Family Recipes

Yum!

We hand down all sorts of things to our descendants. They are largely pictures, old letters, family Bibles, things we can’t use but can’t throw away.

That’s how things are here, but some of the most precious things are pieces of paper upon which are scratched recipes.

Uncle Tom Watts was the three times great-grandson of Johan Seabolt, who was born in Bavaria in 1743. Uncle Tom said that the German influence of his family was seen in the dinner table.

I should have asked what he was talking about because the thing that came to mind was the homemade kraut he produced every year and that blotted out other possibilities.

Having grown up on a large farm in Catoosa County, there had to have been someone in the family that enjoyed German style roast beef (sauerbraten), but I just don’t recall it.

I’m the only one left who makes kraut. I’m not a purist like Uncle Tom, who grew his own cabbage while I’m content to make a run to south Georgia for a fifty pound box of it.

When he saw some promise in me as a kraut maker, he gave me his oldest kraut crock.

It is a large crock and holds as much shredded cabbage as I dare put into it.

One of the several lines of ancestors who came out of Ireland brought a recipe for little cookies called “tea cakes.”

So many of my grandmother’s relatives made them that I haven’t been able to sift through and discover the oldest recipe. They were baked by the Keowns, Tates, McWilliams, and McMillians, who all seem to have made the jump from Ireland about the same time.

The cookies are cousins to a basic sugar cookie but were called “cakes,” sort of in the fashion that the English call cookies “biscuits,” and the closest thing they have to a buttermilk biscuit is a scone but isn’t close since scones contain a lot of sugar and heavy cream.

Poor Brits. I don’t know what they have with their sausage patties in the morning and what goes with their sausage gravy.

One of the favored recipes is not really old, and came through my father’s side.

A two times great-uncle married a woman who was already a twenty-oneyear- old invalid when they wed in 1843.

Caroline Little, an enslaved woman, came with Mary Ann Little of Paulding County when she and Ephraim Pray married. One of the telling documents is how something as simple as a recipe for gingerbread stayed the same through decades.

The paper is “Caroline’s Ginger Bread” and is remarkably similar to a contemporary skillet of a dish of the same name.

The recipe is written in an unschooled hand and difficult to read, which in itself is remarkable considering as a slave Caroline was not expected to know how to read/ write at all.

joenphillips@yahoo.com