Blog.EmealsForYou

This rant is about the food but it really goes much deeper than that, it’s about maintaining our touch on our own family history.  How many of you have gone to a family gathering and asked a cousin or sibling, “what do you know about …?” The conversation usually turns to an agreement that you should have asked someone who is no longer alive the question years ago.  We constantly allow moments to go by that could and should provide us with family treasures to pass along to the next generation and beyond.  I guess it is like everything else, we expect someone will know the answer to our questions, but those “someones” are getting older and more forgetful.  So the bottom line is one less tie to those who went before us; one less interesting fact not shared.

What brought this on was a recent discussion I had with a good friend about recipes handed down from generation to generation.  She was planning a family reunion and was putting together a family recipe cookbook and fact sheet for all those who were to attend.  Each family was requested to submit some facts about themselves and their families along with a favorite recipe, perhaps one passed down from an ancestor.  This is a great idea and one that should be part of everyone’s family reunion.

Many of the recipes found here and on my website have come from past generations of family cooks.  Some were taught to me, some were shared by those around me and some I absorbed by just being in the kitchen growing up.  One that always makes me smile is a recipe for sweet cabbage.  You see, back in the dark ages when my wife and I were beginning to date she only ate white bread.  No matter how many kinds of breads my family put out on the table she would always ask for Wonerbread, so much so that my father began to call her whitebread.  I mean there was chewy rye bread, hard rolls and flaky horns but she would always say, “don’t you have any Wonderbread?”  Needless to say the great varieties of bread went along with a wonderful assortment of “old country” dishes.  So years later when I was looking for my father’s sweet cabbage recipe, and had tried all avenues with no success, it was whitebread who had somehow written the recipe down.

The moral of the story is to get those stories and recipes before it is too late.  BTW – my wife still makes the sweet cabbage and yes hers is better than mine.