Celebrating Family and Food

by jodi ~ January 11, 2010

Celebrating Grandma and Grandpa’s birthdays, Christmas 2009

This December, my grandparents turned 81 (grandma, on December 21) and 87 (grandpa, on December 24). On Christmas Day, when we sang the birthday song and watched them together blow out the candles on their banana-chocolate-walnut chiffon cake — my grandmother’s recipe, my uncle, the baker, told us — they were barely two weeks into living their new life at a seniors’ home in Windsor, Ontario. With my grandfather continuing to weaken with age and the effects of the stroke he had nearly a decade ago and my grandmother grappling with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the time had come for them to move into a managed-care facility.

Moving them has meant weeding through a lifetime of their accumulated belongings, as there are so many things they simply no longer need. In particular, almost none of their kitchen ware made the move, as they now take meals in the home’s dining room three times a day. What an experience it was to see what was hiding in those cupboards and closets. Tablecloths and aprons hand-embroidered by my grandmother and great-grandmother. Kitchen utensils dating back to the late forties. Dishes and serving pieces I remember ogling through the window of the china cabinet as a child and handling so gingerly when they were brought out for celebration dinners.

Perhaps the most thrilling discovery was my grandmother’s handwritten recipe books. One was a journal of the dinners she planned and cooked at the church she and my grandfather attended for years. After the title of each event — there were weddings, funerals, bazaars, and religious feast days — came a shopping list of the varying pounds of ingredients needed to make crowd-sized supplies of creamed chicken, perogies, cabbage rolls, and other traditional fare. The other volume, supplemented with handfuls of loose-leafed index cards, was a collection of the dishes she prepared regularly at home. My mom and I, leafing through the pages, stumbled on the very chiffon cake and icing recipe my uncle had prepared for my grandparents’ birthday just days before.

For me the find felt destined, as I have spent the past year trying to recall from memory and learn from my mom and her siblings our definitive family recipes. Those recipes, and the stories that accompany them, are the heirlooms that mean the most to me, and I want to collect them, savour them, and share them. That I can hold the original sources in my hands I consider no small opportunity.

At first this photo of my grandparents made me feel sad; it’s a reminder that they are no longer the vigorous and tireless couple I remember from my youth. But now, when I look at them kissing over a cake that my grandmother used to make, that my uncle now does, and that other family cooks will continue to make as time marches on, I see celebration. Of life and love and a culinary heritage that will outlive us all.