Family Recipes

Last year around this time I made brown sugar cookies for my husband as part of the Christmas baking.  I don’t love them and his mom always made them so I had never made them before.  But things were a little different last Christmas, so I decided to add them to the roster. I got out the recipe his mom had given him when he moved out – he didn’t even know where it was, but I had come across it years ago – and I did my best.  I felt a lot of pressure.  His mom had always made them and they were one of his favourites, so they are special to him.  So, I did my best, and much to my relief, he loved them.

And maybe because I was making something from his childhood, suddenly I wanted something from mine.  Macaroons.  No, not French macarons.  These are very different.  Made of chocolate and coconut, they seem to have different names.  I have heard them called lump cookies and haystack cookies, but they have always been macaroons to me.  They aren’t the prettiest cookie, but they are delicious.

I asked my mom for her recipe.  She didn’t know where it was, and told me to look online.  I had a look.  And then something told me to look in my grandma’s recipes. (That something was probably my mom telling me to look at Grandma’s recipes.)

When we cleaned out my grandma and grandpa’s house, I wanted Grandma’s recipes.  To me, the kitchen was such a part of her.  She was a farmer’s wife, and she took care of her family, whether that meant cooking and cleaning or helping Grandpa during harvest time.  You should have seen her out there driving that big grain truck. She was tiny but mighty, and a big part of what makes me think of her is cooking and baking. So, off I went to Grandma’s recipes.

My grandparents were married in 1941, during World War II.  They made do with what they had.  And one of the things they had was a farm accounting book, and my grandma used that to write recipes in.   I have a recipe box of hand written recipes, old, old recipe books, random pieces of paper and newspaper clippings, and the books that she wrote the recipes in.

By some miracle, the recipe for the macaroons was in the recipe box.  I say it’s a miracle because it is by far the smallest number of pieces of paper to search through, and much to my surprise, at one point, before those recipes made it to my house, I organized them.

But the recipe books.  Both the handwritten books and the actual recipe books that she bought or were given to her.  They are such treasures.  Written decades ago, in another time, with instructions that seem so foreign now, some recipes with only ingredients and no instructions.  There is advice on being a good housewife, how to stretch your budget, how to keep your husband happy.  We may frown or roll our eyes at that, but it was a different time, and those things were important.

And when I open those recipe books, I look at them with a hushed silence, like the reverence you feel walking into an ancient beautiful church.  The pages are soft with years of turning, and I know that love came out of those recipes. Sometimes the hushed silence is broken by laughter when I see an ad from decades ago that would never see the light of day now.

It is hard to find what I am looking for in the handwritten books and random pieces of paper.  The recipe books are easier, but even then, how do I know which recipes she used? How do I know which one is the best?  Grandma did something wonderful and oh so smart with her handwritten recipes, which I do myself now.  She wrote who gave her the recipe and if she liked it or not.  Many have “Good” written at the top.  One had an ‘x’ beside it.  Did that mean it was the one she used, or did that mean it wasn’t a good recipe?  But even though it is hard to find what I am looking for and it takes a bit of time, it always feels like time well spent.  Time spent in another time, some when my grandma was a young bride during the war, newly married, and later, a new mom.

I miss her very much.  We were close.  Sometimes, especially when I was a teenager, she made me so mad.  I spent a lot of time with my grandma and grandpa in the summers when I was growing up, and what I didn’t know until years later was that they treated me more like their daughter than their granddaughter.  Yes, they spoiled me as grandparents do, bringing me something back from their travels, Grandpa letting me choose a candy or two from the paper bag under the seat of the truck when we drove from the house in town to go work on the farm while Grandma stayed home to clean up and get things ready for supper. (I didn’t work on the farm.  I mostly drove around on Grandpa’s golf cart.  But that is another story.)  But mostly, for better or for worse, they treated me like their daughter.  Now, it means so much to me.  But back then, well, teenagers aren’t the most grateful people in the world.

I made those macaroons.  And they tasted just like the ones my mom made when I was a kid.  It was so exciting, knowing that I did it!  And knowing that I made them from Grandma’s recipe made them all the sweeter.