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Ancestral Dish: Sludge? Stew? Slumgullion!
We can’t have Thanksgiving every day, my dears. On the other hand we could have slumgullion every day, if we dared. What is slumgullion? If you’re Irish-American and you grew up in the pre-convenience...
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Ancestral Dish: Stuffing Wars
Early on, Mom made the stuffing His Mother’s Way, but over time, she persuaded Dad to prefer it Her Mother’s Way. And Her Mother’s Way was what we grew up with. But first, they had to fight the...
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Advent Calendar: Fruitcake is Good. Really.
Every family, even mine, has at least one famous holiday recipe. Ours is The Fruitcake. Wouldn’t you know it? (The blog will take a brief break while you get the fruitcake jokes out of your system.)...
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Ancestral Dish: When is a Goulash Not a Goulash?
Can a goulash be goulash without peppers and paprika? Well, if your mom says so ...
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But we digress … or do we?
Recently a genealogy email list I follow was having a lively discussion about Irish brown bread, followed by a shorter-lived digression into baseball. Which prompted a comment: “Recipes? Baseball? What...
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Ancestral Dish: Soda Bread 101
Top of the morning to you! Now, kindly put down that cellophane-wrapped loaf of soda bread. Why is Irish soda bread on a supermarket shelf, anyway? It does not have a shelf life. Heck, it barely has a...
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Ancestral Dish: The lost salads of summer
My dad knew his way around a kitchen, but he did not cook every day. He preferred to be known for a selection of specialties, a niche he could comfortably occupy while my mom did the day-in, day-out...
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The Foods We Hate, The Memories That Cling
In family-history discussions we often talk about the power beloved family recipes can exert in bringing warm, vivid memories to life. Not long ago, I got an unexpected reminder that bad food memories...
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Hello Again!
Here’s a dark secret about the blog: When I started it, I just wanted to write. The tricky part was, I needed a topic I liked to write about a lot. Genealogy was the perfect choice. Writing has always...
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Sentimental Sunday: A Dinner Anchor
When mothers are remembered, talk always turns to food. And usually it’s the special foods: the celebration cakes, the holiday dishes, the things eaten only if you were sick in bed. But as a lot of...
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Happy Fourth!
That is, a very happy Fourth of July, if you are in the U.S. If not, Happy Fourth of whatever you please! I myself would easily consider a happy fourth of one of these, which were the result of a...
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