4 Family Recipes Ohio Households Still Make Exactly Like 1985

Some recipes don’t change, even when everything else in your kitchen does.

Here are the family recipes Ohio households still make exactly like 1985.

1. Buckeye Candy

The buckeye candy recipe started in a single Columbus kitchen, not a factory.

Gail Tabor was dunking her mother’s peanut butter balls into melted chocolate in 1964 when she left the first ball’s top bare by accident.

The exposed circle of peanut butter looked like a buckeye nut, and the name stuck.

Tabor kept the recipe to herself until 1971, when she gave in to a woman in Oklahoma who swore she would never share it.

The woman broke that promise and submitted the recipe to an Ohio State alumni magazine under her name, and it spread through kitchens across the state from there.

By the 1980s, buckeyes weren’t a novelty anymore.

They were standard football-season and Christmas fare, made the same way in nearly every household: Peanut butter and powdered sugar rolled into balls.

The cook dunked each ball most of the way into chocolate and left it to set on wax paper.

Nothing has changed.

Families still measure the ratio by eye and still leave that same circle of peanut butter showing, the same accidental shape from a single kitchen sixty years ago.

2. Cleveland-Style Pierogi

Cleveland-style pierogi start the same way they did in 1985: a Saturday, a big bowl of dough, and a family working through fillings one batch at a time.

Cleveland’s West Side Market has anchored the city’s pierogi tradition since a wave of Central and Eastern European immigrants settled in Cleveland roughly a century ago.

National Public Radio (NPR) has reported that Cleveland grandmothers spent entire Saturdays hand-folding dumplings filled with potato and cheese, sauerkraut, or cottage cheese.

Every batch took all day.

Home cooks in Cleveland’s Polish and Ukrainian households say the process hasn’t sped up any.

A family still spends hours rolling, filling, and pinching dough shut by hand, exactly like the grandmothers before them.

The West Side Market’s Pierogi Palace has added newer fillings over the years, and the stand still makes 70 to 100 dozen a week on average.

The shop works three or four kitchen days instead of two once Lent starts.

The plain potato-and-cheese filling stayed put.

Many families make that same filling at home, and it never changed shape, never changed recipe, and never needed a shop at all.

3. Copper-Kettle Apple Butter

Copper-kettle apple butter hasn't changed its recipe since long before 1985: apples, cider, a copper kettle, and hours of stirring with a long wooden paddle.

The recipe itself never came from a company.

The Ohio Arts Council notes that the spice mix still varies from family to family, with no two households measuring it quite the same.

Grand Rapids, Ohio started selling it at a festival in 1977, but resident Pat Kryder simply brought an old family recipe that already existed at home.

The kettle never got smaller.

Stirring the kettle is still treated as a shared family job, passed hand to hand around the fire the same way it was decades ago.

Ohio communities have gathered around that same kettle since at least 1965, when the Hueston Woods Apple Butter Festival started on a recipe it still uses today.

Families who grew up peeling apples for that kettle are now handing the paddle to their kids, using the same recipe cards their kitchens have kept for years.

4. Canton's Shredded Chicken Sandwich

Canton's shredded chicken sandwich is the plainest recipe on this list, and that's exactly why it never changed.

Shredded chicken, a can of cream of chicken soup, and crushed crackers or potato chips, simmered together and piled on a bun.

Canton's Woody's Root Beer Stand has long served a version of the sandwich.

The dish moved through Stark County kitchens the way many Ohio recipes did: One cook trading it with another.

No fancy ingredient list.

Home cooks still make a batch in a slow cooker for a swim meet concession stand or a church potluck table.

The same pantry staples do the same job they did in the Reagan era.

From Kitchen to Storefront

Cincinnati chili and goetta show the flip side of this list of family recipes.

Cincinnati chili never started as a family recipe at all.

Brothers Tom and John Kiradjieff, Macedonian immigrants, opened Empress Chili in the early 1920s.

They built their spiced meat sauce as a hot dog topping for paying customers, not a Sunday dinner for their kids.

It spread through more chili parlors, not more home stoves.

Goetta shows the opposite slide.

German immigrant families in Cincinnati fried goetta from scratch for generations, but the maker of the region's best-known brand hears the past tense constantly now.

Cincinnati Magazine reports that customers routinely tell him their mother or grandmother used to make it.

The company he runs now ships over a million pounds a year so households don't have to.

The recipe moved to a factory.