Last year when I stumbled on a recipe that my husbands family had loved, but thought they had lost when their grandma died, I got to thinking about how easy it is to loose those little things we remember that made the holidays special. This year I am resurrecting a few other old recipes of Grandma Tallman's that I found in her old cookbooks. While we'll be giving the cookies to my in-laws as gifts, I think preserving some of these traditions, left over from "the old world", is also giving a gift to ourselves and our kids. In an effort to recover some of the lost past on my side of the family, I have contacted a cousin in Ireland and explained that I don't have any old, handed down traditional Irish recipes, and would he ask his mum, and her siblings what they remember. I explained that even if they could remember a name and a few ingredients, I could likely find something close on the Internet. I'm chasing down the past and trying to make new traditions for my own family. I want my kids to have more of a sense of their heritage than just knowing where their ancestors came from.
One of the better gifts I have ever given, was homemade, and will probably never get used. In digging up old recipes, my mother-in-law gave me the names of some dishes that she remembered from her childhood. With those and a few others, I put together a "cookbook" of traditional Norwegian recipes. In between the recipes, I put old pictures of her family that I had found on Ancestry.com. Pictures of her grandparents when they were still in Norway. Pictures of her mother as a teen. Pictures of the family in later years, more the way she remembers them. My mother-in-law is in poor health. She can't do much cooking and baking the way she used to. She will probably never use even one of the recipes I printed out for that cookbook. But, when my husband gave her the cookbook, she remembered almost all the recipes I had found. Her hand traced over the pictures of her family. She murmured the names of loved ones lost long ago. And she was speechless.
Hindsight being 20/20, I should have made a copy of that cookbook for myself, as well. Someday I will. For now, I keep fining new recipes to try, I'm still chasing down the old recipes, and I'm trying to find a heritage for my children that has nearly been lost.
