Family Food Traditions

Food brings people together. It carries memories. It connects through time and generations, across the miles. Food is not simply necessary to sustain life, but it is food and the traditions around it that sustain family bonds, build relationships and strengthen community.

When we get in the kitchen and cook, when we gather around the table to eat, we engage in a unique form of fellowship that engages all the senses and touches the soul.

I grew up in a family where food was important. But it was more than simply eating food. Preparing the food was often a family event and meals were eaten together around the table. Some of my earliest memories are food-related; and when I think about holiday traditions, I usually think about the foods (and all the good feels!) associated with them.

When I was about six years old, my family moved to Mexico where many of our food traditions changed as we were exposed to a whole new world of flavors and food culture. But there was also an effort on my mom’s part to hold on to many of our comfort foods (including iced tea) in a place where most of the items she was accustomed to finding at the grocery store were no longer available to her.

Everyone in my family can cook. Myself and my siblings learned to cook from our mom. We may have different personalities in the kitchen, but we’re all pretty good cooks who really enjoy being in the kitchen and we owe that to her.

While Mom was the main cook in the household, Dad could hold his own in the kitchen too. He would often make pancakes for breakfast on Sundays or for a weekday breakfast-for-dinner. He is also the undisputed Snickerdoodle King. Undisputed.

I have memories of sneaking snickerdoodles from the neat, even stacks that my dad would place them in as he removed them from the cooling racks. (We had to sneak them because he didn’t appreciate having his neat, even stacks of snickerdoodle perfection messed with.) I’m 45 and I still get in trouble when I eat his cookies before he’s ready to part with them.

When it comes to “comfort foods”, potato soup is what I want when I’m not feeling well. When I took a “sick” day from school, my mom would make me potato soup. It’s still my ultimate comfort food, and it’s still best when she’s the one who makes it for me. (But I’ve also developed my own pretty darn good variation of the original.)

We didn’t farm, hunt, fish, garden or forage for our foods. But as an adult, I took up gardening and have taken steps to shorten the gap between myself and my food sources. This magazine is part of that food journey and was born from my desire to have a greater connection to my food and to my local community.

We didn’t do canning in the house when I was growing up, but it is something that I have done a few times as an adult along with my parents. Together we have made jams and jellies. It was something I was interested in doing after I had started gardening, but canning isn’t something I wanted to attempt on my own. My dad takes the role of recipe reader, keeping Mom and I on task throughout the process. We make a pretty good team in the kitchen.

I never had the opportunity to know my grandparents, which wasn’t something I really thought too much about as a kid. But as an adult I have come to realize that I missed out on a great deal by not having that connection to earlier generations.

Interestingly enough, all four of my grandparents could cook. Both of my grandfathers were cooks in the Army. My maternal grandfather had a restaurant in New York for a short time and my maternal grandmother was a short-order cook at one point in her life.

As I have listened to my dad reminisce over the years, I have come to realize that my own food story is coming to resemble that of his early childhood. I took the time recently to interview Dad about his family’s food traditions.

Dad grew up in Elkin, North Carolina, in a working-class home which, by all accounts, was very happy and loving. His father was a painter and floor-finisher by trade and his mother was a homemaker. The cornerstone of the family, she devoted much of her time to growing, preserving and preparing food.

Her name was Gladys and Dad describes her as being happy in the kitchen. She was also tidy and organized (my sister, not I, inherited that trait) and cooked mostly from memory.

Dad enjoyed hanging out in the kitchen with his mother, especially when she was baking and there were bowls and spoons to be licked clean.

When I first asked Dad to share his earliest food memories, not surprisingly, I was provided with a list. Dad likes lists. Sometimes he gets going on a good long list and I’ll be forced to interrupt (using my best Bubba-from-Forest-Gump impression) with a list of my own starting with “fried shrimp, boiled shrimp...”. Then we laugh.

“Fried okra, corn on the cob, homemade biscuits, gravy, blackstrap molasses with butter - sopping it with a biscuit,” Dad recalls. “For breakfast we had oatmeal lots of times with buttered toast and a big glass of milk. Milk, coffee and iced tea were our beverages. Pepsi. When my mother made tea, she’d put a Pepsi in the big pitcher.”

“Really?”, I ask. “Every time?”. “Just about,” he replied. (Just goes to show, you learn something new every day.)

Eventually, we moved away from lists. I was interested to know how the food got to the kitchen in the first place. I knew my grandmother had kept a garden, but I was curious to know where the meat was sourced (because one of the lists included things like chicken, ham and turkey).

