Kitchen Table Tales
by
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It was a sunny day in August 2001. My granddaughter, Monica, and I were in the tiny kitchen of the camp on the shores of the
“Nannie, will you give me this recipe?”
“Sure I will. You can carry on the tradition.”
“Do you have more of Grandma’s recipes?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have them, too?”
“Sure you can. Someday I’ll put them in a book for you.” ...
* * *
Monica and I canned 24 jars of bread-and-butter pickles that day. By the time we were finished, I was ready for a nap and Monica had coaxed Dave to go for a swim with her.
I tucked the idea of a family cookbook in the back of my mind. It wasn’t an idea that was high on my list of priorities, but it surfaced every time I went to the three ring binder where I keep recipes collected from the Holz and Ward families. By the summer of 2002 I had made copies of the recipes that I thought were good candidates for a cookbook, when I got around to the writing.
Dave and I have a morning ritual. While the rest of the world sleeps, he and I read the newspaper, drink coffee, and solve the world’s problems. One morning, over a cup with a distinct hazelnut flavor, I remarked, “You know, Dave, if I ever do write this cookbook your blends should be in there.” We had long since limited our coffee drinking away from home, and exchanged coffee after dinner in restaurants for a cup of Dave’s home brewed. We’ve never quite settled on whether we enjoy his coffee because of its unique taste or the comfortable atmosphere in which it’s consumed.
“When are you going to get around to this cookbook?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it. You know, there must be recipes we don’t know about, and all the people who know the family’s history are getting older. I’ve been thinking that maybe we should at least visit with them and collect some information along with the recipes.”
This gave birth to the thought that the grandchildren, Monica and Veronica, should know where they came from; the values, strength, perseverance and endurance of those who preceded them. You learn a lot about yourself if you know your family history. Even though the Holzs and Wards are very different in some ways, there are many ways in which they are similar. The cookbook idea grew. By the fall of 2002 Dave and I had visited family members and gathered a gold mine of information. It was evident that this book had become a joint effort for us.
The simple idea of putting a few recipes together for the grandchildren had grown into a family history that included stories from family cooks and their spouses, pictures, maps and documents of all kinds. In putting family stories together Dave and I became fascinated with the life experiences of the family members we were writing about. From Great-Great Grandma Ott, Ginnie’s grandmother, the factory girl who married the factory owner, to Great-Great-Grandma Mesick, Dave’s grandmother, who cooked for lumberjacks in a camp in
each generation passed to the next begged to be acknowledged.
History is not a far off notion unrelated to the present generation; meaningless stories put in books to gather dust on library shelves, or written to bore school children. Few of us understand that we are the history in history books. Though Great-Great Grandfathers Albert Ott and Lewis Ward do not appear in history books with John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, they are nevertheless in that class of nineteenth and twentieth century men who industrialized
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About the Book
The Holzs and Wards are among the millions of little-known families whose hopes and dreams, inventiveness, work ethic and perseverance were transplanted from the rigidity of European culture to root in the opportunity of American soil. The cultural, culinary, social and industrial histories of the
About the Author
Virginia and David Ward were born and raised in Western and Northeastern,