Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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 15^th 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

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

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

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 1 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Anyone who has done genealogy as a hobby knows how exciting it is to find the name of a man’s wife.  A whole new branch on the family tree opens above her.

Unfortunately, most of the research centers on her father, because details about a woman’s life are usually limited to her birth (or christening), marriage, and death.

“Would I want my life reduced to those dates alone?” I asked myself as I was putting together family trees to give out as Christmas presents as well as Photostats of family photos with identifications photographed along with them. 

I have hedged my bets against this happening by keeping journals since the age of ten when I began doing genealogy for a school project, which included interviewing and taping grandparents and parents.

However, I wanted to do something for the women on my family tree chart to flesh out their existence a bit.

I thought of doing research on food, since almost all women in the past had responsibility for cooking it or supervising staff who did. 

Best of all, I could make use of my family’s treasure to do the initial research: 103-year-old Aunt Winnie, my grandfather’s sister, who had gone to college at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater to earn a teaching degree along with her older sister. 

(My great-grandfather William Sawle, a ship captain turned famer, thought educating women was more important than educating men, because they raised children.)

Aunt Winnie would use any pretext for entertaining guests and immediately invited me over for the weekend.  After working her crossword puzzle in the morning after my arrival, she told me that I would have to measure out the various ingredients, because she did everything “by eye.”

Her living room sized kitchen had a real iron, wood burning stove and a six-foot gray marble counter top in the pantry.

Even though I was in my thirties, Aunt Winnie still called me her “little lemonade maker,” because that is what I begged to do every time I went to visit “the farm,” whose name was Rosevale.  Lemonade was the only beverage served on the screened in back porch where we ate “dinner” at lunch time and “supper” at dinner time.

The official lemonade recipe I measured out follows:

-one cup of sugar

-juice of two lemons

-3 quarts of water

Aunt Winnie shared a trick for adding flavor to this basic preparation:

Slice the lemon rind in ringlets and crush them to release their oil.  The lemon ringlets look festive in the glasses as well.

What Aunt Winnie was most popular for were her cookies.  She kept them in a stemmed glass bowl on low, marble topped table for children on the back porch.  The anise, sorghum, and molasses cookies she kept there intrigued generations of Sawle family children.  (Sawle is my mother’s maiden name.)

I refused to believe that the anise cookies I loved as a child were related to black licorice, a candy I still dislike.  I thought the cookies were made with vegetable shortening like Crisco.

“You really don’t use Crisco to make those cookies, do you?” I asked a few times.

“Lard isn’t Crisco,” Aunt Winnie finally responded. 

“Real lard is good for you,” she continued.

“What is lard made of?” I asked.

“Lard is the rendered fat of a pig,” Aunt Winnie continued with her real world food lesson.

She was ignoring me and answering my question at the same time.

“I wish they had invented plastic wrap when my mother was alive.  Whenever we butchered a pig, there was so much blood, and mother kept changing the sheets to keep everything clean.  She would have loved throwing away plastic wrap,” Aunt Winnie said.

Aunt Winnie could tell I was squeamish about these food details, but later in life I am happy to say that my ancestors could butcher a pig like Italy’s famous Norcian butchers.

End of Part 1.

To be continued.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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The Black Madonna Phenomenon - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Black Madonna Phenomenon – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Malgorzata Oleskiwicz of the University of Texas – San Antonio researches the concept of personal geography and the role of black Madonnas in Latin American and Eastern European liberation movements.

The brown Virgen of Guadalupe figures into the “Black Madonna” pantheon according to Oleskiwicz.  Filming religious ceremonies of Brazilian descendants of Yoruban slaves from Western Africa (primarily modern-day Nigeria), Oleskiwicz was struck by how similar the iconography and religious practices were between Yoruban and Polish worshipers.

Why so many people are drawn to black Madonnas was discussed by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum of the California Institute for Integral Studies and China Galland of the Graduate Theological Union.  Both emphasized that we must respond to this phenomenon with academic rigor.

Birnbaum happily told the group, “Male geneticists and anthropologists have pinpointed the origin of human life in Africa.  And, migrating Africans took their goddess with them.”

Galland pointed out that despite our common genetic origins, the manifestations of the black Madonna are as different as the cultures within which they develop.

For Galland, the black Madonas beckon us to defend life on Earth.  She stressed that our real enemies are not people, but greed, hatred, delusion, and jealousy.

Galland encouraged participants to have everyday spiritual practices such as prayers, caring for plants, preparing family meals, and outdoor walks to bring love into our lives.  These acts allow us to transform anger and act with compassion and levelheadedness.

The birth of Chicana artist Rosa M’s son prompted her to literally deconstruct the Virgen of Guadalupe down to the bones.  She left only the heart inside a painting of the Virgen, wanting to pass on to her son something that would reflect both their Indian and European heritage.  She left the heart to show that “We mature as individuals, when we sacrifice ourselves for others.

Anne-Marie Sayers, founder of the Costanoan Indian Research Center and chronicler of the persistence of culture offered wise remarks about resilience:  When the ceremonies stop, so does the Earth.”

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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