What makes something an ancestral recipe?
If you cook a recipe that was one of your mother’s favorites, are you cooking an ancestral recipe? How about if you cook a dish you learned from your grandmother or your great Auntie? I believe that all these foods are ancestral recipes.
A year or so ago I saw this post on Instagram:
“You are your ancestors, act accordingly.”
That’s heady stuff.
Apply that theory to food. When I create new recipes AND when I take my elders’ recipes and update them to be more modern and aligned with today’s nutritional guidelines, I AM cooking the food of my ancestors.
When I think about the impact of the foods I cooked on my children’s lives as they were growing up, and then potentially on their children’s lives, it gives a whole new meaning to the rituals around creating tasty foods in your home kitchen.
I’ve been thinking a lot about multi-generational living this year. Several years ago we purchased a second home in Colorado where my daughter and her boyfriend currently live. It gives us a homey place to stay on our visits west. Sadly, our pandemic (or plandemic; call it what you will) is keeping us on the east coast right now.
Slowly, our dream of living together is beginning to take shape, even if only in baby steps.
These fledgling plans, my veggie garden, and beginning to preserve food again are all components of my thought process around cooking the foods of our ancestors. I want to preserve their heritage, but in a way that reflects what we know about nutrition and creating an environment for longevity.
Will I have the pleasure of preserving food in the sweltering heat of a summer kitchen with a grandchild learning this skill by my side? I can see it in my mind. Whether or not that becomes a reality, I know that capturing these newly updated and tested recipes and saving them is a good thing. It creates an opportunity for my daughter to make them for herself, and hear the family stories of watching my Nana make these pickles in her kitchen while she talked about learning to cook with her mother.
This week’s ode to my ancestors was re-launching this family recipe for mustard pickles. I absolutely love their tangy, slightly sticky, and bright yellow sauce that is just thick enough to suspend crispy pickled vegetables that came straight out of my backyard garden.
I can trace the making of mustard pickles back to at least as far as my maternal great-grandmother. However, my mother couldn’t remember the recipe and we don’t seem to have it written down. The last time I made them was when my daughter was a toddler. Fortunately, I have a pretty good memory for these things and I think I came pretty close to the family recipe. These days, the experts in food preservation say that we should not use flour in anything that is going to be canned because it can create thick hot spots that may not become properly cooked while in a canning bath, so that had to go along with the sugar.
The revised recipe makes me so happy. I think I even felt a wink and a nod from my Nana and Nana Sara when I tasted that first spoonful. Even my sweet pickle loving husband approves.
