Food Memories
We’d love to hear it! Send your stories along with any recipes you’d like to share and we’ll add them to the site. We might even do a tutorial on your family’s recipe and include your memory and name as the headline!
A little story about my great grandmother
My great grandmother was a sharecropper all her life. She, her husband, and four kids would live in little shack houses provided by land owners and plant and raise cotton for them in exchange for lodging and a few monthly staples such as a 25lb sack of flour and dried beans.
Every now and then, the would get a roll of bologna, and that was a RARE treat. As harvest season came near, the entire family would set to work in the fields picking cotton, even the youngest children. Lela (my great grandmother), would come up to the house at lunchtime after having picked cotton since before the sun came up, and dig up some root vegetables from the garden in order to cook a little lunch for the kids before they all headed out into the fields again.
At night, the kids would be so tired that they would come into the house and fall asleep the first place the sat down. Lela would get a bowl of cool water and a cloth and go around to wash their feet while they slept before covering them up and falling asleep herself. When they turned in the cotton crop, the land owner would let them have a percentage of the profits – minus any money he felt they “owed” him for the meager food rations he had provided.
Throughout the year she would skimp away little ingredients here and there. A little sugar, some honey, raisins….whatever she could find. Each year on Christmas eve Lela would send her kids to bed early. She would then stay up all night long baking cakes with the ingredients she had put back. She never had a single recipe. There would be a cake with dried apples she had reconstituted and fried as both filling and topping. A raisin cake, a coconut cake, cinnamon, etc.
When the kids woke up Christmas morning, seven cakes were sitting on the table. The kids took turns until the new year choosing a cake to eat each day – and they did eat an entire cake each day- for seven days. My grandmother still gets twinkles of excitement in her eyes when she talks about those cakes.
I just love to think about that as I’m baking at Christmas each year. They had such a hard life, but Christmas was perhaps even more magical because of those cakes than it is for most of us these days who have more than they could have ever imagined having.
What a great story Christy, made me tear up,,,,brought back memories of my grandma too…..when my youngest granddaughter spends usually every Fri. nite, unless she has other plans with her friends, we try to make a dessert and she loves it….but last Sat. her and I made biscuits & gravy she really enjoyed it…..my other grandkids all teenagers and 2 married all live in different states, so we don’t get to do this 🙁 Love your blog and your great recipes…..
Your stories remind me of my own parents and grandparents and the stories the passed on about there parents and grandparents.
This is lovely….made me cry and I`m at work!
:/
Margaret
Thank you so much for your story, and for this website as a whole. I can’t remember how I stumbled upon it, but in the few weeks that I’ve known of its existence, my whole view on food has been redefined. Food has always been so special to me and I haven’t really been able to say why. These stories and the connections going way back have really brought meaning to my cooking. My grandmother is nearing the end of her life and suffering Alzheimer’s. She still knows who we are, but forgets quite a bit. With tears in my eyes, I have been trying to think of a way to do something to remember her after she’s gone. This is it. When I travel back home for a visit next week, I am going to plan a day with her talking about food and getting recipes. Thank you so much for being all about family food history. I don’t think pictures tell enough about these amazing women.
I have just read this, and it was very touching. I hope you got to spend enough time with your grandmother to fulfill your idea. I too cherish “food memories” and always try to attach a story to a special food. I am very glad Christy shared this with us, it is certainly an inspiration!
This is so much like the stories I heard growing up in rural Mississippi. Folks were so poor financially but rich in love and family. This story demonstrates the little things that make life worth while. It brought tears to my eyes and made me miss my momma and grandma so much.
~grins~ I think you gotta be around Grandmama when she’s on a diet and reminiscing about sweets. 🙂
Wow, I had never heard that story before. I will definitely think about it this Christmas when I am eating cake.