Home Cooking by Grandmas

[BakerAunt]

Now this is the kind of restaurant that gets my attention:

http://gothamist.com/2016/10/06/enoteca_maria_staten_island.php

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[Mike Nolan]

Sounds like the kitchen would be an interesting place to work, or just watch and listen. (Might help to be able to speak Italian, though.)

[BakerAunt]

One reason that I enjoyed the story is that I don't have any great cooking (or baking) memories of my grandmothers. Both worked throughout their marriages, so maybe that is why there was not a lot of experimentation. In the case of my maternal grandmother, her mother-in-law lived with them, even after my grandmother was widowed and remarried, and my mom told me that she did the cooking. So, I only remember, as a child, having fried spam (hey, we thought it was great!), Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Velveta cheese, as well as eating either raw turnip or rutabaga as my grandmother peeled it.

[Italiancook]

BakerAunt, all the cooking and baking you do is really great, since you didn't have a grandmother's influence in the kitchen. You're making the memories you missed out on, although you appear to have cute memories of them (Velvetta & rutabaga).

I don't have many grandmotherly memories in the kitchen. I recall one grandmother cooking only for the annual picnic. She would never have allowed a child to help her. My other grandmother made a Banana Cake with me once. I can recall her method for making fried potatoes, but otherwise, nothing.

My dad was the cook from whom I learned the most. My mother canned a lot each summer, but I didn't inherit the desire to do that. Maybe that's the difference between rural-living and city life.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 6 months ago by Italiancook.

[Mike Nolan]

My mother was a pretty good cook, she worked in a restaurant for a while so she was adept at all the 'short order cook' stuff. We ate a lot of hash and chop suey, because it was easy to make enough to feed 6 kids. She worked full-time from the time I was in 5th grade, but she could throw together a pretty good meal in a half hour.

My grandmother was even better, I can still smell her pressure-cooked ham. I don't know what she put in it, the closest I've come is to marinate the ham in Dr. Pepper. In a small town we did a lot of pot lucks, and my grandmother would bring a variety of casseroles, though I honestly don't know what they were any more.

Her rice pudding was creamy and my grandfather ate a bowl of it nearly every day. She didn't use a recipe, and I've never duplicated that taste and texture, a combination of rice and tapioca comes pretty close, but I'm fairly sure she didn't use tapioca.

I helped can a lot of pickles and tomatoes growing up, and a fair amount of apple jelly too. I don't do much canning these days, I'm more likely to freeze stuff, like tomato sauce.

[BakerAunt]

My mom was influenced by the packaged food craze that really took off in the 1960s--and our family is large, so I can't blame her--,but she had certain specialties that were more from scratch, such as her spaghetti sauce. She would make a giant pot of it, and also make a giant pot of chili at the same time. Some of it she would freeze. I still make a variation of her spaghetti sauce (although my husband cannot eat it due to the heavy tomato sauce and spices). Before I was married, I'd make a big pot of it at the start of the semester, and freeze it in two-cup serving containers for fast meals. (I do miss being able to do that.) She also made an excellent turkey tetrazzini casserole, and I found that froze well too in small portions. Her other major claim to fame was her hamburger stroganoff, with its Campbell's cream of chicken soup. She made a mashed potato salad--without a recipe--that one of her grandmother's had made. That one I don't have, but it was yellow from the yolks and the mustard and had dill pickle and lettuce in it. She never let a turkey carcass go to waste but made broth.

She didn't do a lot of baking, but every now and then she would get excited and try a new recipe. The Coconut Bavarian Cream Pie with chocolate coconut crust was a favorite. I've made it in the past, until the fear of raw egg white put me off. I also bake her pumpkin pie recipe, and she usually made it from scratch--although she would use the leftover jack-o-lantern!

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