Grape jelly, from grapes my grandfather grew. She also canned everything from the garden.
She could also cook anything under the sun. I got all of my best recipes from her and my mom.
My paternal grandmother, dear sweet woman that she is, can’t cook to save her life. We all cut her some slack, though, as she was raised in an orphanage. We joke that we can never tell her in advance when we plan to visit, because if you tell her 3 days ahead of time, that’s when she’ll put the chicken in the oven.
My materal grandmother, though, makes up for it in spades! Everything she cooks is amazing…stuffed cabbage, noodle kugel, sweet-and-sour meatballs, double-chocolate fudge cake, Viennese crescent cookies with piles of sour cream in the dough and jam inside…the one thing she doesn’t do is pie crust. My Aunt Shelly does the best pies in the world: deep-dish blueberry, peach, you name it.
It’s impossible to get a semi-accurate recipe out of Grandmom, though. You have to watch her cook. Once I called her, begging, for a recipe, on the grounds that I was having a kugel emergency which only she could properly address. She started dictating about 4 different noodle kugel recipes, and with each one, as she got almost to the end, she would yelp, “No, that’s the wrong one! That’s not the one I use. Where is the darn thing?” and would rummage through her recipe box some more.
Finally she finished one which she swore was the right one, but it was definitely missing stuff. “But Grandmom,” I asked, “where is the cinnamon? Where are the apples and raisins? What kind? How much?” Her reply: “Oh honey, but you know that, don’t you? Just put in some until it tastes right.”
Maternal - Chicken Pot Pie. Absolutely amazing.
Paternal - Lentil soup and Roladen. Actually, anything German.
My Granny used to smoosh homemade vanilla frosting between graham crackers. Better than any cookies ever made or bought…
I make them now, but it isn’t the same…
She also made cinnamon bread that inspired me to learn to bake bread myself. Mmmmmm… warm cinnamon smell… 
My nannie (mom’s mom) was THE BEST southern cook. Fried green tomatoes, fried okra, fried chicken, fried taters n onions. Buttery summer squash. Black-eyed peas with chow chow, syrupy sweet pickles, perfect biscuits, perfect cornbread.
She always had a fresh loaf of friendship bread warmed with cinnamon and raisins or apples. Tea cakes…oh man, the soft kind drizzled with hot chocolate syrup or strawberries. Hard chocolate cake that has never, ever been matched. And these incredible skillet cookies made with dates and rice krispies that taste nothing like the recipe on the back of the cereal box.
And her green beans. There will never be a green bean like nannie’s green beans!
And fudge pie…and pumpkin pie…and chess pie…and the very best banana pudding in the world.
I miss that woman! When she died she left nary a recipe either. She was another one of those, “dash of this, pinch of that” cooks.
My (maternal) nanna makes the best lamingtons I’ve ever tasted. She is reknown for them. On a return trip from fighting fires in the bush, my father and his team were visited by my nanna who had baked a spread especially for them.
Her shortbread, sausage rolls and ginger fluffs (a type of sponge) are also to die for.
Hmmm, Grandma’s cooking. (On mother’s side – father’s side lives abroad and I can’t remember her cooking.) I can’t say it was fantastic, though it wasn’t usually spectacularly bad or anything. However, my mom is a great cook. She did a lot of the cooking while growing up, apparently.
My maternal grandmother worked in a bakery for many years so naturally her deserts were to die for. The few time I ate my paternal grandmother’s cooking are not pleasant memories. Such as beet juice in mashed potatos.
My mother was the cook of the family. We always hosted the family holiday meals. And we always had visitors for Sunday night dinner. Her fried chicken was her specialty. Buttery mashed potatos, the creamy gravy, the biscuits that melted in your mouth. I have tried to make chicken like hers, mine is good, but it’s not Mom’s. Her oven baked macaroni and cheese with the browned crust we would fight over, the lasagna with the home made noodles, the roast beef with the garlic. I miss my mom.
My grandma was the best cook ever :). Her thanskgiving turkey and stuffing have never been duplicated to my knowledge. Her number one specialty though would be potato salad.
The only problem is that by the time I was old enough to appreciate how good her cooking was, she had developed a really wierd form of senility. It was like her consciousness and her cooking ability became two completely seperate entities. One time she plopped a raw piece of chicken on our plates and told us to eat up. But she wouldn’t believe that she had forgotten to cook it, since she had always cooked it in the exact same way. My sister distracted her, not all that difficult to do with a senile woman, while my mom fried them really quick. Another time she made a really amazing cranberry glaze for a ham, that nobody had ever seen her make before. It clearly had some form of liquor and cranberries in it, but when my mom asked how she made it, Grandma swore she made it the way she always did, and there were no cranberries in it. She had no TV and couldn’t possible have read a cookbook, because she had horrible cataracts. Part of her brain decided to improvise without her ever noticing. It was the wierdest thing, eating at her place was an adventure.
