We came up with a home truth in French class this morning: grandmothers need to pass along their recipes. We were discussing recipes our families enjoy, and Daryl broke down the details of how she prepares beef brisket. The version her family likes takes quite some time to prepare. It also includes strong coffee as an ingredient.
Daryl’s grandson talked through the brisket process with her recently, before essaying it on his own. He is both confident and adventurous in the kitchen, and made a second brisket as well, from a recipe of his own devising. He contacted Daryl afterward to debrief. Grandma’s was better, he reported. And Daryl reported feeling a bit proud about that. It’s good to know she’s still got it.
Carol mentioned that her family really enjoyed the apple dumplings her Polish grandmother made. As children, Carol and her brother used to watch while she made them. The trouble is, the maker of dumplings never committed her recipe to paper. No one in the family knows how she did it. They remember how the dumplings tasted, but cannot reproduce them.
My mother-in-law, early in my relationship with her, confessed one day that she wished she had a particular recipe. It was for a type of biscuit her grandmother made, while—and presumably after—crossing the country to settle in Utah. Not too long after that conversation with Eleanore, I did a story on Jan Longone’s library of cookbooks. Jan was a culinary historian and, when I asked her about the elusive biscuit recipe, she strolled over to one of her shelves, pulled out a book, and opened it to a recipe.
“I bet it’s this one,” she said. I bought the book for Eleanore.
And, when Eleanore opened the book that Christmas, looked at the recipe, and heard the story, she said, “It is.”
Eleanore herself was the type of cook who didn’t write down her own recipes. Not even, alas, the recipe for her potato salad—than which no potato salad is greater. Prior to tasting Eleanore’s potato salad, I thought potato salad was disgusting. That was a fact-based opinion: all prior potato salads had been disgusting. Reprehensible wastes of perfectly good potatoes.
Eleanore’s potato salad revealed what all those other attempts must have been striving for. It was stupendous. It was stupendous every time she made it which, fortunately for us, was often. She even served two versions each time, with onions and without onions, so that even those who couldn’t manage onions could partake of her offering.
Did she write down her recipe? No, she did not. She seemed a bit embarrassed by the suggestion that she should. Even when pressed her for details by her beloved son, she tended to hem and haw. She could generate a list of ingredients, but one was never sure the list was exhaustive. The salad-making process was second nature to her, and it was always possible for some portion of it to slip her mind in thinking about it after the fact.
After his mother’s death, my sweetheart worked assiduously to replicate her recipe. He is, after all, a scientist. He’d make a batch, and we’d eat it. Yum . The next time, he’d tweak the recipe a little, and we’d eat it. Yummier. He endeavored to make each batch a closer approximation of Eleanore’s gold standard. And you know what? He did it.
He duplicated her recipe. His potato salad is as good as hers. Sometimes, a shade better. It’s hard for a scientist to stop experimenting, even with perfection. It’s wonderful to have a scientist in the family. And in the kitchen.
That scientist says, with a smile, that when he was a boy, his mother set about making a perfect lemon meringue pie. In particular, she wanted a meringue that didn’t weep. As every pie that woman ever made was fabulous, you wouldn’t think the quest would take her more than a try or two.
Her husband and children, however—knowing a good thing when they ate it—encouraged her in her quest by scrutinizing each pie for any hint of a flaw. They wanted the quest to take a l-o-n-g time. She had to have known what was up, but she was a sweet-natured soul whose family greatly enjoyed both her pies and the idea of fooling her into thinking any of them could ever be flawed, so she played along.
Fortunately, she passed along her pie-making skills to all her daughters, who in turn passed them along to their girls. As we decided in French class today, this is the way it should be.
8 November 2024