Doing a school paper on Folk Foods for a class on Folklore. Does anyone have a family food or recipe that has been passed from one generation to another? The more generations it has come thru the better. I don't necessarily need to know the origin (if the origin is lost in antiquity let me know), and I don't need the exact recipe just a description of the food & what it means to your family. I need the information by Sunday April 11 as the paper is due next week. Thanks.

Ma-ma, my maternal grandmother, made watermelon rind pickles every summer and they are so good. They are spicy and gingery and sweet.

My dad's mom baked all the time. Every time we would go visit her, the freezer would be full of lemon bars, Caramel Bars, oatmeal bars, best ever cookies and cheese wafers. YUM! No wonder I have a sweet tooth!

Pam

I thought about it a little more, and I don't know that, in my family at least, it's been the food itself that led to the tradition. It's more like the food gives us a reason to behave in a certain way and do certain things that bring us comfort and bring us closer together.

Summers on Papaw's farm were predictably wonderful, and very centered on what we would eat that day. . .we would help to pick the corn, or tomatoes, or watermelons. We'd go to the farmer's market "downtown". We'd sit on the front porch and snap the beans, peel the potatoes, shuck the corn. We'd sit together and churn ice cream. . .and a few times, he'd even let us make butter in his family's butter churn.

And I'm probably getting off topic a little, but the relatives I enjoyed the most seem now to be the best cooks of the bunch. Well, maybe not the best cooks, but the ones who put their love and interest into feeding us. The process of cooking was far more important than the end result. My Mamaw never had any children, and when she's back in the States, I plan on visiting for the express purpose of learning more recipes from her. When I asked if that would be okay, she sounded as though I'd asked if I could name a child after her--she was so flattered and so honored, she said. If she were around, I could give you more recipes (chess pie, egg nog, fried chicken) that she's well known to us for, recipes that were handed down in her family.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent.

D

I've got two:

1. Mema's Sugar Cookies. It just isn't Christmas without them. The recipe originated, to the best of my knowledge, with my father's mother, a Pennsylvania Dutch girl. The recipe has been passed down through him to me. And as with most of the best recipes, there's more to it than just what's written on the paper! The cookies have to be rolled out to just the right thickness, or they're not MeMa's Cookies.

2. Open-faced Ham and Cheese Sandwich covered with Tomato Soup. This one also came to me from my MeMa. It's not so much a recipe, as a quick and satisfying meal. I've updated it a bit (toasted whole wheat bread, soy ham, white american cheese, organic soup, as opposed to white bread, ham, and yellow cheese, and campbell's tomato soup), but the heart of it is still there. You build the sandwich in a or deep plate, then smother with hot soup. There's no better lunch on a hot winter's day.

alli

tomato sandwiches on homemade (white) bread with homechurned butter (well, now it's lite mayo, but I grew up, mom grew up and grandpa grew up with home churned butter). I grew up in an ag area in WA state and this was what we ate for lunch at Granpa's and Great Aunt Stella's all summer long.

Peanut Butter Candy (kind of like a peanut butter fudge), noodles cooked in broth, a "candy bar cookie", and a drop cookie that is basically a burnt sugar cookie with frosting. All the recipes go back at least as far as my great-grandmother.

Another handed down recipe is mushroom steak that my grandma makes every Christmas.

For the four grandkids, it's tradition and comfort. We've all noticed (though) that since my grandma stopped doing most of the "traditional" meals that the tradition is more about memory now. My mom keeps changing things to make them easier, which (to us) kills the flavor. I have made it my mission to make sure that I do my best to keep the original tradition in tact, according to the original recipes, and not overcooked.

None of the recipes qualify as diet food, but they're special none the less.

We have cornbread dressing every Thanksgiving & Christmas season.

Two pans of cornbread are made (from scratch) the night before and cooled all night, then crumbled up and mixed with celery, onion, seasonings, and the juices from the turkey.

I make it (I'm 30), my mom makes it, her mother made it, and my great-grandmother made it. It's cornbread dressing because the family is from Tennessee and (from what I understand) had a fairly large corn & cotton crop as my great-grandmother was growing up.

The putting together of the dressing occured even if we didn't have Thanksgiving at home. . .mom would still make cornbread, but she'd use chicken broth instead of the turkey drippings. It simply wasn't Thanksgiving to ANY of us without that dressing in the house.

My dad's family has made sweet potato pie. . .sweet potatoes, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, and orange juice, smushed up like mashed potatoes, then topped with marshmallows & baked. He says his Granny (my great-grandmother on his side) made it with meringue on top, but he likes marshmallows better. He makes that just about every year when the really good sweet potatoes start coming in.

And I'm not sure if it qualifies, but my mom's dad loved fried fish. He'd take anybody who wanted to go to his fishin' hole, catch crappie, and bring them home. The batter was just cornmeal, salt, & pepper, and an egg to make it stick, but it was fried up in a cast iron dutch oven that had been HIS grandmother's (so. . .my great-great-grandmother, a Cherokee Indian). After the fish was done, the okra went in. He told stories about frying fish & okra like that when he was a little boy (he was born in the early 1900s).

My mom's side of the family grew up on farms in rural Tennesse, so I'm sure I could pull other stories from her if she wanted to talk about it. From what I've heard her say, times were difficult and the work was hard most of the time. They used everything they could (her dad had a "wreath" his sisters had woven out of corn husks, and I still have a corn husk doll passed down) to help get by. I'm hoping that as I get older (and save some money), I'll be able to follow in that side's footsteps and have a small, productive garden of my own.

D

My grandmother's food was just amazing, all cooked from scratch, no recipes. About a year and a half before she died my sisters and my mother went over to her kitchen and got her to tell how to make everything, then made a cookbook for all of the children and grandchildren with "Serafina's Secrets." These were the foods we ate on holidays: The springtime green onion pie, the homemade pizza, meatballs, spaghetti sauce, stuffed peppers, fried peppers, Christmas cookies... plus all the stuff that she made for everyday: frittata, swiss chard, spaghetti with broccoli... and some things that no one wanted to try like sea urchins and octopus. We gave everyone a copy at the last Christmas she was there and she signed them for everyone.