It’s Recipes We Remember

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I don’t know if my great-great Grandma Howard was a round woman, or if she was as twiglike as my great-grandma Wanda, or if she had my grandma Karen’s smile, or my dad’s love of German chocolate cake. I only know what Dad remembers, and that is her cinnamon rolls. They were doughy to their middle and caked in hot glaze, and when he and Papa Larry talk about them, they roll their eyes up to the ceiling.

My great-grandma Wanda on my dad’s side was not much of a cook, so it seems my grandma Karen had her work cut out for her when she got married and tied on an apron. The first recipes for a new wife are often the ones her mother made, but my grandma (Nanny, as we called her) was determined to rise above the Schwan’s truck. She’d only been married a few weeks when she experimented and made my grandpa a liver and onion casserole, which he still shivers to think about.

But in my lifetime, I do not remember Nanny ever being new to the kitchen. Over the years, she ripped recipes out of Taste of Home magazines and scrawled them on index cards. She tried chowder and popovers, pot pies and spaghetti. I can still see us all there in her kitchen on Monday evenings, sitting in folding chairs and licking the alfredo sauce off our plates. She made it taste like it hadn’t come out of a can.

A few months after she passed away, we found Nanny’s iced oatmeal bar recipe filed away somewhere. As with most things she wrote, it was barely legible, but we didn’t bother to type it out cleaner. Holding a recipe card of hers is like having a part of her there in the kitchen— dough stains on the paper and a smiley-face next to the word, Enjoy!

In the same way on my mom’s side of the family, I’ll thumb through my grandma Naomi’s checkered recipe books from the 70’s and can almost smell the pickles and pies. I miss recipe books, when you couldn’t turn a page without Aunt B’s recipe for homemade rolls falling out. I wonder if there is more history in those books than in files of genealogies?

I’m not here to say that oatmeal bars or rolls are the only things I’ll remember about my grandmothers— but in a way, they are the things I remember best. We are still making, icing, saucing, and stirring these things. We still pull up chairs around the table on Monday evenings to enjoy them. A good meal is something we will always need, and a recipe passed down keeps it on the table in front of us. For myself, I wasn’t born a cook, but I was born into a history of women who gave their children good things to eat. In the end, I wouldn’t mind if the only thing my great-grandkids remember are my cinnamon rolls.

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