III C E Burham

Recipes From My Childhood!Mother's Tin Boxes III C E Burham

Some of my fondest memory from my childhood, was standing around my mother in the kitchen as she prepared many of our family meals. She always had a story behind every dish she made, whether the dish was passed down to her from her mother or from her grandmotherCountless of the recipes she prepare, were either her mother's, or father's favorite dishes when she was a child. I still remember standing and listening in awe she retold her stories time and time again. How she was born during the Great Depression of the 1930's, and how her father was fortunate enough to still have a job working for the railroad. And how he would wake before the crack of dawn and walk for miles just to go to work, and how he made a dollar a day. "Back during the Great Depression" she would say, "A dollar a day was good money." But like everyone else, her family too struggled. Raising pigs and chickens, and having a small vegetable garden sure was a blessing to their family. Bt as the years went by, I seem to lose all interest in my mother's cooking, and the stories she would tell, replaced with other childhood interests, swimming, baseball, horseback riding etc. But as time has its way, when I was about 13 or 14 years old, one cold Thanksgiving evening after dinner, mother was washing the special bone China we always used during the holidays. Upon washing a beaker, it broke and sliced her right hand deeply requiring stitches to close the wound. It was then me being the oldest child in the house that I was as one would say I was unanimously chosen to cook. Back in those days one would not object or argue with ones' parents. We did what we were told, with no questions asked, no IF or BUTS. Nearly forty years later, I have no regrets, in a way mother cutting her hand that Thanksgiving evening, had already set me on the path of becoming a chef. Twenty-four years ago, while home for a visit, I had noticed several old semi rusty tin boxes in a cabinet in her kitchen, curious as I am, I asked her about them. She had informed me that those old tins contained a countless collection of recipes, recipes for which she had prepared for us fifteen kids over the years. I asked to borrow the tins, which she allowed, I took 'em home and scanned them all, saving them onto floppy disc, totaling nearly forty. So many were to faded or unreadable, and over the course of time technology too had advanced, and the floppy discs became obsolete. But thanks to a dear friend of mine, he still had an old computer from the mid 1990's, he was able to extract them, and E-Mail them to me. It's take me countless hours of research to translate, convert these wonderful old family recipes from the mid 1900's to the mid 1940's.