Editor's note: Chimes introduces this column as a result of the many favorable comments we received about Anna-Margaret Sietsema's article on where to buy food in Grand Rapids (see Chimes, September 15). If you, our readers, find this first article palatable and express a concern that the series continue, Anna-Margaret will delve into such topics as survival food tactics for dormitory residents and gourmet cooking for poverty-stricken off-campus students. We solicit your comments.

So now you have your car-full of groceries home and are about to cook up a meal. What can you create that will be nutritious, inexpensive, and interesting?

Whether our grandmothers lived in Whitinsville, Massachusetts, or Pella, Iowa, or Manhattan, Montana, or even Ripon, California, they had to learn to feed their families with the simples of ingredients.

They cooked without the aids of timesaver mixes and instant dinners, often even without recipes.

Their resourcefulness and ingenuity enabled them to cook creatively while stretching their household budgets by making do with what they had.

The following menu attempts to recapture the flavor of that bygone era, a back-to-basics, down-home taste of the ``gold old days.'' Give yourself a therapeutic afternoon in the kitchen.

``Start from scratch,'' cook up a ``good old country-style'' meal and serve it with pride to friends you love.

This week we have old-fashioned fare: a 19th century American menu for four to six.

It includes spinach salad with frontier dressing, easy-scoop biscuits, pioneer beef stew and grandma's chocolate cake.

I must credit Chef Jean Douat for this first recipe, which I gleaned at a ``Frontier Steak House'' somewhere in Nevada en route to Calvin from California. When I gave chef Douat my compliments, he proudly told me Wayne Newton liked it too. What could I say? It is the only wilted salad I have come to enjoy, and have since served it in titillating mounds on dinnerplates, greeting my guests with a tangy sweet-sour aroma, that ... well, you had to be there.

Spinach Salad with Frontier

Dressing

1 cup clear bacon drippings

6 teaspoons brown sugar

1 1/3 cups broken pieces crispy ba

con

2 tablespoons lemon juice

4 teaspoons red wine vinegar

In skillet, bring bacon drippings just to sizzling point.

Add brown sugar; stir to dissolve and add remaining ingredients, stirring well. Prepare spinach: have one large bunch of fresh spinach washed well, deveining large leaves; drain well.

Place in a salad bowl. Pour sizzling hot dressing over spinach and mix. Serve with freshly ground pepper, if desired.

Easy-scoop biscuits are a classic ``el-cheapo,'' costing $.02 each. My mother shared the recipe with me from one of her middle-class social-nicety clubs, called a ``Ladies Luncheon League.''

But judge not a fruit by its tree. Easy-scoop biscuits are great for camping and backpacking, as well as an economical menu filler at home.

A makeshift oven can be simply constructed at camp or in the dorms with one tin-foil pie plate inverted over another and held together by eight clothespins clamped all around, heated on a camp stove.

Easy-Scoop Biscuits

To 2 ½ cups biscuit mix

Add 1/3 cup instant non-fat dry

milk

Add 1 ½ tablespoons water

And ¾ cup water

Mix all the ingredients with a fork in a medium-sized bowl.

Dough will be quite wet. Scoop out the dough with a small ice cream scoop and place the biscuits on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes at 450°. Makes 9-12 large biscuits.

In Buena Park, California, a long time ago, there lived a Mr. and Mrs. Knott, who had a Berry Farm.

Commercialization has since set in, infecting a one-time ghost town with an amusement park aura, but Knott's Stead House is still a great place to eat. Mrs. Knott's stew is served there, inspired by chuckwagon chefs, filled with garden vegetables, cooked in the manner of the `49ers, and served with biscuits and boysenberry jam.

Pioneer Beef Stew

3 lbs beef chuck stew meat

¼ cup flour

2 teaspoons salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

1 pint diced tomatoes

1 pint water

1 small onion, diced

½ cup diced carrot

1/ 2 cup diced celery or turnip

1 quart diced potatoes

Cut beef into ½ inch cubes, removing fat.

Heat beef trimmings in large skillet until fried out; discard. Dredge beef cubes in flour mixed with salt and pepper.

Brown beef in drippings, stirring constantly. Add tomatoes and water. Cover and simmer about one hour, until beef is almost tender. Add remaining vegetables, cover and cook about three minutes longer, until beef and vegetables are tender. Makes six servings.

A friendly fundamentalist lady shared the following recipe with me while I was working at a Christian Conference Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The cake is so fudgy good that I have been able to bribe folks with it more than once.

Grandma's Chocolate Cake

Mix in large mixing bowl:

2 cups sugar

2 cups flour

Bring to rapid boil:

½ cup shortening

½ cup (1 stick) margarine

1 cup water

4 tablespoons cocoa

Pour over dry ingredients. Mix

well at medium speed.

Add ½ cup buttermilk or sour milk

1 teaspoon soda

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon salt

Beat well.

Bake in greased 10'' x 15'' x 1''

pan at 425° for 20 minutes.

Frost immediately with:

Frosting:

Bring to a boil: 1 stick margarine

4 tablespoons cocoa

6 tablespoons milk

Add:

1 box powdered sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla

½ cup chopped nuts

Mix well. Spread over hot cake.

Cool and serve.