Greetings from Karen and Stephen !

Food and family are heavily intertwined.  So many family memories revolve around the every day meals at the kitchen table, holiday dinners with extended family, growing food, shopping for food, hunting and fishing to put food on the table in hard time, gardening, preserving, preparing food are all activities wrapped in family memories

Old family recipes bring back happy (or sometimes not so happy!) thoughts of living relatives or long gone family members and friends.  Recipes help keep your dear departed ones, and ancestors you weren’t around to meet, alive in your thoughts. 

Sometimes, when your dearly departed didn’t teach you to make their recipes, you think, when it’s too late, “I wish I’d asked Grandma Emily which recipe she used for those wonderful hard doughnuts with the powdered sugar that she made for my birthday every year.” or, “Why didn’t I ask Mrs. Kocon for the more of her cookies recipes when her Apricot Triangle Cookies and her Nut Crescents were so delicious?”  

If your relatives and friends prepare things which you like, ASK FOR THE RECIPES NOW!  Of course if your relative cooks like Mimi Sheraton’s Mother did, you'll have to spend time watching, making notes, and figuring out how much “butter the size of a walnut”, “a wineglass full of milk” or “enough flour until the dough feels right” are and translate those terms into standard measurements! 

When your relatives or elderly friends break up their households because of down sizing, moving to senior housing, or the old homestead is being emptied and sold off due to the death of the last family member, you’ve got to act fast!  Get in there and grab the cook books and recipe collection!  Don’t be shy about it.  You can always make copies for others, but if you don’t grab the cook books and the recipe collection, they will be lost forever. 

I still mourn the fact that my dear Mother-In-Law Mary Kinnane’s recipe collection was tossed into the dumpster by her two sons when Mary went to a nursing home.  WHAT A TRAGEDY!  I have Mary’s recipe for blackberry jam cake with caramel icing (excellent!), her recipe for stuffed celery with anchovy paste (tastes loads better than it sounds!), her deviled eggs.  Mary made THE BEST fried okra I’ve ever tasted,  and have never been able to reproduce it satisfactorily.  She made a great turkey pie after Thanksgiving, a two crust pie with leftover gravy, stuffing, chopped up turkey and sliced hard cooked eggs.  Mary was a great cook as long as you kept her away from meat. Being old school Southern from a time when there was no refrigeration or just an ice box, she tended to COOK HER MEAT UNTIL IT WAS REALLY DONE.  At meals, or parties, I filled up on the vegetables, the hors d’ oeuvres, and the dessert, giving the meat a wide berth! 

Mary was a person of great character, smart, funny, good sense of humor, excellent work ethic, social, generous, quirky, loved antiques, liked to cook, enjoyed her family and her dogs.  When I make one of the few recipes of Mary’s which I have, so many happy memories come flooding back to me.  I’m still peeved at Joe and Michael for dumping their Mother’s recipe collection! Talk about holding a grudge!

There is nothing like preparing an inherited recipe to make you think of the cook who gave it to you!

I’m lucky!  I have my Great Grandmother’s White House Cook book with some of her hand written recipes tucked inside it including one in the original German.  I have her daughter (my Grandma Emily)’s cook books which she annotated, “no good”, “very good”, “too much sugar”, “cook longer than it says.” Grandma also cut inspirational thoughts from the newspapers (newspapers used to have that sort of thing!) and taped them in the blank spots in her cook books.

I have Grandma's half sister Laura Meyer’s recipe collection.  There was a copy of my Mother’s World War II era big thick “everything” cook book but when Mom's original book fell apart I gave her my copy which was identical.  My first cook book was, “The Joys Of Jell-o” which shows you I was ill prepared to embark on a lifetime of cooking!  I still have that Jell-o cook book today, more than fifty years later. 

The very first meal I ever cooked as a newly wed at nineteen was a baked casserole with Spam, noodles, sautéed onions and cheese sauce, and it went over big.  I still think fondly of that dish, how nice it looked (for a casserole, not one of cooking's glamour foods) and how good it tasted, how satisfactory it was.  I’ve since given up Spam due to the high salt content.  Old age will do that to you!

Karen Kinnane