History 101
The Nostalgia of Food Article Aimee Pellete | Photography Provided
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re you just now feeling back to normal after the gluttony of the holidays? Did you stuff yourself with all the comforting foods that so often remind us of special times and holidays past? I’m sure we all have memories of cooking together with family members or gathering around the table with family for dinner. Food is one of those things that connects us with the past and connects with each other. My mom and I often talk about what we call “nostalgic food.” These are foods that, while we don’t make them a regular part of our modern diet, every once in a great while we savor these somewhat odd or unhealthy (usually both) items. More than just a simple comfort food, they are a remembrance of the people and or events we associate with them. For us, these nostalgic foods include the fried onion rings my grandfather made for my mom; “Grandma Pellet’s Cookies,” a meringue and nut confection; Nana’s Greasy Slaw, a bacon-dressing-based slaw; and pretty much anything made with Velveeta. While my Mom was looking for a recipe this past Christmas, she came upon a spiral recipe notebook belonging to my great-grandmother, Lena. The fact that Lena even had one is surprising since most of her cooking was done by taste, feel and memory…a bit of this, “about this much” of that. A quick perusal shows recipes made in quantities that few of us 16
Chesterfield Lifestyle | February 2015
would use today. But, of course, they were often canning for future use or feeding hungry farmers. Recipes that call for liquids were measured in quarts and gallons, as well as bushels of ingredients. How many people today can even visualize what a bushel looks like? While a few of the recipes are quite detailed, many of them have just enough information to serve as a reminder of how to make a recipe that had probably already been made numerous times. Her recipe for “Divinity,” a sticky-sweet holiday concoction, is still a common holiday favorite and the only recipe in the notebook that is typed, shows only a list of ingredients and the different pans into which they were to be placed. There are no real instructions, showing that most cooks of the day knew enough about the process of cooking that they didn’t need the details. Some of the recipes we remember most from Lena aren’t in the notebook at all; she clearly had them memorized. One such recipe was Lena’s family-famous coffee cake recipe. Unlike the gooey, Danish-like version most people think of today, this was more of a sweet bread with cinnamon and sugar baked on the top. Then she would spread butter and sprinkle additional sugar on each slice. What the kids in the family remember is licking the butter and sugar off the top and asking for more, which she usually obliged even if it came with a somewhat stern, obligatory warning that children shouldn’t eat too much sugar.