Through the Generations

I have a strange item that I love to hang onto after family members have passed: their recipes and cookbooks. Not just what the recipes are, but the actual recipe itself, in their own hand. It's a weird connection between the generations before me, and those that will follow. My son will be able to read out and use recipes written in his great-grandmother's hand, or his great-great-grandmother's hand. It's an odd thing to keep, but I'm somehow drawn to them.

My grandmother Dorothy's old cookbooks 

with hand-written recipes in the front cover 

My grandmother Anna's recipe box. The front ones are hand-written,

but the back ones came in the Betty Crocker box set.

I'm quite proud that my great-grandmother, Elsie Ryan, had her recipes published in a cookbook. It may have been the church cookbook, but still...she's been published! 

A well-loved, much-used cookbook 

Great Grandma Elsie's brownie recipe - hands down the best!

My great-grandmother was known for her persimmon bread, my great aunt for her persimmon cookies, my grandmother for her pies, my mother for...well, you're getting the point. Cooking, recipes, and having a focus on quality food for our families has been part of our lives for generations. My great-grandmother would chop walnuts for persimmon bread with a hand-crank nut chopper, and would bake hundreds of loaves of bread (each batch called for 1 cup of nuts...that's a lot of chopping). Even now, it feels wrong to make persimmon bread or cookies without using a hand-crank chopper for the walnuts. I was lucky enough to find the same style chopper in a thrift store in Eureka, CA for $1.50. Well worth the memories, and doing things "right."

Plus, how fun is it to flip through old cookbooks and see what was considered mainstream meals at that time? It might be even more fun to give some a try.