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Gourmet Grandparents


DTBarton

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It's occurred to me lately that there's a lot of good information around about old school cooking and ingredients. I think that's great. The only thing that bugs me a bit is the pretentiousness of some of it, everything's artisinal or organic, free range or hormone free, small batch or hand made or local. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just think it's a little overblown sometimes, a little fancied up unnecessarily.

I was thinking about my grandparents and how they cooked and I realized that in many ways, they were doing this stuff 50 to 70 years ago without the pretense, it was just the way it was. My father's mother made a terrific dish she called beef and noodles. It was basically pot roast and gravy mixed with homemade noodles. She hand rolled the noodles and cut them with a knife and hung them on chair backs all over the kitchen to dry. She also made great corn meal mush. It never occurred to her in Texas (or Oklahoma growing up) that she was making artisinal, hand made pasta and homemade, stone ground polenta.

My mother's father grew a large garden as he had been raised on a farm in western Virginia. This was an absolute necessity during the depression in the Shenandoah Valley. My grandmother cooked the fresh vegetables, canned all kinds of stuff, bought their meat and eggs at the Farm Bureau co-op.

Obviously part of the modern move towards better local ingredients etc. is that it harkens back to simpler times. Perhaps we could describe it in simpler terms. Might make some things cost less too without the flowery adjectives.

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What an excellent observation! Both sets of my grandparents were Polish immigrants who settled in Chicago. I think back on things that I watched my maternal grandmother make in her small second floor apartment kitchen and I marvel. Today they would be considered gourmet in most home kitchens.

She made homemade noodles to compliment the homemade chicken stock that was almost always simmering on the back burner. I can remember watching her make perogies by the dozens and dozens with at least five different fillings. In spite of living in the city, she routinely managed to get big gallon jars of fresh milk that she skimmed the cream off of for various things. And every year we went outside the city limits to the tomato farm to pick our own tomatoes for canning. Her polish dill pickles were the envy of the neighborhood, and I don't think she ever put bottled salad dressing to her lips. Most vegetables came right from her back yard, which was tiny but very productive. And she rendered her own lard.

That interest in basic cooking and canning skipped my mother. She cooked some, but not with the loving attention to ingredients and skill that my grandmother had. I think that my mom's generation was wooed by mass marketed convenience foods and they had more money which allowed them to buy more expensive and easier to prepare cuts of meat. The pendulum seems to be swinging back and what was once considered below grade cuts of meat are now gourmet. Stuff only peasants would eat is now sought after, with the fancy names and price tags to prove it. How sad that the great carefully prepared things of our grandparents had to be renamed in order to be appreciated.

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What an excellent observation!  Both sets of my grandparents were Polish immigrants who settled in Chicago.  I think back on things that I watched my maternal grandmother make in her small second floor apartment kitchen and I marvel.  Today they would be considered gourmet in most home kitchens.

She made homemade noodles to compliment the homemade chicken stock that was almost always simmering on the back burner.  I can remember watching her make perogies by the dozens and dozens with at least five different fillings.  In spite of living in the city, she routinely managed to get big gallon jars of fresh milk that she skimmed the cream off of for various things.  And every year we went outside the city limits to the tomato farm to pick our own tomatoes for canning.  Her polish dill pickles were the envy of the neighborhood, and I don't think she ever put bottled salad dressing to her lips.  Most vegetables came right from her back yard, which was tiny but very productive.  And she rendered her own lard.

That interest in basic cooking and canning skipped my mother.  She cooked some, but not with the loving attention to ingredients and skill that my grandmother had.  I think that my mom's generation was wooed by mass marketed convenience foods and they had more money which allowed them to buy more expensive and easier to prepare cuts of meat.  The pendulum seems to be swinging back and what was once considered below grade cuts of meat are now gourmet.  Stuff only peasants would eat is now sought after, with the fancy names and price tags to prove it.  How sad that the great carefully prepared things of our grandparents had to be renamed in order to be appreciated.

Great thread, brings back the memories...grew up in grandparents house while ww2 was finishing up. GM was Swiss, and GF was from the Tyrol. The great chicken soup ,with canerdrle, and the fantastic stews, and homemade noodles , and of course the polenta....They raised chickens He made various dried sausages...and wine.I still use his 70 year old grinder to do charcutrie..

I have made many of her meals just from the great memories, without recipies..

And my Mother couldn't hold a candle to her cooking. But that was probably due to the very limited menu my father would eat...

Thanks again for the reminder...

Bud

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Today is memory lane day.

Coming from Nicaragua to New York City in 1947 meant that my parents had to shop in caribbean grocery stores for the basics of their "home cooking". But the best part of shopping and preparing was SHARING the food. Family and neighbors were always at our house at dinner time, my mother was not only inventive but a wonderful cook.

This is what I remember most and why the Slow Food philosophy is near to my heart.

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