[Sca-cooks] Meanderings on family histories and foods, was, Re: Packing from the Nimatnama

[Lisa]

*snip*
> On my side of our family, we have the folks who came to the US before it
was
> the US.....so our family recipes are mostly a matter of what we were
served
> as children, and are pretty much regional in nature.  The only things Mama
> cooked that her mother made were mostly southern-style stuff..she cooked
> everything pretty much the way her mother did, though she did come up with
> some things that I remember fondly from my childhood, especially her mac
and
> cheese, meatloaf and her spaghetti sauce.  The one recipe from Grandma
that
> I use is her orange fruitcake recipe which is yummy.  Dad introduced her
to
> the salt-cured hams and bacon that came from his father's farm...and I do
> have very fond memories of baked ham and cured shoulder sliced and fried
for
> breakfast...she would then make "red-eye" gray and serve the whole
business
> with grits....mmmmmmmm.  (Can you tell I'm a southern gal???)
>
> Phillip's culinary heritage (and he is a better cook than I am) include
> nothing from his father's Slovenian heritage.  And the recipes passed on
> from his mother are things like the creamed chip beef that she learned to
> make from a Marine mess sergeant!  He does fix several other things that
she
> made, or that he remembers from living in Yugoslavia...the cook there used
> to make moussaka, which he makes but doesn't use her recipe.
>
> Kiri
>*snip*

My background is typical american... mutt, and very little passed down from
my ancestors when it comes to cooking, although my husband's grandparents on
his father's side both came from Sicily.  We recently found an old cookbook
that was his grandmother's and since is it beginning to deteriorate we
scanned it and put it on disk.  Hubby was taught to cook by his Sicillian
grandmother so many of his recipes are very traditional for the area she
came from.

Elizabeta