Fortunately most of her recipies survive in my Mom who is an amazing cook as well.
God bless you! Kisses on your pillow! Thank you!
Man, oh, man, I had forgotten all about those. Will be introducing those to my grandson the next time he comes over.
Thanks again,
Sue
Growing up, I was convinced that my gramma was the best cook in the world. (Probably relative, since my mother is one of the world’s worst–eggplant chutney on hot dogs, anyone?) I actually got fat on gramma’s food at 8 years old, I loved it so much. Cabbage rolls, potroast, fried chicken, and so on.
I visited her recently (2 years back) and determined that, in fact, I am a vastly better cook. With one exception: I am utterly unable to duplicate gramma’s latkes (potato pancakes). Crispy on the outside, soft and steamy inside, just a hint of pepper and onion–ahhhhh. Sadly lost to the world now, since gramma went senile very quickly and unexpectedly.
My other gramma, aji (Dad’s mom in India), grew up rich and never learned to cook. Too bad for dad, since aji had to cook until her daughters grew up enough to take over. Dad used to lecture me about his own youth when I wouldn’t eat my mom’s lousy food.
There wasn’t much that she couldn’t cook and make perfect, but there were four things that we always counted on gram to thrill us with:
Pork chops baked in milk - sounds simple, but nobody that I know has been able to duplicate what whe did with this simple recipie
Bluberry cake - moist, buttery, full of gigantic blueberries and sprinkled on top with confectioner’s sugar
Hand cranked strawberry ice cream - every summer, she’d dig out the old ice cream maker and go down the the store and get the ice and rock salt and fresh strawberries and cream … maybe it was just that the stuff tasted great after cranking the ice cream maker for hours, but it was awfully good
Home made root beer - this was another summer ritual. She’d save up big Coke and other soda bottles and when she got 30 or 40 of them set aside, all the grandkids would help mixing up the stuff, boiling it, pouring it in the bottles and capping them with an ancient bottle capper that she had, that worked perfectly after goodness knows how many years.
Man, I still miss her awfully bad - and she’s been gone for oer 17 years now.
My maternal grandmother was German and she made the most fantastic sauerbraten with potato dumplings
My paternal grandmother was a good cook, but she is best remembered by the family for the picnic lunch she made - she made sandwiches for about eight people, and put nothing on the bread except butter.
My wifes mother makes the best biscuits and gravy.
Sweet potatoes. My dad’s mother was of the classic Southern sharecropper’s wife school of cooking, and most of what she made was extremely good, if predictable and laden with fat. The sweet potatoes, however were transcendent. Nothing could have been more apparently simple – she just peeled them, sliced them, and baked them. My mother and my sister each stood over her while she did it, replicated the steps later at home, and failed to come anywhere close. I never took the time to watch her when I was single and rarely cooked sweet potatoes; I eventually married a woman whose favorite food (after peanut M&Ms) is sweet potatoes, but by then her health was failing, she rarely cooked, and we lived a full day’s drive away. I have managed to come close to MawMaw’s version, but only by introducing a little butter into the process, which I don’t recall having ever seen her do.
My grandma is absolutely, unquestionably the WORST cook on the planet. I honestly do not understand how my mother survived. Grandma is a kind, sweet woman, the absolute salt of the earth, but there is literally nothing she does not ruin.
Mom’s mom, Bubby Sarah, was a wonderful cook. Her two specialties were her apple strudel, hot out of the oven with just the right amount of icing drizzled over the top; and her chicken soup with homemade noodles. The broth was yellow and clear (not cloudy) and tbe thick noodles had a bit of a chew, not mushy. MMMmmm.
Dad’s step-mother, Bubby Ruth, didn’t cook for the family much. When we visited them (Bubby and Zaydie) we usually went out to dinner. But we always went back to their house for dessert. Her specialty was her rice pudding - absolutley the best I’ve ever tasted.
I’m so glad I’m not the only one. Despite their many, many wonderful qualities, neither one of my grandmothers could boil water. Eating was kind of a scary experience at their homes. I’m also amazed that my parents, aunts, and uncles made it to adulthood given their mothers’ cooking skills.
Mom, otoh, is an excellent cook.
On my father’s side great granny made the best Brunswick stew you ever had.
Even when they made her stop using squirrel and she switched to hog head it was still just as good.
My Grandma is a good cook, though it wasn’t until my late teens that I realized there were more spices than salt, pepper, and chili powder. Her food tended towards the bland.
My maternal gradmother made the world’s best chicken-rice soup. To this day, I’ve never tasted anything to approach it. When I asked my mother what was in it, she said, “I’m sure we don’t want to know.”
The soup and its deliciousness was all the odder, as Grandmom never cooked (or could cook) anything else, and she was the least grandmotherly person you’d ever want to know. An out lesbian, shark-like businesswoman, totally uninvolved parent, self-trained doctor (and occasional drug dealer!) . . . Quite a character, that woman.