In My Grandma’s Kitchen

I’ve always known that I was extra blessed because I spent most of my life, until I was 10, temporarily living with my grandparents for a short while, then moving across the street and half a block away. Even when my parents decided to move from their starter home into something very modern for its time (1966), we were in the same town and less than 5 minutes away by car. We had most of our Sunday dinners in their home, and many other visits as well.

Earlier this year, in a group I belong to on Facebook that has to do with PA Dutch foods and traditions, someone posted a recipe for cherry pudding, and I got all teary-eyed. This was something my grandma made when sour cherries came into season. I’m not sure why it was called ‘pudding’ because it was actually a cake with sour cherries in it. We ate it as a meal, when it was still warm from the oven, in a bowl with sprinkled sugar and milk on top. Lordy, my mouth is getting a little watery with saliva just thinking about it.

My grandma was of German stock but grew up close enough to PA Dutch Country that many of the meals and foods we ate were based on that similar kind of cooking. She also had a strict budget, set by my grandfather, on what she could spend on groceries every week. She really knew how to stretch a dollar and how to use what was ripe in the small garden at the end of the back yard. Oh, I have such a clear vision of she and I sitting on chairs on the back porch, cleaning the mass of green beans she had picked while it was still cool in the morning. She would boil a ham shank (she called it a hock) to get ham flavored broth, and we had many a meal of green beans and potatoes cooked until tender in that broth. The little bits of ham that could be picked from those bones were always set aside for my grandfather’s bowl. This became a regular meal during the summer since the beans grew and re-grew for several months.

Grandma was also good at being “sneaky” in her cooking. Whenever she made a stuffed roasted chicken for a Sunday dinner, she stood at the stove and cut meat for each person’s plate. We all got fair amounts, and we had the stuffing from the chicken, veggies and mashed potatoes in bowls on the table we could eat if we wanted more. Also, there was always a loaf of bread and a jar of apple butter on the table. If we were still hungry and the veggies and potatoes were gone, we filled up on bread. Nobody left the table hungry! But grandma never offered more chicken than what was served to you initially. It took me a long time until I realized that there was still chicken left in the roasting pan. She had plans to use the remaining chicken to make other meals, and she always boiled the chicken carcass to make extra chicken broth as well.

One of the meals we had during the end of the week when we’d had chicken on Sunday was chicken pot pie (the kind with noodles cut into squares and dropped into boiling broth) with diced potatoes and some chicken. Well, we thought it was chicken. Much later we learned that grandma would pull out frozen pieces of squirrel and/or rabbit that my grandfather shot and skinned. The meat was dark from both, but the chicken had dark meat as well, so nothing was ever questioned. She’d add however much of these ‘other’ meats to what chicken she had left over so that each serving had an appropriate amount of meat to go with the noodles and potatoes.

From the one roasted chicken, in addition to our Sunday feast, the week brought a variety of chicken and waffles, chicken corn soup (with rivels, of course!), chicken and dumplings, chicken pot pie, even chicken salad when she was ‘scraping the barrel’ of chicken and broth. Sometimes we had a beef roast instead, and that brought us things like beef noodle soup, beef pot pie, hot roast beef sandwiches and other ways she’d incorporate a small amount of meat into something that would create a different entree.

Grandma always asked if I wanted to help in the kitchen when we were there for a meal and my answer was always a resounding “YES”. I definitely know that the pleasure I get from being with her in that kitchen is what created within me a true passion for cooking for and feeding others. I also adored my grandma (we all did) and being one-on-one with her as we puttered was a far higher valued gift than her gift of receiving help from me.

I can still picture much of the garden, what and where items were planted. There were white radishes (my mom loved sliced white radishes between two pieces of bread with mayo, salt and pepper). There were at least 10 tomato plants, 4 long rows of green beans, parsley, a HUGE patch of rhubarb, and some potatoes. We lived close to an orchard, so fruits were purchased from there. We had our sour cherries, but as different fruits came into season, we had entrees like apple crisp, blueberry crumble, strawberry shortcake (over homemade sweetened biscuits), apple dumplings. We truly ate from the garden during the growing season.

I get melancholy envisioning the two of us on the back porch cleaning green beans. I get melancholy envisioning the old laminate and metal table and chairs in the kitchen and eating something delicious from a bowl that was covered in milk and sugar. They were simple meals, and worrying about sugar intake was not in anyone’s mind. While my memories are about the taste of those foods, they are also about being aware of all of the love and attention my grandmother gave to feeding others.

Apparently, it skipped a generation, but the apple didn’t fall far from the tree…