The Importance of Passing Down Recipes

I must admit that I have procrastinated writing my Apples & Thyme entry for this month for two reasons: my life has been feeling a bit out of control and not allowing me to feel my usual ability to communicate, and secondly, I wasn't sure what I wanted to write about. Of course, my mother always is in the forefront of my mind, and I've written about her many, many times. Some days her absence feels so strong, filling me with sadness and an inability to write about her. Other times, it is easier.

After her death last October, my older sister and I sifted through her huge collection of recipes - she filed them neatly in binders, categorized and put handwritten notes on her favorites. We came across three - 3x5 index cards, each with the same recipe but each one having one of her three daughter's names on it. On the back, she had written "October 1975"! The recipe was simply labeled "Cornbread", but it wasn't just any cornbread - it was our Nanna's delicious cornbread. She wanted to make sure that we each had a copy of this legendary recipe.

Here's a little background: "Nanna" was my mother's mother and was raised in the back woods of West Virginia. I've written about here before. My grandfather was from Georgia and later Tennessee, and they settled in Ohio. They continued there humble, southern cooking traditions throughout their life. One of the staples at the dinner table was cornbread, and my Nanna's was the best. Cornbread from the south is savory, while the cornbreads I've tasted on the west coast are usually a little sweet. I have never gotten used to that sweet flavor and still prefer, and can taste to this day, an old-fashioned Southern cornbread slathered with butter.

When I read the recipe I called my older sister to question a few things. First of all, we don't believe they sell self-rising cornmeal anymore, although perhaps they do somewhere. I went on line and found this information on the Aunt Jemima Corn Meal site: To make one cup of self-rising cornmeal:
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup + 3 tablespoons Quaker or Aunt Jemima Corn Meal

The second thing I asked my sister is "Why did Nanna's cornmeal always taste soooo savory, almost like there was some bacon in it?" This recipe doesn't indicate anything like that. She immediately knew the answer. Nanna used to coat her pan with bacon grease before putting the batter in. Ah hah! Another old-time southerner's trick!

I remember my mom carrying on the cornbread tradition by making a simple meal of it with some cooked beans and coleslaw. Yum!

The point I started to make about the importance of passing down recipes is that a recipe such as this, which was never written down by my Nanna would have been lost if my mother hadn't taken the time to write it down for all to remember. We were all touched by mom's foresight at making a copy for each of us because she knew how important it would be to us one day - over 30 years later!

Over and over again we have read stories in this Apples and Thyme event of people wishing that they had a certain recipe one of their mothers or grandmothers used to make, but now it is impossible to get because the person has passed on and no one knows exactly how they had made it. Which leads me to why I love this event so much - it honors those age-old family cooking traditions and encourages us to write about them for posterity's sake. It even encourages us to seek out those living members of our family and ask them for their secrets before it is too late to do so.

Please visit this month's Apples & Thyme host - Mele Cotte - to see the full round up, which will posted sometime before the end of the month.