“The Basketeria,” Dad says matter-of-factly.

“The Basketeria was owned by two brothers,” Dad went on to explain. “One of them ran the farm and the other ran the market. Luke, I don’t remember his last name, … worked in the meat department and he would custom cut your meat … You would phone in your order to Elsie Nixon (said with no hesitation. I’m not sure my own name would flow so easily from his lips) - she was the cashier and she would take your order - and they would bring it to the house in bushel baskets and set them on your back porch.”

And here we are thinking that having our groceries delivered is a modern convenience!

I have memories from over the years of Dad saying that they always had oranges and pecans in their stockings at Christmas. And I used to think that was odd. The lightbulb came on for me this year as I gathered a large basket of pecans and oranges from my yard this fall. It wasn’t odd at all, they were simply enjoying the harvest of the season. A theme that was repeated throughout our conversation.

“We had persimmons, we’d have persimmon pie,” Dad recalled (did he just smack his lips?) “They were in season in the fall of the year, you had to wait until they turn color and usually wait until they were dropping off the tree before you’d pick them because they’d be bitter if you didn’t. They were kind of a tart sweetness. She’d make persimmon pie, almost like a pudding but it was in a pie shell.”

“We would go up on the mountain,” Dad recalled, “and there was a place where you could get Chinquapins…”

‘I’m sorry. You got Chinkawhats?,” I interrupted.

“Chinquapins,” he reiterated. “A little nut, real sweet. There might be one tree in a whole stand of woods, but we knew where they were. Once you found one, you’d go back every year.”

So, if I’m honest, I thought maybe Dad was just making stuff up at this point. So, I put a mental pin in it to Google chinkawhatsits later. I had no idea what the spelling might be, so I Googled “nut foraging in North Carolina”. And what do you know? Chinquapins are a dwarf variety of the American Chestnut and are native to North America found prominently along the Blue Ridge Mountains (though somewhat in decline these days). Here I am, learning new things again.

“My dad was not a fisher or a hunter,” my Dad said. “But I did a little bit of fishing and hunting. I would go out and get a rabbit every now and then. I never did hunt deer.”

“Every now and then I’d get a rabbit and she’d dress it out,” Dad said, referring to his mother. “She’d cut it up in parts and fry it. I couldn’t dress it out like she did. She’d cut around the feet first and pull it up across the back and when she got to the head, she’d just pull the whole thing off with the head in it.” (There’s a visual!)

When she wasn’t removing rabbit heads, my grandmother was a prolific baker. Dad recalled that she always did a lot of baking, but that even more was done leading up to the holidays. Cookies, cakes, pies and fruitcakes were listed.

“She didn’t have a mixer,” Dad said. “On my paper route, we had a general merchandise type place. And I saved my money on my paper route and went to that store and bought my mother a mixer.”

Ok, I’ll admit that I teared up a bit here. I always suspected as much, but this story made it clear - my dad was a mama’s boy! Ok, back to the narration...

“And the owner of the store said, ‘don’t you want a baseball glove or something?’ and I said, ‘no sir, I want a mixer.’ And he thought that was pretty neat. It really touched him that I’d take my hard earned money and not buy something for myself but for my mother.”

“And it thrilled her too.”

“Was it for her birthday? Or for Christmas?”, I ask.

“I just bought it,” he said. “I don’t remember if it was any certain time of year, just when I had enough money to get it. She always had to mix by hand, of course, she had strong hands. But she did use the mixer when I got it for her.”

“What about your dad?”, I ask. “Did he ever cook?”

“Dad was a cook in the Army,” he replied. “He didn’t cook a whole lot, but when Mother was gone somewhere or something, he would cook.”

Dad chuckled and then said, “we always teased him about his gravy.” A pause as he looks over at me. “You make the same kind (dramatic pause) we called it ‘pudding gravy’.”

Ha. Ha. Everyone’s a critic. I like my gravy a little thick. Good to know I come by it honestly.

Listening to my dad recall his memories from childhood, I felt like our family’s food journey was coming full circle. Eating foods in season, foraging, gardening, canning. I heard stories I’d never heard before and once again it was food that was making connections through time and generations.

I highly recommend that if your dad is still living that you have a similar conversation with him this Thanksgiving. Get his list of favorite foods and allow that list to develop into the stories around the foods. Ask your mom and your grandparents too, if you are fortunate enough to have them. You never know what new things you’ll learn!