Food Memories recorded at Flavors of Bedford

Flavorful Memories recently attended Flavors of Bedford and recorded several wonderful food memory stories.

In Grandma and Grandpa's Kitchen

One of my most precious childhood memories is sitting in my grandparents’ third-floor kitchen watching them cook for our family. My grandparents had immigrated to the United States from Canton in southern China, and both my grandfather and my grandmother were absolutely amazing cooks—in fact, later in life they actually had quite a large roadside Cantonese restaurant! They lived in the apartment upstairs from us, so I spent time with them quite often. Just calling to mind those afternoons in their kitchen, with the warmth from the stove and the sounds of stir-frys sizzling in the large stainless steel pots, I can still smell each of the special dishes that they used to cook for us. Perhaps most incredible was the array of soups they made, full of exotic Asian ingredients – nuts, herbs, roots, bark, even flowers (and most of them medicinal, I would imagine). They are soups I have never seen in a restaurant or a cookbook, with ingredients one could never find in an ordinary grocery store here in the States! Only one of these soups can I approximate these days myself, however, since my grandparents cooked “by heart” based on their experiences growing up in their respective villages in China, and at the time we never thought to take down the recipes. It’s been many years now since my grandparents passed away – God bless them! How wonderful it would be if today I had a video recording of them in action in that third-floor kitchen, to vividly capture the sights and sounds of those special moments and enable us to preserve for ourselves and, now, the new generation of our family, those delicious and treasured parts of our Chinese heritage!
- Liz L-H

Grandma Browning's Rolls

I know surprisingly little about my great great grandmother, Sophronia Louise Browning. But what I do know, what I have always known, is that these are Grandma Browning's rolls. Ever since I was a small child, that is what they have been called. Never dinner or yeast rolls, never simply bread, her name was always attached to this dough, like the recipe itself was consubstantial with her very being. For all I know she, too, learned this recipe from her grandmother, there is no telling how far it goes back. Maybe the Snow family brought it here with them from Europe on the Mayflower itself. There is no way of knowing. But what there is to know, is that there has never been a holiday dinner or important family gathering in the last one hundred fifty years which did not include these light, feathery rolls.

My grandmother Iris (or Grandma I, as we always called her) is the one who taught me the recipe. She would use this dough for everything. It was her all purpose dough. Cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, pizza crust, dough nuts, loaves of bread, bagels, anything was possible, nothing was out of the reach of its magic. About ten or twelve years ago, when her health began to deteriorate and she was no longer able to make the rolls for our gatherings, she passed the torch on to me, as it had been passed to her, and I have been making them for our family ever since. I, of course, have put my own modern spin on the recipe, as she no doubt did hers. In this way, it is a collection of all of us. All of our secrets, our tricks, our special touches, our memories, our happiness, our holidays.

My Kitchen Aid mixer now makes easy work of the kneading process. But as a child, standing on a stool, my hands on her cutting board, squishing the dough between my tiny fingers, I remember Grandma I smiling down at me, telling me that this was very special bread, that this bread had to be kneaded for exactly twenty-five minutes. No more. No less. And to this day, whether in the mixer, or by hand, I ensure that it kneads for exactly that long. If I close my eyes I can still remember the smell of her kitchen, the sound of her gentile, contented humming, the way she seemed to glide from counter to counter, as if in some elaborately choreographed food ballet.

Sadly, there will be no more carefree summer days spent baking bread with either of my grandmothers. But as I knead this dough, and stir my own batch of my grandmother's jam, I can feel myself stretch my hands back through our history. It is so tangible. I can feel them around me, these generations of women. And for the briefest moments I can feel that I am apart of them, and they of me.

We don't have inheritances in my family. We don't have trust funds, war bonds, stock market portfolios, or priceless antique furniture to leave behind. But we do have this dough: our own little yeasty legacy. This dough that has spanned at least five generations. This dough that has been with us all along. Delicious.

Jacob B.
Jacob's Kitchen

Simple Salad, Lots of Memories

I'll start by explaining that, growing up, my parents made an effort to have us all sit at the kitchen table for dinner. But due to one conflict or another, they were not always successful with this.

On Friday nights, however, we always ate together. This was when we'd have Shabbat dinner, which my mom spent most of the afternoon preparing; baking challah bread, roasting chicken, boiling the matzo balls. I’d sit in the kitchen with her, and she would go over different techniques for how to make each dish. As soon as something was finished, she’d give me a little taste and ask me how it was. “Need anything?” she’d ask. “Nope. It’s perfect!” I’d reply.

That evening, the four of us would gather around the dining room table for dinner, which had been decorated in a linen table cloth and beautiful pink Depression glass. Candles were lit, prayers were said, and a feast was had.

One of the dishes I distinctly remember eating at every Shabbat dinner was Israeli Salad, a combination of chopped cucumber, tomato, lemon juice, and parsley. It was served with a hard boiled egg on top which, when mixed with the lemon juice, would create a thick dressing. An utterly simple and incredibly refreshing dish.
But more important than this recipe, which I have included below, are the memories that I have sitting around the table with my family, laughing and telling stories from our week. It’s not the food that is necessarily memorable (though, in this case, it was), but the experience of eating with one another.

Brian S.
A Thought for Food

Shelling Peas & Snapping Beans

I signed my kids up for the Sprouts program at my local farmer’s market today. The Sprouts program provides various kid related activities at the farmer’s market to encourage kids to participate. We faithfully head to the market in the downtown of our small college town every Saturday morning, where people know us and greet us. It is my hope my kids will grow up loving the entire process of bringing food to the table in the summer—from planting the seeds in the spring, to weeding and picking our own garden and yes even purchasing those items we do not raise ourselves from the local farmers who grow them. When we got home today we snapped the first green beans of the season, always a big deal in this household.

These things are important to me because they form such a strong core of my own childhood memories. From the smell of freshly baking bread every week in my mother’s home to picking strawberries and blackberries near my grandparents’ house, there are not many childhood memories for me that are not in some way permeated by food. And these memories always come back strongest in the late spring to early fall, when fruits and vegetables are pouring in from the garden.

As an adult cook, I get most excited for tomatoes, corn and berries, which to me are the holy trinity of foods that must be locally grown and fresh picked to be enjoyed properly. But the child in me revels in the peas and beans, because when I am shelling peas and snapping beans I am instantly and always transported back to my grandpa and grandma’s house. I can feel the sun on my back and the breeze in my hair—and the wind chimes are tinkling around me despite the fact that we have no wind chimes at our house. I can even hear my grandma’s screen door swinging open and shut. And maybe my grandma yelling at my grandpa because he just mowed her violets again—always a weed to him but never to her. And I am sneaking bites of fresh, raw peas—the best way to enjoy them, straight out of the pod, while my mom and grandma both admonish me not to eat them all.

Laura T.

Public Radio Kitchen Spotlights Flavorful Memories

Public Radio Kitchen, a food culture site coming to you from the folks at WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station has posted a great article about Flavorful Memories, including an interview with me about why I love working in this unique business. You can read the article at http://publicradiokitchen.org/2010/06/07/star-in-your-own-cooking-show/.

Leslie

The Most Important Meal of the Day

I have special memories of breakfast when I was in elementary school, especially during the cold and snowy east coast winters.....Mom would have hot cereal steaming on the stove -- oatmeal one day, ralston or cream of wheat another. It smelled and tasted so good -- especially with milk and sugar and some cherrios or kix sprinkled on top. My brothers and I would read the stories on the cereal boxes while we ate -- a prelude to reading the morning newspaper, I guess. Oh and there was the added excitement of occasionally pouring out a 'prize' from the cereal box.

Ruth W.