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My dad's been writing his favorite recipes in a 5-subject copybook that I think he bought in the late '70s. He's since wrapped it in rubber bands and put it in a binder to keep pages from falling out. Supposedly he wants to re-bind it and make it my wedding gift (whenever that happens). It's nice because some of them are recipes he made up, but all of them contain little bits of commentary (for instance one had something like: "should be as sweet as [my mother's] face").
I suppose I'm following in his footsteps, since I've gotten in the habit of writing recipes for my best meals in a journal.
I just wanted to say that I think it's great when parents teach their children how to cook. I don't have kids, but I can guarantee I will be teaching them how to cook. Such a valuable life lesson to learn. I don't want my kids living off of ramen & mac-n-cheese when they are out of the house. I pretty much had to teach myself to cook in my early 20s. My Mom was busy putting herself through grad school when I was little, and my Dad and my Stepmom just cooked and I came to the table when it was ready.
They are great parents but I wish I would have been cooking since my teens! So please, parents, teach your kids how to cook NOW!
A lot of the cooking I do now, I taught myself. However, I had a lot of inspiration from my mom and grandmother. Mom taught me some basics, but I had no idea - at all - how to make a potroast when I got married. Or chicken soup. I thought chicken soup was just, you put a "soup chicken" in a pot with water, dill, some parsley, turnip, carrots, and boil it til the chicken was cooked, and the liquid left over was soup. Wrong, heh. I still can't make a decent chicken soup but it doesn't bother me at all. On the other hand, the previous post in this thread said something about not wanting her kids to live off ramen and mac & cheese when they leave the house.
Ramen, I can understand. It's a good emergency substance, but I don't think it actually falls into any of the food groups. It doesn't even qualify as pasta. However, a decent mac and cheese is actually an artform. When I was in college, my favorite quick-meal was cooking up some egg noodles with black pepper and cottage cheese, and a scoop of tuna on the side. My second favorite, was fresh-made spinach linguine (there was a macaroni/imported cheese specialty shop down the street), with shredded romano and butter. Both of these are a variety of mac & cheese. I didn't make my first baked mac & cheddar with breadcrumbs til um..five months ago. And I'm 49 years old
PS: it was amazingly delicious. I surprised myself.
I have loved to cook since I was a child. I don't love to cook when I am hitting the house after a long day at work, hungry children asking, "What's for dinner?" But when I can actually prepare a meal on which we will dine, I love it...scanning cook books for recipes, preparing the shopping list, picking out the freshest ingredients at the store. And then the rhythm of the meal preparation- washing, chopping, simmering, roasting- like a musical score, crescendoed by the increasingly defined aromas blending together as they cook, ending with platters and bowls brought out to the table to the smiling faces of family and friends.
Nowadays I am more likely to go online for a recipe than pull out a cookbook, but when there is an old recipe that I want to prepare, especially one that is in my notebook of hand written and old newspaper recipes, the process is all the better. When cooking from a saved newspaper cooking section I see old advertisements for various markets. An index card neatly typed out has handwritten notes in the margin. Or I find a fading fingerprint smudge of a spice on the page of a frequently prepared recipe in a cookbook, left during a years-ago preparation of the dish. Sometimes I can remember the meal that we had when I made that smudge- who was there, where we were in our lives.
The memories evoked by cooking from old cookbooks, recipes hastily torn from newspapers, written on index cards or on scraps of paper can't be replaced by the efficiency of a database or google search. I hope that future generations don't lose this, as these memories feed the soul as much as the meal nourishes the body.
If this has brought back memories for you, please share!
1971 Betty Crocker cookbook with the pie wedge cover- my mom has had hers since the year I was born, and it is practically ripped to shreds, with her notes and writing in the margins, pages falling out, duct tape on the binding, etc.. She *insists* that there are recipes in there that just "aren't the same" in later versions...
It would Never, EVER, occur to me to replace the one she has completely, but I've been looking for another copy (same vintage) to give her so she can retire that one someplace for safekeeping before it disintegrates, and in the process make a mother-daughter project of going through it and copying out her notes and revisions and reminiscing
After my mamaw (yes I am a southern girl and I call them mamaw and papaw!) died I started craving her strawberry jello salad. I tried making it on my own a few times, but it wasn't tart enough and I couldn't figure out what was missing to make it taste like the stuff I remembered so fondly from my childhood.
I had really been thinking a lot about the recipe and after papaw died mom handed me a bunch of old books that she had saved from the estate sale. The first book I opened was a cooking book and out fell an index card with the strawberry BUTTERMILK jello salad recipe hand written in mamaw's pretty cursive writing !! It fell right into my lap.
I almost cried. Thank you mamaw ! I got the ingredients that night and relived my childhood. So delicious and the buttermilk was the missing ingredient that made all the difference.
She was such a great cook and I treasure all her little hand written notes. Most of the comfort recipes that I cook today came directly from my grandparents.
Location: Montreal -> CT -> MA -> Montreal -> Ottawa
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TNGal78
After my mamaw (yes I am a southern girl and I call them mamaw and papaw!) died I started craving her strawberry jello salad. I tried making it on my own a few times, but it wasn't tart enough and I couldn't figure out what was missing to make it taste like the stuff I remembered so fondly from my childhood.
I had really been thinking a lot about the recipe and after papaw died mom handed me a bunch of old books that she had saved from the estate sale. The first book I opened was a cooking book and out fell an index card with the strawberry BUTTERMILK jello salad recipe hand written in mamaw's pretty cursive writing !! It fell right into my lap.
I almost cried. Thank you mamaw ! I got the ingredients that night and relived my childhood. So delicious and the buttermilk was the missing ingredient that made all the difference.
She was such a great cook and I treasure all her little hand written notes. Most of the comfort recipes that I cook today came directly from my grandparents.
What a terrific story! I got goosebumps reading it...
Thanks ...and to think jello salad could mean so much to me.....but we used to make it together when I was little. I stayed with her a lot.
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I treasure old recipes.
