Category Archives: memoir
An Icy Dessert from Garden Ingredients
From Eden to Babylon, gardens for thousands of years have inspired legends. In America, the U.S. Botanic Garden opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1820 and still operates nearby. Michelle Obama revived gardening on the White … Continue reading
Hurry Up Curry: Convenience from the 1930s
In this age of microwave dinners and mail order meal kits, we all seem intent on erasing every extra second from food preparation. My Richmond grandmother, Hanna, was attracted to the same idea in the 1930s.
Peach Cake Rushes the Season
A week of gloomy weather in Boston means it’s time for a sunny recipe. This peach-almond kuchen does double duty for Mother’s Day
For Washington’s Birthday: Easy Cherry Sherbet from the 1930s
The 1930s – the era that brought us the Great Depression as well as an end to Prohibition – also brought us some of our most enduring kitchen convenience products, such as Miracle Whip and Bisquick. This was also the … Continue reading
6-4-2-1 Equals a Family Cocktail
The recipe paper-clipped inside one of my grandmother’s cooking pamphlets sounds like a scientific formula: 6 orange juice, 4 ging, 2 vermouth, 1 lemon.
5 Ingredients, 5 Minutes for Cranberry Relish
When the English settlers arrived in Massachusetts in 1621, they found an unfamiliar, low-growing fruit: the cranberry.
No Crust, No Rolling Pin for Grandma’s Apple Pie
Apples have a long history in Massachusetts because the early colonists brought seeds from England to plant in the new world. The first orchard grew on Beacon Hill in Boston in 1623, now the site of the gold-domed State House … Continue reading
Camp Fire Fun
As a Girl Scout, I learned how to build a fire without wadded up newspaper as fuel, but I can’t say my outdoor cooking skills advanced apace. I used to wrap refrigerator rolls around sticks and toast them over the … Continue reading
Sunshine in a Jar
Berries go into preserves, tomatoes into sauce, right? That’s what I always thought until I found my grandmother Hanna’s recipe for Yellow Tomato Preserves.
Candied Virginia Tomatoes From a Surprising Source
Inside a booklet that promised nothing more than Great Ideas for Barbecues & Summer Meals (Family Circle, 1983), I ended up finding a recipe for Thomas Jefferson’s Candied Tomatoes sent in by someone I knew quite well — the mother of my … Continue reading
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