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My maternal grandmother, who was called "Mother" by everyone in our family, passed away a few years ago. For the last thirty or so years of her life, everyone who could gathered at her home for dinner on Wednesday nights. Every Wednesday night. In her last years, my aunts and cousins took over the cooking and prepared dinner.
Most of the time, we’d have fried fish, spaghetti and coleslaw or fried chicken, greens and potato and garden salads. There were other times we had neckbones and beans with fried corn cakes or hot-water bread. There’d always be cake or pie and a big pitcher of lemonade and “red” Kool-aid. (I know it is really cherry or strawberry-flavored, but we always called it “red” and laughed about it. The only time I drank Kool-aid as an adult was at my grandmother’s house.)
She also made a wonderful soup, a recipe I’ve tried to recreate but can’t quite get right. Mother always seemed to just “throw the soup together” with bits and pieces of whatever was on hand. It was a soup that had small bits of beef in a tomato base and was chock full of vegetables: string beans, lima beans, corn, celery, onions, sometimes spinach. I've put all of those ingredients together, but there's something missing - a seasoning or technique that remains elusive. No one else has figured it out, either. Perhaps there was a special pinch of love she gave that cannot be replicated.
After she passed, the weekly dinners became less frequent and subsequently ceased. The aunts and cousins get together only occasionally now. You see Mother was the linchpin of the family, the proud, strong and bossy matriarch who bade us all come visit and kept everyone connected. I would often call her home during those Wednesday dinners from my home halfway across the country because I knew I could reach everybody and say a hardy hello.
I have a funny photo of my aunts celebrating my June birthday with the other summer birthdays on one of those Wednesdays. One aunt has a paper plate held in front her face with my nickname written on it to show that they’d all sung Happy Birthday to me in my absence.
Thinking about Mother’s soup made me realize that there are recipes my mother and aunts make (or made because they are hanging up their aprons now and turning over the cooking to the younger ones). Their special dishes will disappear with them if someone doesn’t go about gathering them. As will mine. I am a grandmother now, myself. A grandmother missing her grandmother!
My daughter has led the charge in gathering photos, doing genealogical research and creating the family tree on Ancestry.com. Adding family stories and tangible things like the recipes looks to be the next area that we should explore. Perhaps we’ll collect family recipes at our next “bring a dish” holiday gathering, out of which may grow a family cookbook.
We could create a family book of "how-to-dos" that would include the ways and wisdom of the women (and men) in our family. Topics covered might include:
- The barbecue recipe from the former family barbecue place, the Pig's Inn
- How to make a pattern work when you have a bit less fabric than what it calls for (my mother was famous for her ability to do this)
- How to wear a fedora (men from St. Louis are known for wearing hats)
- How to keep a garden and can vegetables (unfortunately this wisdom was pooh-poohed during my teenage years, but boy would it come in handy now)
- How to iron a sharp crease in pants
- How to keep your cool on a hot summer day (the dapper guys in our family never seem to sweat)
- How to organize a family reunion without going off on anyone (that would be my brother's contribution; he manages to keep the peace)
- How to own a home and pay off the mortgage on minuscule salaries (something my mother and grandmother's generations managed to do)
- How to cope with life despite deep disadvantage (and live joyfully)
That would be the most important lesson of all.
A couple of weeks ago, I looked through several cookbooks of my husband's. It turned out they belonged to his mom, whom I didn't have the pleasure of meeting because she died a year or two before we began dating. While turning the pages, I found several handwritten recipes from her and newspaper clippings. There was
