By Pam Pacelli Cooper
President, Verissima Productions
“Mother’s German potato salad,” “The Rauh sister’s Spice Cake,” “Successful Icing as of 1975,” and “Oy! Lebkuchen.” As I opened the little tin box of my mother in law’s recipes, I was able to see the history of her family in about 100 3×5 cards. Some were written in her mother’s hand (born 1892), some referenced great aunts who were born in the 1860’s, and some (such as the “Successful icing” card) annotated the struggle—over years—to master the art of a 7 minute frosting.
What’s in the recipe box of your family, or in your family cookbooks? Do you always make the same dishes for the 4th of July? Do you have periodic family reunions where each person brings a favorite dish? Or, is your family reunion, the reunion of a “heart family,” friends who get together once every year or two and recreate foods that they ate when they first met? If you’ve been attending for years, how have the reunions changed over time?
Think about the history of food at your summer family or friendship gatherings. Are you a steamed veggie person for 11 months of the year who brings the coconut cake to the party? Or are you the only one who brings Jell-O made with mayonnaise and fruit, a wiggly reminder of family picnics in the 1950’s and 60’s? Perhaps you are the maverick, introducing a new, nontraditional dish to every reunion.
Jot down a few memories that come to you after reading this blog and see what’s inside your picnic basket.
Here’s a recipe that dates back to the early 1900’s in Natchez, MS
Ilana Hardesty says
OK, Pam, you got me. I shall pore through tin and cardboard box, not to mention memory, and reply in more detail soon…
Is this a new project? If so, I want to help!!
All best,
Ilana
Ilana Hardesty says
Savta was my mother’s stepmother. She was a good cook and a very particular person, allowing no assistance in the kitchen; it would have irredeemably disrupted her necessary order. But I was her exception. She didn’t let me help, exactly, but I could keep her company in her tiny Astoria, Long Island, apartment kitchen. We would talk and I would watch her, and wait for the tastes to come.
Savta was renowned in the neighborhood for her brownies. She would carefully mix the ingredients, bake them to perfection, let them cool, and cut them. Then, each brownie was wrapped individually in waxed paper, as if it were a perfect gift. The brownies were packed into shoe boxes as gifts for neighbors, friends, family. Part of the joy from the brownies in that box was the feeling of privilege as you unwrapped the perfect square, and bit into it.
When Savta suffered what would be a terminal heart attack, she was in the middle of a batch of brownies. Her caregiver, after taking her to the hospital, came back and scrubbed the kitchen, and cleaned all traces of the brownies away, including the recipe.
We mourned Savta. And, in truth, we mourned the brownies that went with her to her grave.
But the recipe? Was it really just Fannie Farmer’s as some of us suspected? Yes, in fact, I think it was. It was mythical in Savta’s hands, but in reality just a simple cookbook recipe.
My father was decidedly NOT a cook. And he and his mother-in-law were never on the best of terms. But he adored her brownies, and she was glad for an appreciative audience. Long after her death, and after his divorce from my mother, Dad taught himself to make brownies, using a Fannie Farmer recipe, that were every bit the equal of Savta’s. He was as finicky as she in the kitchen, and chose, when he had perfected his recipe, to individually wrap his gifts as she had.
He wrote out his recipe for me, on lined notebook paper, in his large loopy handwriting. It fills two pages. At his memorial service old friends remembered his wrapped brownies, which took me back two generations. In my thank you letter to his community, printed in the Sigourney, Iowa News-Review, I included his recipe.