preserving our food heritage
I suffered from what most women of my generation suffer from; we don’t know how to cook because we didn’t learn from our moms. The foods that our great-grandparents, or grandparents, and our parents cooked is not being held onto and those food traditions are slowly vanishing.
Food and culture are hopelessly intertwined and as we lose those traditional foods, we lose a piece of the culture that it came from. One of the greatest sources of modern food traditions is the church cookbook. Typically done as a fundraiser, the church cookbook provides the tried-and-true recipes of the church ladies, who are typically the elders of the church. Unfortunately, this particular source of preservation is declining as church membership declines. It is replaced by other sources such as organization cookbooks - my husband has a cookbook from the Physics Department at the University of Pittsburgh called “Quiches, Quarks, Quasars and other favorites of physicists and astronomers”. But, again, as people stop cooking because they don’t have time, they don’t really have recipes to pass along to those kinds of sources. You have to have it to give it away.
There are fewer and fewer people cooking the food that their grandparents and parents served. The fact that it is normal to have two working parents and there isn’t time to cook an elaborate meal every day when you have that family situation. If you come from a family where recipes aren’t being written down if you can’t or don’t take the time to learn how the recipe is cooked, it vanishes when the cook dies.
I was born in 1970 and until I was about nine years old, my mother was a stay at home mom just like everyone else’s. She cooked all of our meals and we would regularly have family over for dinner or would go to a family members for dinner. For a short period of time we even lived across the street from my Gramy and shared a duplex with my mother’s sister and her family. On my Mom’s side of the family there were a lot of casseroles and food cooked from recipes out of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Food was what you made because it was mealtime, it was the people that were the center of the event.
My father’s side of the family was an entirely different matter. I am the third generation born in the United States (my great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Slovenia). The food that I remember eating at my grandparent’s house were things like Smerdel’s Klobase and home grown and home ground horseradish. Food was an event and I remember my grandfather talking about the various foods that he had while he traveled around the world with his job. In their house, the food was the event and the people were there because the food was there.
Unfortunately, there is a lot that is lost in my family. My maternal great-grandmother made amazing pies that she made without a recipe. No one got the information so that it could be passed along. If there were any family recipes that my paternal great-grandparents had, I don’t know what they are. There are no recipe cards, there are no written records. There are a few hazy memories by a person who didn’t find cooking to be important until she was in her late 20’s.
It is worth saving our food heritage because with that heritage, we preserve the essence of the culture that it came from. Consider spending some time with your elderly relatives and learning how to make the foods that make you happy when they make them. Then write them down to pass along to others. Food History doesn’t have to be about research, it can just as easily be about standing in a kitchen with your grandmother learning one of her recipes.