Writing a Family Cookbook

The focal point of my kitchen is my grandmother's Grand stove made by the Cleveland Co-operative Stove Company in 1929. It's the stove on which she learned to cook and where she taught my father and then me how to cook. It's usually the first thing a visitor remarks on when entering our house, and because the kitchen is where everyone seems to gather, I consider it the heart of our home.

My father and sister rescued the stove from the basement of my grandparent's house in Pennsylvania after it burnt down in a fire caused by a freak accident. It had been stored there along with other relics of their lives when they graduated to modern appliances. I had stopped spending summers at my grandparent's house in my mid teens, not returning to visit until my early 20's for their 50^th anniversary. I had been shocked at the stove's retirement. "It's old, the gaskets leak and the thermostat doesn't work anymore," my grandmother told me. It was time for it to be replaced, but it's storage in the basement spoke of how hard it was for her to give it up.

After it's rescue from the ashes, my sister, who knew how much I loved the stove and how appropriate it would be for me, the chef of the family, to have it, said she would store it for me in her garage. It sat there for several years until my uncle and his partner made a trip out to Tucson and hauled the stove out with them.

My husband and I took the stove to an antique appliance restorer who, after looking at it, advised us that it was restorable, but it was "gonna' cost a bit." A "bit" it turned out was about $1000.00 and involved replacing gaskets, nickel plating parts, body work, and sending the thermostat to several specialists, who after all was said and done, would not guarantee how long it would stay calibrated.

When the work was finally completed, six months later, it was just as I remembered it from childhood, right down to the smell when the burners were lit. It was a smell that evoked hot coco before bed, the cakes grandma made every Saturday night, fish we had caught with my grandfather in the afternoon being fried in a pan, and pies made from berries my brother and I had spent all morning picking in the fields surrounding the house. These memories prompted me to dig out my grandmother's recipes, which, fatefully, I had gotten from her the year before the house burnt down.

Sorting through the recipes was a bittersweet exercise since my grandmother and father had both died recently; she quietly in her sleep at age 97; my dad, too young, from Leukemia at 67. It was then that I had a horrible thought. Nobody in our family was passing on recipes to their children anymore. My nieces and nephews would never taste my grandmothers chocolate cake with whipped icing and multi colored sprinkles, a Sunday morning treat my brothers and sisters and I all remembered fondly. They wouldn't experience my dad's traditional saltine cracker based turkey stuffing. This was terrible! I needed to do something, and soon. As it was, all the old aunties who made our family's traditional dishes were either dead or getting too old to remember them.

I decided I was going to compile a family cookbook using the recipes from my grandmother and whatever I could find of my father's recipes. My father loved to experiment with food, rarely made the same thing the same way twice and never wrote anything down. He would tell me about his latest concoctions when we spoke on the phone, and I would flesh out the ingredients and procedures into recipes and try them out later. My mother, who didn't like to cook and was happy to delegate this chore to my father, remembered a little about how he cooked certain things when we were kids, like the infamous saltine cracker stuffing. Several of my sisters who often cooked with dad as adults, were also helpful in reconstructing recipes and excited about the prospect of a family cookbook.

As the cookbook started coming together I realized how much food tied my family together, both in the past and the present. Family gatherings from wedding to wakes had always been about food and still were. My siblings and I always plan family gatherings in advance via e-mail and the best part of these get-togethers is working in the kitchen together, passing recipes and cooking tips to each other. I decided I needed to include these recipes in the cookbook too.

I mentioned the project to my uncle, my mother's only brother, a world traveler and very good cook and asked him to contribute also. The book had taken on a life of it's own.

After two years of collecting information and recipes, I was finally ready to put the book together. I spent three more months typing, annotating, and illustrating the book with family pictures and appropriate quotations, made copies and packaged them in plastic binders. It wasn't flashy, and it certainly wasn't professional looking. It was homespun and from the heart, the perfect Christmas present.

When I spoke to my family on the phone on Christmas day, everyone had something wonderful to say about the cookbook; how reading through the recipes brought back so many memories; how great it was to have the recipes to pass on to their kids, and so on. One of my brother's, a tough, no nonsense guy, said he was so touched by the book, he almost cried.

Of course, as so often happens with these projects, people who hadn't contributed suddenly had recipes that they wanted to add to the cookbook, like my baby sister's husband's family recipe for potato chip cookies. How could I not add that? I proposed that every year around October I would put out the call for more recipes, type them up and send them out as additions, which I did this year and plan to keep on doing as long as I keep getting them.