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.

Some Delicious Memories

I grew up in Budapest. My mother and grandmother were amazing bakers. My grandmother would make her own challah bread every single week. They were beautiful and huge (about the size of a keyboard) braided just so, and the top covered in poppy seeds. It was crunchy on the outside and fluffy and soft on the inside. Every Friday she’d also make some kind of coffee cake or other yeast bread. Her brother owned a fancy pastry shop. She was such an accomplished person at making fruit preserves (they would last for years and never spoil) that he used them in his baking and sold them in jars in his store. They were of exceptional quality.

Every Saturday my grandmother would make a whole variety of strudels that were just incredible—sweet strudels (tart cherries, walnuts with sugar, poppyseed0 and cabbage strudels. It amazingly took her no time whatsoever. We had a huge dining room table; here she would stretch the dough, blow underneath it, stretch the dough some more, and blow under it some more. There were never any holes. They were exquisite but she thought there was nothing to it. She taught me to cook lots of things but she said I was in no way ready to graduate to strudel making so I never learned that. She preserved everything but was so happy when they started to sell canned tomato sauce in the market because it was such a mess and so much work to make. She would preserve meat by covering it completely in fat and it would last for a very long time. Our huge pantry was stocked with big jars of what she had preserved— plums, peaches, strawberries, cherries, gooseberries. She was a fabulous cook but the big deal was the goose that she would cook on Saturday! We loved to eat and were rather chubby back then.

During the war my family had an acquaintance who owned a very fine pastry shop. My mother and grandma decided that they would apprentice themselves to this gentleman. My mother was an artist and did amazing, beautiful pastries that were to perfection. Her cinnamon rolls were about 1½ in wide and tall, with the thinnest layers of pastry and a generous portion of cinnamon or cocoa sprinkled in between. She made cakes not to be believed. Her hands were a gem. After the war, when we came back from the Jewish ghetto, sick and undernourished, this pastry shop owner, who was a Gentile, was the first one who showed up at our doorstep, laden with goodies. He brought a jar of fresh strawberry jam and I portioned it out one spoonful a day – I still cherish strawberry jam to this day.

We lived in an apartment building overlooking the Danube. There were incredible specialty shops on our street. One was a butcher shop with curving marble counter tops with a huge fish tank below it for show; and there were lots of specialty cheese shops. My folks were great friends with the fish monger and his wife who was a huge buxom lady with arms that glistened with rendered fat because they also sold goose there. Everyone always talked about the size of the goose liver. It was like a treasure hunt because you never knew exactly what you would get. We also had “spring chickens” about the size of a Cornish game hen. Inside of them were tiny eggs (smaller than a Lindt chocolate truffle) which only had yolks. We put them in the chicken soup—the egg was a special delicacy. Until all hell broke loose life was very good.

Veronica R.

I Wish I Had A Recipe For Those Dumplings...

My grandmother owned and ran a tavern and small restaurant in the city of West Allis, Wisconsin, an industrial city adjacent to Milwaukee, when there were taverns on every block and at a time when kids could run over and get a pitcher of beer for their parents at home. The tavern was situated across the street from a factory where they forged steel and further down the street from Allis Chalmers Tractor Company. The neighborhood was primarily central European families, who worked at these factories and they lived in triple-decker homes. Adjacent to her tavern was an outdoor farmer’s market which was a permanent structure with long rows of tables and awnings over each row.

My grandmother was originally from a small town in southern Wisconsin where Swiss and German immigrants settled and farmed and produced limburger cheese in small cheese houses beside the barns. The families of this town brought with them recipes from their European homelands and my grandmother incorporated them into her menu at her tavern.

On farmer’s market days she cooked, in addition to her regular lunch menu, one or two special dishes for the farmers. I remember her serving stuffed pork chops, wiener- schnitzel, and sauerbraten on those heavy divided china plates that could bend your wrists back with their weight. There were often customers lined out the door waiting to get in.

Her most popular item and her specialty was a chicken soup with farina dumplings which I never got the recipe for and which I have been tying to reproduce for many years. I remember vats of chicken stock sitting on the large window sills cooling so that the fat could be removed at the top. Then she would put in the vegetables and chicken, and simmer the soup before adding her killer dumplings. I even made them with her a few times, but she never had written recipes and I was too young to pay attention to proportions. The dumplings were light and penetrated with the chicken stock. The smell of the chicken dumpling soup would waft out of her kitchen and permeate the entire neighborhood, which is maybe why she always sold out of that soup each day. It may be that I will never be able to reproduce her soup. The ingredients were less mass- produced at that time and stewing chickens were raised differently and then there is the fact that I just can’t get the dumplings right.

Mary B.