Friday, November 25, 2011

Heritage

Two and half years ago, I inherited my mum's two thick books full of recipes. The first one is called "Salty" and overflows with recipes for salty goodness. The other, the "Sweet", consists tens, rather hundreds of recipes for various desserts. Just before the Advent is coming, I suppose it is the time to open my Sweet book again. Well, the first moments are overwhelming. The book still keeps the aroma of my mom's kitchen, of the times when I was her restless little helper.

I have to skip the newer recipes which are not spectacular at all: just printed e-mails or  recipes from webpages. The  interesting part starts from about 1996. There is a recipe on the reverse side of a telefax. Somebody asks there about possibility to transport a machine (4.800 kg) from Hamburg to Zimbabwe. On the other side my mom wrote by hand a recipe for "the best Tiramisu". Some of the recipes are written by my mom's hand, some are from her friends and collegues, some are just carbon paper copies with a hand written note like "must be eaten warm" or "11.2.1975". 
 The oldest one is written by my grandmother. Look at it: "we spread coconut flour on a greaseproof paper..."
There is also one short notice written by me. Seven years old, I was on the phone in our hallway and my grandma dictated me a recipe for my mum...


Oh goodness. So warm. I feel like my mom is back again. Welcome, Advent!

7 comments:

  1. what a prescious inheritance! my grandmother, who was czech too, never had a single recipe written down. when she was making "gulivari" (?) for example, and i wanted to find out how she did it, it was impossible. she measured everything by hand and if one would ask her how much of this and that she was using she couldn't answer. i think she even thought the question was weird. :-)

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  2. Actually Gulivari does not sound very czech;-)Is it something sweet?

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  3. wow, i just discussed it with my husband, for us is it just "kynutý ovocný knedlík" and we don't know any other denomination for it - it must be some dialect - very interesting!

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  4. Ich hab's - gulivár - es gibt sogar eine Diplomarbeit auf dieses Thema:-)
    http://is.muni.cz/th/152732/pedf_m/Diplomova_prace.txt
    nie gehoert!

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