The details remain elusive, so the story stays where it belongs for now: in the family-lore file.
She also believed she possessed a low-level talent for finding lost things, enjoyed testing her luck in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, and was convinced that one location of the saddle shop was haunted because merchandise seemed to rearrange itself overnight.
Rose was successful, generous, competitive, intuitive—and undeniably a character.
Family recollections are identified as such. Documented facts and family stories are both worth preserving, but they are not treated as the same kind of evidence.
Inside Aunt Rose’s Recipe Box
Rose’s recipe box contains everything from Christmas candy and church-supper casseroles to cocktail cakes, holiday favorites, handwritten family recipes, and a few enduring mysteries. Here are just a few examples from the growing collection.
Graham Cracker Yummies
An early, chocolate-free cousin of modern graham-cracker toffee, made with butter, sugar, and sliced almonds.
Harvey Wallbanger Cake
A wonderfully 1970s combination of orange cake mix, instant pudding, Galliano, vodka, and orange juice—party food preserved in recipe-card form.
Pineapple Bread Stuffing
A sweet baked mixture of pineapple, bread, eggs, butter, and sugar, equally at home beside a holiday ham or on a church-supper table.
Spiced Oat Flakes Cookies
The handwritten recipe that may finally explain how my mother adapted the 1961 Post Oat Flakes cereal-box recipe for our family.
Hot Shrimp Cheese Dip
A warm party dip from the canned-seafood-and-processed-cheese era, intended for Pringles or lobster crackers and still holding a few mysteries.
…and many more from the box
The complete edition of Aunt Rose’s Recipe Box includes cakes, pies, cookies, candies, appetizers, holiday dishes, original recipe-card photographs, family connections, historical notes, and recipes that still require a little detective work.
See the Complete Collection ↓Download Aunt Rose’s Recipe Box
The newly expanded book turns Rose’s recipe cards into a family-history collection filled with recipes, memories, mysteries, original card photographs, and glimpses of twentieth-century American cooking.
Inside the Current Edition
Original recipe-card photographs
Carefully reconstructed recipes
Family stories and memories
Recipe Detective investigations
Historical and cultural notes
Connections between family cookbooks
This is a living family archive. New discoveries and newly translated cards may be added to future editions.
A Surprise Discovery
Aunt Rose’s Recipe Box Reopened the Case
After this page was published, Rose’s daughter began opening more of her mother’s old recipe boxes and sending photographs of the cards inside.
Among them was a handwritten recipe titled “Spiced Oat Flakes Cookies.”
When compared with the original 1961 Post Oat Flakes cereal-box recipe, the family card proved to be almost identical—with less sugar and the addition of cinnamon and nutmeg.
That discovery became the strongest new evidence yet in the search for my mother Mary’s lost Oat Flakes Cookies.
My Memories of Aunt Rose
During my final two years of medical school in Philadelphia, money was tight. I chose distant rotations whenever possible because hospitals more than fifty miles from the school were required to provide room and board. Some rotations, however, had to be completed in Philadelphia.
Aunt Rose opened her New Jersey home to me so I could commute into the city. She did more than provide a place to sleep. She stocked the house with foods she knew I liked—an act of practical kindness that a tired and hungry medical student never forgot.
Years earlier, when I first moved to Philadelphia, she had taken me apartment shopping and helped me get settled. That was Rose: she noticed what people needed, then did something about it.
The Legacy
Grandma Contino passed down an unwritten kitchen. Rose turned that inheritance into a box of twentieth-century recipe cards—some familiar, some mysterious, and some written in a language of shorthand that now has to be rediscovered.
Her legacy is larger than any single recipe. It lives in the students she taught, the golf matches she played, the business she built, the family members she encouraged, and the people she welcomed into her home.
Every card we translate brings one small piece of Rose back to the table.