I love to cook, but I have not always felt that way. I come from a family of great cooks on my mother’s side and as a child was somewhat intimidated, so I chose not to try. When I graduated from college, I had yet to even boil water. I was content to subsist on the fruits of everyone’s labor while reading Betty Crocker, the only cookbook my mother possessed.Not that she and her sisters, or my grandmother needed a cookbook. For most of the women of their generation, cooking was just something one did. Especially the old farm girls. Cooking for them was a necessity, but they were blessed with the freshest fruits, vegetables, dairy, poultry, and meat available, so it was hard to screw up. The one thing they did not have were the gadgets and appliances that we have today. There were no Cuisinarts or blenders. Chopping was done by hand with metal grinders and shredders for grinding meat or shredding vegetables.
Being German, we ate a lot of sauerkraut. Canning sauerkraut was a family affair. One or two kraut cutters might be utilized to shred the cabbage while someone else packed the big pottery crocks and added the salt. Several weeks later, they would return to put the finished product up in canning jars which would last through the winter.
The cellars were full of all sorts of canned fruits and vegetables. There were canned peaches, spiced peaches, spiced crab apples, canned cherries, and plums. There were also jellies: grape, strawberry, raspberry, apple, and orange marmalade. There were canned gooseberries for pie in the winter and jars of homemade mincemeat.
My grandmother never bought dairy products. She made her own butter, buttermilk, cream, and cheese. She ground her own cornmeal and had her own bee hives for honey. The only foods I recall her buying were flour, sugar, coffee, vinegar, peanut butter and the occasional orange or banana. Oh, did we eat well whenever we visited her. There was always fresh baked bread, with fresh butter and homemade jelly along with fresh milk. What more could one want.
We did not grow up eating candy bars and chips or drinking sodas. Those were occasional treats but were not part of our daily diet. We ate what was available and that is what the women in my family cooked and baked with. My mother and her sisters inherited my grandmother’s gardening gene, so we grew up eating anything they grew which included a lot of vegetables and dishes that most city people didn’t know of in those day: stewed okra, eggplant pancakes, corn fritters, tomato pudding and raspberry custard pie; dishes you would not find on the table of any of our neighbors were some of my favorites. We also feasted on pork ribs with sauerkraut and dumplings, homemade chicken and noodles, and all sorts of breads, cakes, cookies and especially pies.
There was always some kind of fruit or custard pie at my grandmothers and my mother took that skill a bit further. She became so proficient at baking pies that it wasn’t unusual for her to get up after a meal while the rest of us were still eating and ask us what kind of pie we would like. She would then whip out the flour and Crisco and within an hour or so, we would have a pie fresh from the oven. Her apple pies were a masterpiece, but my favorites were her cream pies. Banana, coconut, chocolate, or lemon, all piled high with meringue that I have yet to master.
When we lived in New Jersey, I finally mastered the art of making pie crust. Without my mother for over nine years, I was dependent on my own ability to bake. For over a year, every Sunday afternoon, I would bake a pie. There were some disasters at first, but I finally perfected the skill of making a perfect pie crust, something that still serves me well, but which I seldom put into practice anymore.
Like everyone else, I have been taken in by all the gadgets, appliances, and new techniques of cooking to the detriment of really good food. Our kitchens are filled with Cuisinarts, spiralizers, flash fryers, rice cookers, and hundreds of cookbooks, but we are not very good cooks. We try to impress people with the look of our food, but most of us are too far from the source for it to be very delicious. The farm-to-table movement may give us a glimpse of what real eating might look like, but as long as the majority of our produce and meat is grown with pesticides or antibiotics, we will not be eating healthy and our bodies will bear the brunt of what we have available to eat.