family tradition

This picture may make you think it's the middle of the night, but it's not! It's simply before 6am. The only way I could convince Cecilia to stop whining in bed this morning was with the promise of pancakes. Recently Ce has decided that she very much enjoys baking and mixing batter. She's actually surprisingly helpful, if not controlling (much like the generations which precede her) when it comes to this particular endeavor.

See? Extra helpful.

But seriously, this is a fun thing that we can do together, she likes being involved in the whole process, and she's a good companion for it. I'm imagining all the fun we'll be having as she becomes more and more competent. It's certainly something I did with my mother and Grandma, it's part of the lineage of intuitive cooks in my family. And, yes, part of that is the female lineage. I remember learning I was pregnant with Ce and just knowing that she must be a girl because I had to continue the female line in my family. Isn't that interesting, we hear so much more about male descendents, however there was a real need within me to carry on the spirit of women throughout our family.

A huge part of that is our family recipes, from the Yankees we have Apple Pie, Meatloaf, Biscuits and from the Greeks we have Roast Lamb, Vasilopita (Holiday Bread), Kourabiedes (Sugar Cookies), Loukoumades ("Doughnuts") and Spanakopita. These are the traditions in my family, how we share our heritage and culture, through culinary traditions. I'm certain it will be interesting to see how each generation changes and adapts these recipes, depending on availability of ingredients or if one person is a scientific or intuitive cook, a traditionalist or an interpreter.

I see myself adapting recipes in my generation to take into consideration health and seasonality. I have adapted my grandmother's meatloaf recipe for example to not include cream of mushroom soup, instead I now make a gravy with seasonally available veggies and bacon fat and smother the inside and out of the meatloaf with that. Or my mother added to Loukoumades, a "honey puff" doughnut that we have Christmas morning and serves maple syrup with them, and that seems like a adaption coming form living in New England. These are the stories of these recipes.

Of course there are many fantastic male cooks in my family who have added to this lineage, and in fact some of the best cooks amongst my elders are male. My father has certainly run with my grandmother's biscuit recipe and markedly improved on their moist, flakiness by adding cream cheese as the fat. And I have further changed the recipe by going back to using lard instead of butter or cream cheese, and I'm certain that 50 years ago Miss Janet, my Grandmother Grant kept a bucket of lard beneath her counter.

It seems it's all adding and subtracting, these family stories of cooking. These family traditions are really all about the bloodlines running though our muscles. It's about the touch, the grace, the atmosphere in the kitchen, the intensity, the stories told, the hustle, the bustle. There are times that I've been baking and I can literally feel Miss Janet coming through my fingers. Coming through my shoulders and doing the work for me. It feels innate, like part of our chemistry to fill the kitchen with delicious smells and cover the table with dinner every night. We get to see the joy in our families eyes and hear it in their voices as they fill their bellies to overfull. And then the greatest tradition of all, apple pie for breakfast the morning after the party.