24 Comments

My grandmothers best friend would fly into town like Mary poppins and make the very best apple dumplings from her homegrown apples that she brought in her suitcase

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Yum! What a fun memory!

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I would eat my mother’s giant Yorkshire puddings with onion gravy.

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I was lucky enough to have my grandma in my life well into adulthood (she lived to 99 years old!) but when she died, I also lost access to some of my beloved childhood dishes. For example, she used to make this delicious twice-baked apple tart - Alsatian in origin if I recall correctly. You first bake halved and hasselbacked apples on a pastry base before filling the pastry base with a vanilla scented custard and returning the tart to the oven until the custard is just set. It's like the love child between a custard tart and an apple tart and hers was divine. She also had a knack for making incredibly good whipped cream to serve alongside said tart. It sounds so simple yet I have never been able to replicate hers - it seemed to have extra volume and just the perfect amount of sweetness.

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Why is it that when we try to replicate our mother’s and grandmother’s recipes, they never turn out exactly the same?

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Ciao Lynn, I was born and raised in a small kitchen on the border between Emilia and Romagna. I would eat again my grandmother upside-down apple pie. Basically it was a lot of sliced apple covered with batter and cooked in the oven. It was only one of her magnificent recipes. Thank you for your question

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One meal from my childhood??? That actually sounds like a nightmare to me. Mom was NOT a good cook. That said, my grandmother would make the dumplings it seems you are describing - just water, flour and LARD that she'd scrape into a pot of boiling water and then ladle them into a Hungarian Chicken Paprikash dish with lots of sour cream. Thank you Grandma!

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I still eat one of the simple meals from my childhood and it’s become a comfort food I reach for when I feel really down. It’s a salty eggy fried bread (French toast style) with a homemade ketchup that my grandma and now my mom makes every August when the tomatoes are in season and then stock their pantries with jars of ketchup for the winter months ahead. Something about the combination of the two really brings me back to summers spent at my grandparents’ house and their vegetables allotment where they grew all the tomatoes our family would make the ketchup from :) This year I intent to learn how to make it myself so I can also pass it on to the next generation!

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I hadn't thought of that term 'rivels' in decades. My grandmother made a sort of brothy chicken soup that she dropped rivels into by pushing dough through a colander with holes larger than a sieve. I believe they are originally Penn Dutch. The dinner I most loved as a child, though, I still make. My Grandmother's salt cod cakes with a condiment called 'Chile Sauce' in New England, though it has nothing to do with authentic chile sauce. This is a an end of garden-season sauce of tomatoes, onions, green peppers, sugar, vinegar and cinnamon cooked down until thickened and then canned to remind one of summer's bounty. The cod fish cakes are salt cod, potatoes, finely minced onion (optional) and an egg to bind, formed into thick patties, sauteed until golden brown and served underneath the aforementioned chile sauce. My Grandmother taught me to cook as a child so I am lucky to be able to reproduce the dishes I loved. The dessert I was fond of was a Peanut Butter Layer Cake w/PB frosting. I haven't made that in a long while as it makes too much - though I just might bake one in a snack size for nostalgia sake. Thanks for the trip down memory lane...

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I am so pleased to see that others here know what rivels are! I'd never heard the term outside of my family! Your grandmother's salt cod cakes sound so delicious!

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I don't know about the Pennsylvania Dutch but that process is Eastern European! I can't remember the name but that's the origin as far as I know.

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Penn Dutch is actually Penn Deutsch - German ancestry. Their origin region was primarily the Palatinate region of Germany. The name has been Anglicized over the years. The old language spoken is a dialect of German. Many of their recipes have close similarities to European ones. Scrapple is one my childhood favorites, too - definitely Penn Dutch.

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Oh yeah, I knew that, just don't know much about their food. Other than Dutch babies since they're always thought to be a Dutch dish, haha. It's called spätzle/spaetzle in a lost of Eastern European countries but Germany has a version too.

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Oh easy! My grandma used to make delicious pigeon with carrots and potatoes. Is it weird to eat pigeon in countries other than Belgium? In any case it's delicious. Plus, the way she made her carrots I've never been able to replicate. In fact, since she stopped making them I've not enjoyed carrots anymore ☹️

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My maternal grandmother would make the best ham and beans with fried potatoes and cornbread. I would eat 2 platefuls. I make this occasionally to this day. I have to share this story about my youngest son when he was a small child, about 5 yrs old. I raised chickens and butchered them myself. He was right there chasing the flopping bodies and picking up the severed heads. He was also very interested in the guts. When he saw the forming eggs inside the hens, he immediately called them “grabbles.” He begged me to save them and cook them so he could eat them. To him they looked like rivels but he could only pronounce it as grabbles. :)

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I used to make rivers occasionally. I mixed egg and flour, like pasta dough, and just rubbed it between my fingers into tiny little dumplings, no bigger that the size of a dime. Most about the size of a pinto bean. I haven’t done that in years. Thanks for the reminder. If you feel like trying, just mix an egg with some flour till it has enough substance to form a little blob when you rub it together. They cook quickly like fresh pasta.

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I think this is how my grandma used to make them. I don't remember her pushing them through a colander... although, at the time, I was more interested in eating them than making them, so it's possible I missed that part. :-)

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Rebecca, L P in the comments had heard of the rivels before, from the description I can say they're Eastern European, yay! They're often called spaetzle and made with a colander.

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I’ve never heard of Rivels!

My grandmother Peg McCarthy Cone made a pot roast on a Sunday, with lots of water, because she put it in the oven while we went to Mass. out it came at noon or 1 and there were big chunks of buttery potatoes and carrots. Maybe onions. I loved it and found a recipe recently that seems to replicate it.

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This sounds like the ultimate comfort food to me!

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Maybe back to my Grandma's house for her breakfasts of fried potatoes, eggs and sausages. She was also an incredible cake decorator and I remember cakes in the shape of fairy mushrooms. This must be where I got it from!

My husband has said to Little Chef, for their pancakes covered in cherries and cream.

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My Nana's Cornish Pastie and her Apple Pie.

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Oh to have my mother's gnocchi again! They were featherlight, a labour of love and muscle memory that I can taste still. No recipe required. We were deputized to roll out the warm potato dough and cut them into little pillows, to be encased in a wonderful meat sauce.

She also made a version she would serve after the gnocchi: they were stuffed with her homemade plum jam, cooked and then finished with a brown butter and breadcrumb sauce. No matter how many of the "main course" gnocchi we ate, we always saved room for these! I learned just recently that these are called "gnocchi di susine" and they have their roots in a blend of Italian and Austro-Hungarian culinary traditions, also popular popular in Slovenia, Austria, and Croatia. It makes sense that she would make them, as she was born in Istria, which is present day Croatia.

Thank you for allowing me that trip down memory lane, Rebecca!

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I’d give anything to be ten years old again, sitting down to supper at the rickety dining room table overlooking our cove on a snowy February evening with my parents the year before their divorce. On the menu: my mom’s signature cassoulet, and a simple green salad tossed with our favorite maple vinaigrette. For dessert, apple cake. Later, we’d play Mille Bornes, a fun little French card game, by the wood stove.

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