This is the third installment in my family culinary history series. The following and the next few posts are part of an assignment I completed for my Cookbooks and History class for the Boston University.
To start from the beginning of my culinary history journey, please see my Connecting with my Ancestors through their Recipes post.
My Great-Grandmother & Her Recipes
I never got a chance to get to know my great-grandmother Irene as she passed away long before I was born. All that I have of hers is a very well-used and worn recipe manuscript which only tells a partial story of her life and leaves many questions unanswered.
However, despite this, there is still much I can learn about her from what little I do have. By making some of her recipes, I can summon a little part of her in my kitchen and learn more about her through the physical embodiment of the gestures she would have engaged in while “doing-cooking” (Giard, 1998).
Building a Meal
Ever since I first started deconstructing my great-grandmother’s recipe manuscript, I had been sorely tempted to try a number of recipes out of the book including one called “Pork Cake” and one who’s title, “Copied From Mother’s Recipe Lemon Pie,” implied that it might even be from my great-great-grandmother.
As with so many of my endeavors, my eyes were much bigger than my stomach (food pun very much intended), and as such I operated under the delusion that I could somehow easily assemble a multi-course meal out of the most interesting recipes from my great-grandmother’s cookbook. I figured I could use the assignment as an excuse to force myself to actually try some of the most interesting recipes in her manuscript.
However, like all good stories, this one had its own plot twists. Influenced by my own culinary prejudices, I mistook a pork cake for a main dish (something similar to a meatloaf). Thus, I thought that by adding a third recipe from the manuscript for “Graham Bread,” I would have at least an interesting if not delicious menu.
But, after realizing that the “figs” in the pork cake were dried not fresh and the “citron” was probably more likely candied citrus peel not fresh fruit, I then understood that a pork cake was really some sort of meat-fruit cake Frankenstein’s monster.
My menu had, therefore, devolved into a course of bread followed by two courses of desserts, but I always knew this was going to be an interesting assignment so I decided to press on regardless.
Next Steps
The next steps in this project are to make my great-grandmother’s recipe for Graham Bread.
You can read about my experiences making that recipe and the struggles I overcame while doing it in my Irene’s Recipes #4: Graham Bread: Communing With My Great-Grandmother Through Her Recipes post!
Resources
Giard, Luce. 1998. “The Nourishing Arts” and “Gesture Sequences.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Living and Cooking, by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, 151-159, 199-213. Trans. Timothy J. Tomasik. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.