Old Recipes

It's holiday time and that always means (for me at least) pulling out traditional recipes for holiday food dishes. I think I still cook some of those things the way my mom and her mom used to cook, not so much because their recipes are better (but they often are), but rather because it is a tie to my ancestors. My mom and her mom are long gone, but they live on in their recipes that I have kept after their passing. It is good.

My mother left behind most of hers and her mom, the Irish connection in my genes, was as all Irish women seem to be, more of a baker than general cook. From her I have some recipes for sweets (I remember often making her Irish ice box cookies with her when I was a child). I have no idea what happened to her general cooking recipes because my mother didn't have them either. And the best cook in the family, my dad's mother, left no recipes behind. It is a pity that is so, but I think she was one of those master cooks who never wrote anything down, given everything she cooked was the best thing one had ever eaten.

I'll leave my recipes to Jane, but I think she is too disinterested to even keep them, much less cook them. Kids today are so a wired (addicted) to electronic technology, many have no time or inclination to cook. It is sad because cooking is about the cheapest therapeutic regimen one can use to reduce stress or melancholy.

Doesn't it seem we all have at least one signature food recipe from our relatives that we ourselves reproduce at holiday times? From my mom's mom it is her lemon pie and from my mother her cheesecake, the simple one everyone clamors for once tasted. Sometimes I want to hide at Christmas because those who have eaten my cheesecake (but maybe I am just an agent for my late mother since it is her recipe I use and I should say it is "her" cheesecake) want me to make it. Well, I am "in culinary hiding" in Portland now where they don't know about such things. Sometimes separation from one's familiar venue is an advantage.

I don't feel it is Christmas until I make that cheesecake. And too, having made so many holiday cookies with Jane during her lifetime I am hoping she may inherit that lone cooking tradition from me and make cookies with her own kids some day. Some of those recipes from my grandmother are faded and some even too hard to read. But my mom's are newer and mostly in tact. A few of my favorites from her seem to be missing.
When my mother died and I took her recipes, both orderly in files and scattered on paper all about, I found a personal letter from my mother and a friend of hers in her recipe files.

That was a nice, unexpected find, the sugar on top of the recipe file because it reminds me of her even more than do the recipes. I guess I'll soon make that cheesecake and the memories of those recipes will make it taste even better than it will be.