A cold rainy Sunday is a good time to work on projects, like the family recipe book. The idea for this book started out
as a collection of favorite family recipes gathered from some great cooks who
are gone but not forgotten, with additions to the collection by the younger
generations too.
But when talking to the Tidwells and asking for recipes, you
get a whole lot more, the family stories that go along with them. Good food is
a common thread (possibly starting with a Thanksgiving Day 1937 wedding?) and
where there is good food there is a gathering of family and friends and always
a good story to go along with it.
It was a simpler time, when flour came in fabric sacks which
were then washed and used to make clothes or quilts. When eggs were brown and
fresh and milk separated with the cream on top, churns to make butter
and buttermilk. A time of using what you had or could grow. A time of fat back
and lard, of making things from scratch.
A time when we could eat raw dough or cake batter. A time of aprons
and sewing and patterns. A time when the grocery store had live chickens walking
around in the store window in sawdust. When the platter of fried chicken on
Sunday included a pulley bone - the most popular piece of white meat chicken
that folks would fight over.
The deeper I get into this project, the more I want to
include not just recipes - our heritage consists of people and places, structures
and values and photos and quilts and heirlooms and memories and stories, the
people who came before us and were examples and helped raise us and taught us
many things including cooking.
Gathering family recipes and stories together is like piecing together a patchwork quilt, one made of flour sacks.
Thanks to all the cooks that came before us, thanks for the
good food and good times and great stories and cherished heirlooms, we are
smiling just thinking about you!
Working with all these good recipes makes me hungry, I may
just have to test some. Does anyone make lemon meringue pie anymore? And what
ever happened to the pulley bone?
