In my youth my brother and myself used to make regular trips to Grammas.
Always there was the smell of home cooking and baking, she standing there with a smile on her face and flour up to her elbows
Fresh hot bread ::sigh:: scones, teacakes, muffins, home made jams, jellies custards and blancmanges.
Gramma used to tell my bro and I “You’ll make yourself poorly eating all that hot bread” She was right but it never stopped us, then or at any other time we called…the taste was irresistable.
I can almost taste it now, hot crispy bread, butter melting into it and a huge blob of blackberry jam.
Oh and her rice pudding with the brown skin dusted with cinnamon and nutmeg, a sheen of butter on the top and a few raisins, big bloated rascals.
Bits of orange and lemon peel, soft and ever so delicious with a slight tartiness.
Gramma passed away many years ago but I can never forget those halcyon days of youth when our lives stretched before us, warm and filled with sunshine.
I’ve made myself feel all soft and nostalgic now ::sniff::
My mother in law is a good baker and whenever my kids visit they make cookies, muffins, cakes and the like together. I’m really glad they’re having that experience, and they love going to Grammy’s house.
I love it, too, because when the kids are away, the parents can play!
Among the few artifacts that remain with me is a red ottoman that belonged to my Grandmother. It is a God awful shade of red with a gaberdeen upolstrey textured in what was probably intended to be cat-tails and water lillys, but honestly it just looks like sausages, bright red nappy sausages.
I believe I remember something about the chair and ottoman was bought in the '50s (given the garish shade of red, the sausage like pattern and the appropriate time frame I’m guessing it’s right up chowder’s alley). The chair was a rocker and it went years and years ago, shortly after my grandma passed actually. The ottoman was with my mother up until two years ago when she passed. Now my kids sit on it to eat ramen noodles and watch Ben 10 or Avatar or something.
That it has survived is amazing, that it is still surviving is miraculous. There is no amount of money anyone in the world could ever offer me for that one simple ottoman.
I’ve tried making Swedish pancakes a couple of times in my life. They always came out sort of meh. Not wonderful and tasty and amazing like my mother’s. Of course, hers were crap compared to my grandma’s. Those were things of true beauty. But not compared to great grandma’s. Her pancakes were high art. I remember sitting at her kitchen table, on that uneven linoleum floor, in that musty old house that HER grandmother grew up in, anxiously awaiting the next pancake. It sucked having to wait my turn as my brother and sister got served before me.
That sounds a great deal like my own grandmother – but substitute blancmange for a proper trifle. (I don’t think she ever made blancmange) But she did the jams and jellies, the bread and assorted other bits of baking, including the best damn mincemeat pies and tarts I’d ever eaten.
She lived with my grandfather in an old converted 19th century schoolhouse in a small flea-speck of a town called Fullerton, which contained exactly one olde-tyme corner store and one church. Even in the late 70s and early 80s, before grandfather passed away and she moved to Hamilton, they had no cable television, and phone numbers were shared; you identified that the phone was for you by the type of ring. But it was a wonderfully quiet place full of trees and two-lane streets and very little traffic. Grandma’s schoolhouse was the biggest house there. I was sad when she had to sell it after grandfather died, but it was just too big and empty for her then. But I still have lovely warm memories of that place.
My (only) grandmother lived far away, and we only visited once a year.
She used to make this incredible peach cobbler. It would be sitting on top of the stove cooling, the air redolent with peaches. Mmm. And she always made cole slaw with diced apples in it. I make it that way now.
Besides very few photos, the only thing I have of hers is a rocking chair. That was my brother’s rocking chair when we were there. The one I used is long gone, but every time I see it, I think of her.
[QUOTE=Dolores Reborn]
My (only) grandmother lived far away, and we only visited once a year.
She used to make this incredible peach cobbler. It would be sitting on top of the stove cooling, the air redolent with peaches. Mmm. And she always made cole slaw with diced apples in it. I make it that way now.
Coleslaw with diced apples?
Now that I gotta try.
Erm… you don’t by any chance have the recipe for the peach cobbler do you?
Cooking was not my grandma’s thing. She did it because people need to eat. But she taught me how to play chess, and sew, and make puppets, and I could go on and on…
She did make homemade english muffins - she called them butter cakes though - and they were fantastic! Her biscuits were good, too. Chocoalte chip cookies were the recipe from the bag of chips - not unique, but plentiful. Cakes were from mixes, but capably made and tasty.
What made her cooking not so great was that she couldn’t be arsed to sift or to stand still to “stir constantly” or anything like that. She’d leave stuff on the stove and go in the other room to hem a dress, or make ten phonecalls for some committee that she was on (and she was on a LOT). Just thinking about all the things she did in a week is making me tired.
My grandma taught me to put cottage cheese on mashed potatoes. Yum. Now Mr. S does it too.
My other grandma had a weed* cookbook that was legend on that side of our family. She would often go out into the yard and pick weeds for a salad. Fortunately she kept her weeds to herself and didn’t make us eat any of them.
ETA: Not that kind of weed, you stoners! Dandelions and stuff.
My maternal grandmother was the mistress of what I vaguely think of as small-town Protestant cuisine. Campbell’s condensed cream of mushroom soup, Cool Whip, canned pineapple chunks, and Jello figured heavily in her recipes. She made some mean cucumbers 'n onions, though. Neither me nor my mother have been able to duplicate them. And I loved her zucchini bread.
My other grandmother, OTOH, raised 9 sons in the woods with no indoor plumbing and little money. That woman could cook a delicious 7 course meal out of nothing. She was like MacGyver - give her a slice of Wonder bread and a live chicken and an hour later she’d present a casserole, bread pudding, and a feather pillow. Sadly she became infirm while I was still very young, but one of my first memories is of me and my dad eating one of her banana cream pies for supper while my mom was at the hospital with my sister who was having her tonsils out. It was really good pie.
My great-grandmother always had a cookie jar full of cream cheese-butter cookies. I have her recipe, and I make them sometimes, but mine aren’t as good as hers. No cookies are as good as grandma cookies. Hey, maybe someday I’ll be a grandma and then my cookies will be awesome!
Sundays at Grandmother’s apartment always meant yummy pot roast, silky mashed potatoes, hot, crusty rolls, and luscious chocolate meringue pie. (There were probably vegetables too but I wasn’t big on those as a kid.) Grandmother and her sister used to run a restaurant, the cooking was always great. She also used to have tins stashed all around her apartment, for us kids to find I think, full of fudge and cookies. I remember these yummy cheesecake-like cookie things she always had in a chest freezer in the back. Wow.
My other Grandmother was a plain cook for the most part but she made the best fried apple pies. She always had a plate full of them on the stove when we’d visit. She could bake up a mess of biscuits without any measurements, perfect every time.
My youngest brother is the chef now-he whips up the tastiest dishes from whatever he’s got on hand. I do the pickling, jams, jellies, relishes, chutneys, sauces, vinegars, and whatever else strikes my fancy. My older brother works in food product lines for restaurants. If you want to find me or any of my family just check the kitchen and see what’s cooking.
