What is in that recipe? How family dinners can reveal clues on your heritage

Friday, April 26, 2013
Courtesy photo The picture of the author's great-grandmother shows the reallty of prairie life.

By Susan Doak

SW Nebraska Genealogy Society

The things I think about in the middle of the night! While others might be pondering Korea's obnoxiousness, I wonder why my mother's side of the family used celery in just about every dish they made.

I was a super lucky person because even though I was born when my mother was approaching her 40s, all of my grandparents and two of my great-grandmothers were still alive. Since I was born to parents who had lived through the depression, both were dedicated to growing and preserving as much food as possible. I got to see raising, harvesting, cooking, canning and freezing food up close and personal.

The seasons dictated what was going on in our kitchen. On our acreage east of Indianola, rendering lard, making apple butter and butchering chickens hold a special (sic) place in my mind. In our family, as soon as you were old enough to perch up on the red step stool, you were old enough to work right along with the adults. While my mom was busy putting by the normal kind of food stuffs, my dad was creating green tomato ketchup, oyster stew, and homemade wine or beer.

I never saw my grandmother look at a recipe card, my mother only when making something she didn't cook very often. Cooking was a matter of a dab of this or that and you only learned how to do it by being right there as it happened. My mother's parents were born in 1884 (Jim) and 1890 (Flora). Jim's parents came to Cheyenne County Nebraska from Indiana (via Kentucky and Ohio) and Flora's from Maine via Pawnee City, Nebraska and Vermillion, South Dakota.

So how did celery become a staple in our family? It may have been through the fact that Grandma Flora's father was a merchant, but I suspect it actually came down from my Grandpa Jim's mother, Mary (Eckert) Davison, pictured with her fowls for Thanksgiving dinner 1919. Grandpa's people hailed from the area where celery as we know it today, first made its appearance in the United States around 1856.

As cultures inter-married, meals became a combination from both sides. Wives learned how to cook husband's favorite foods and often mothers- in- law lived closer to the family than mothers due to the fact that most settlers were in Nebraska to claim land and start farms. Grandma Flora's parents actually ended up in California, always seeking a better life, while Grandpa Jim's large family reaped the rewards of farming the Nebraska Panhandle.

Food may be a strange clue to our heritage, but it was at holiday dinners, family picnics or reunions where some of the few pictures of our ancestors may have been taken. If we are really lucky, someone jotted down their names as they posed. My picture of my great-grandmother is an unusual one since the other pictures I have of her are in her "Sunday best" rather than the reality of life on the prairie.

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