Mother Lines Genealogy
– Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Lard
was part of the crust recipes for pie that Aunt Winnie gave me, too. Even though blackberries grew on the farm,
Aunt Winnie only wanted rhubarb and lemon meringue pie to be part of her recipe
list. Both have a tangy, sweet taste
that I love.
“Mother
made her fruit pie crusts with butter,” Aunt Winnie remarked about my
great-grandmother Jeanette Hodgson.
“She
filled the crust with sugared peaches or strawberries and would top them off with
ice cream or whipped cream,” Aunt Winnie continued.
The
crusts required no baking, which made me think I could even master them.
“And
how many cups of fruit would she use?” I methodically asked.
“Three
or four,” she answered as I thought of how good blackberries would taste in
this recipe.
My
great-grandmother Jeanette Hodgson taught Aunt Winnie how to cook as my
great-great grandmother Elizabeth McFarland taught Jeanette Hodgson how to
cook. The foods Aunt Winnie cooked were
both English and Scottish. (Elisabeth
McFarland was a schoolteacher, too.)
Cooking
tends to pass down through mothers. The
English Sawles ate a lot of roast beef like the English with potatoes
substituted for Yorkshire pudding in the New World, but there were some
Scottish items on the dairy farm menus, too, as I discovered later when I read
through the cookbook British Cookery.
This
particular cookbook represents a real gift to anyone interested in finding out
what their British ancestors ate. The
book was compiled “Based on research undertaken for the British Information
Service of Food from Britain and the British Tourist Authority by the University
of Strathclyde.”
British Cookery gives a brief history
of British food since 1066, including sample menus for country parsons as well
as the poor, the development of meals, and the effects of foreign trade on
foodstuffs. Most importantly, British Cookery gives a regional
breakdown of characteristic dishes with their recipes.
I
looked up Scotland and discovered that oatmeal and pancakes were considered
regional breakfast foods. When there
were groups of us staying at the dairy farm, oatmeal and buckwheat pancakes
would always stream out of the kitchen in addition to eggs and bacon.
End
of Part 2
To
be continued.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
