The power of memory/nostalgia

Cafe Society
1

Today I did some grocery shopping and then made a batch of our nearly-sacred Christmas sugar cookie dough. These will be baked tomorrow, cut out with tin cutters I’ve inherited from my mother, and decorated in the only possible manner: sprinkles of coarse red and green sugar (on separate cookies, for heaven’s sake.)

Thus it has been, thus it will always be – at least until I am no longer able to cook.

The recipe was clipped from a woman’s magazine by my maternal grandmother during World War II. Yes, 80 years ago! I know this for sure, because I still have the original clipping glued to a 3X5 recipe card, though it has sadly tattered edges, miscellaneous stains, and the paper has darkened to the point that making out the print from the paper is a real challenge. Luckily my mother wrote out the basics of the ingredients/amounts/technique/temperature on the back of the card at some point. In pencil, which itself has greatly smudged and softened with wear over time but is still legible. (And one of very few samples of my mother’s writing that I still have.)

This is THE sugar cookie recipe. I have eaten at least dozens, maybe hundreds of other sugar cookies in my life, but they are WRONG. This recipe, with its adjustment for wartime shortages, is the one true one. My grandmother Lily used to visit us each year at Christmas time, and she’d always bake us several batches. In my memory, every single time while I ‘helped’ her make the cookies she’d tell me how her husband, who always had had fried eggs for breakfast each day, would make the sacrifice of switching to oatmeal for several days, just so the family would have the eggs to make these cookies.

I have no idea if these cookies are actually superior. I really can’t tell. I just know that if a sugar cookie doesn’t have that snap! that comes from nothing but Crisco as the fat (Butter? We were never so decadent as to use butter! Save it for the soldiers, you know?) and scented with the perfect combination of vanilla, nutmeg, and most importantly cardamom! it just wasn’t right.

My mom inherited the recipe, of course, and made them every year. She was the cook, so her traditions were the ones that were passed down. All her daughters made these cookies ever since. I know her daughters-in-law all were entrusted with the recipe, but some of them traitorously insisted on their own family’s recipe. So sad. With any luck, some of my sisters’ descendants will also be making these cookies decades from now.

So, how about you? Do you have recipe, or other, traditions that are basically unchangeable? That simply must be followed, exactly as taught, year after year after decades?

2

No, but I’m envious.

3

My mother had a ginger cookie recipe that was inherited from Belgium.

The ginger cookie recipe made 12 dozen and had really strange measurements one of which was a St. Dennis cup lol.

She halved the recipe and calibrated some of the weird measurements including the St. Dennis cup for me when I wanted give this a try.

Well I only made them twice. Way too much effort.

My cousins still do this every Christmas and I enjoy watching them decorate the cookies. I had a garbage can sized container of cookie cutters for every season which I gave to one of my cousins once I realized that I was never going to do this again.

I love that you are carrying on the tradition.

4

My grandmother made a very simple string bean dish every Thanksgiving (no, not that one - blech! :slight_smile: )
You used string beans (frozen, and needed to be French cut), fresh garlic and lots of mushrooms, tomato paste, diced onion, butter, seasonings.
I still make it every Thanksgiving, and even when I can’t be there I make it and send it to the person hosting that year.
So many good memories from this recipe, and her great grandchildren ask for it every year as well.

5

Recipe please?

6

Once, maybe twice my mom recreated a family traditional potato pudding, sewing cotton bags then somehow suspending them filled with batter under the lid of a stockpot to steam. Although luscious in flavor and texture, too difficult to be a regular addition.

Years later I steamed the batter in a round cake pan covered in cloth, and used it as the base of a trifle under layers of mincemeat, custard, clotted cream, etc.

7

I make lasagna using a recipe that I got from my Italian mother. She used to make it on every major holiday, when the extended family would gather at our house. To me it is the best lasagna ever, but it has a lot of sentimental associations for me that probably affect my view of it.

I always believed that it was an old family recipe handed down from our Italian ancestors (both her parents were born in Italy). It wasn’t until late in my mother’s life that she happened to mention in passing that her mother never cooked Italian food, and all my mother’s recipes came from cookbooks and magazines. I was floored by this revelation, but I still view the lasagna as an old traditional recipe, even if the tradition is only two generations old.

8

My sister-in-law makes the one true sugar cookie that I have experienced. Maybe she uses the same recipe that your grandmother did.

9

I can’t come up with any family recipe earlier than the 1950s.

There is an oddball meatloaf recipe from the 1960s my mother always made which uses undiluted canned tomato soup mixed with onion soup mix poured all over it that I hated as a kid but have grown fond of in my dotage. As it cooks, the soup mixture turns into a gravy with the drippings from the meatloaf. Not my favorite meatloaf, but it’s okay.

10

I make the same spaghetti and meatball recipe that my Italian grandma (paternal) made. She showed my mom how to make it and now I make it. I’m sure it’s the same recipe that my great-grandma used and her mother before her. I use the work “recipe” lightly. There are no measurements at all.