Handing Down Women's Wisdom

My own mother left me a cookbook. It was her personal cookbook, a compiling of recipes that she had gathered across her lifetime - spanning the 1940's until 1969. Her cookbook, although now quite in tatters with pages and papers falling out, has recipes that she jotted down and recipes that she cut out of newspapers or other literature. There are recipe pamphlets that came in sacks of flour and sugar. There are also recipes that I tried to type up for her when I was in junior high (it's very interesting to see those early attempts at typing with a pretty crummy children's typewriter).

I love my mother's cookbook. It is the one thing that I have from her that I value dearly. It is like having a piece of my mother there in my hands. When I see her hand written recipes, I feel I get a glimpse of how she worked to carry out taking care of our family. There are the recipes that she obviously got and used when money was tight. There are the precious recipes of Christmas Cookies that she routinely made each winter.

What's not in her recipe book are the recipes that she taught me by showing and doing and telling....family Hungarian recipes that she had learned from my father's sisters. Although I know at one time I likely had some written form of them, she encouraged me to memorize how to make them. I luckily had that knowledge before her death in 1969 when I was just 15.

My mom took time to teach me how to cook. My earliest memories are from when I was very young – 3 or 4 years old. We lived on Hanover Street in Denver, Colorado. Mom used to bake pies. I had a child’s baking set – mini metal baking pans – and when she would bake, I would bake along side of her, standing on a chair. At this very young age, she taught me how to make pies. We would take my little pie plate and make a small version of whatever she was making. I would roll out the pie crust - it was so much fun. We would make a mini double-crust pie, and she would bake mine along with hers. My funniest memory is when I made a pie for my dog. I can remember lining the pie plate with a crust. Mom baked the crust. Then I dished the canned dog food into the pie plate. I’m sure our dog, Pepper, enjoyed the dog pie treat.

My own daughter is now in her late teens. Unlike me at the same age, she is in the beginning stages of cooking knowledge, and made her first pie (with a little help) this week. She is getting ready to move into her own apartment, and now she has interest in learning how to cook the "everyday things". She talks of how she prefers food "made from scratch", and so she now (finally) wants to have the information that I grew up learning by my mother's side from age 3 to 15.

I've decided to take my mother's tattered cookbook and using her recipes as well as others that I've created, tweaked, or collected over my lifetime, write up a "family favorites" cookbook. This way I can pass on the oral as well as written recipes that have been part of my life. Of most importance is writing down the ones mom taught me that are not written down. The "woman's wisdom" my mother passed on to me.

Of course my hope is that many years from now my own daughter will be leafing through this recipe book, or looking through my recipe cards and thinking about how to pass on the wisdom. The wisdom mother's share with daughters generation after generation. Hopefully "cooking from scratch" will not become a lost woman's art in our age of fast, instant & preprepared foods.

S~