Mother Lines Genealogy –
Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The
buckwheat pancakes Aunt Winnie served may have been an Americanization of the
oatcakes made in Scotland. Buckwheat
pancakes taste like sour flour to me, but are supposed to be good for you.
I
never cared for buckwheat pancakes, but I always ate two or three of them with
maple syrup to please Aunt Winnie.
One
Scottish food my family seems to have dropped once they settled in the U.S. was
haggis. Plenty of my ancestors must have
eaten it though. According to British Cookery, haggis has been around
since the 15th century.
Haggis
is a boiled sheep’s stomach stuffed with entrails and cooked. Dare I say, “Thank goodness, there are not
too many sheep in Wisconsin.” However, I
have eaten a Mexican version of this dish and liked it, so maybe I would like
haggis.
British Cookery helped me understand
what I thought was an anomaly in Aunt Winnie’s kitchen – using potato water in
her homemade bread. The cookbook said
that the cooks in the north countries of England used potatoes more in their
cookery, since it was one of the few crops that grows well in its colder
climate. I felt like I had discovered an
heirloom ring when I read that.
Aunt
Winnie baked bread daily. She told me as
she would toast a few slices, “You should always make as many foods as you can
yourself. It’s better for your health.” She taught me how to make bread by hand and recognize the elastic feel of properly kneaded and twice risen and punched down yeast bread.
Following
this philosophy of life, she managed to eat a diet rich in cream, butter, and
salt till she was 106.
British
dishes using alcohol did not make it on family menus in the Americas thanks to
my maternal great-great grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe. Both she and my great-great grandfather
Captain Stephen Sawle came from Cornwall, England in Great Britain’s southwestern
peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Cornwall
is famous for shipwrecks and tin mines.
Aunt Winnie told me that her grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe “wanted to
come to America, so her husband would not go down with his ship.” She was from a farming family in England. She wanted to be landed gentry and there was
plenty of land to buy in Wisconsin.
The Sawle Family did regain access to fish, though, when my grandfather Frank Sawle purchased a cabin on the Wisconsin River. Pan fried fish is great fresh out of the water and freezes well.
End
of part 3.
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
