Vermont Home Cooking: Do You Really Remember Your Mother's Cooking

By Carole White

This is a wonderful, funny family memoir cookbook. It was developed from the authors desire to preserve the family recipes and to showcase wonderful recipes, as well as fabulous stories of life growing up in Vermont. The author also describes many humorous errors she has made during cooking and has interesting and easy methods to prevent future failures like she has had!

There are a total of thirty-five recipes, including nineteen desserts and ten main dishes. There is a full chapter on just the Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner, including all parts of this meal and a special recipe for kids to make and to keep them busy and out of mischief.

Each recipe includes detailed steps to make it, with helpful hints included and a complete list of utensils and ingredients, making this the perfect book for the beginning cook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479708635

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I recently lost both my parents, and now I wish I had spent more time at home. I was the one in the family who traveled far away and did not visit home much more than once a year. Don’t get me wrong. My parents and I were close. It was just circumstance that I lived almost across the country from them.

I was fifty-seven years old, but I felt very lost not having my parents anymore. I thought about them often and wanted to remember them. I started by collecting all the photo albums and trying to preserve all the old pictures on the computer. It was hard to look at the old picture but wonderful to see them in their youth before any of us kids were around. I realized that I did not know that much about my grandparents. My parents never spoke much about them or all that much about their own childhood. I wanted to keep as much of the memories I had been told and my own memories as I could. My husband came up with the idea of collecting all my mother’s recipes. Cooking has always been a big part of my family’s life. There is also a lot of competition between my sisters and brother at finding, making, or changing recipes and on whose is the best. This competition was the catalyst that gave my husband, Robert, the idea about this book. I was planning to have the recipes printed up nicely and be given to my brother and two sisters, probably as a Christmas present. Bob felt we should try to publish, so two years later, here we are.

My father told me that when they were first married (1947), my mother could not cook—could not even boil water correctly, according to him. Surprisingly, my mother backed him up on this. The majority of the family recipes come from my father’s side of the family. Who knew!

A little history about my family may help. As with a lot of the families in northern Vermont, we are of French Canadian descent from my mother’s side and Irish and French Canadian from my father’s side. We lived in Derby Line, Vermont, a small town on the Canadian border. My father started working as a machinist and became a general foreman before he retired from Butterfield, a factory that was built in both the United States and Canada, physically straddling the border.

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Dad at Butterfield shop

My father had a green thumb, and a small family garden grew into several acres and a roadside vegetable stand. Back then, it was called a truck farm. I don’t know why. He worked at Butterfield at night and in the garden during the day. We grew everything—corn, peas, carrots, squash, cucumbers, etc.—and also had large beds of raspberries and strawberries. My mother sold the vegetables from the roadside stand. Everyone worked in the garden—planting, weeding, harvesting, and so on.

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Mom working in the Vegetable Stand

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A small part of our garden

(FYI: My editor explained the meaning of truck farm to me. It is from the French verb troquer, which means to trade, originating hundreds of years ago. It referred to anything that you grew or made and then sold or traded. To truck meant commercial goods that you marketed. Years later, truck also referred to the wheelbarrows and carts used to market, and we still use hand trucks today. After the invention of automobiles, the word truck was applied to vehicles transporting goods. Cool to know, isn’t it!)

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Unfortunately, I do not know that much about my grandparents. My paternal grandmother passed away before I was born, as did my maternal grandfather.

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Mother’s parents

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Father’s parents

My maternal grandmother was French Canadian and, unlike my mother, never learned to speak English. My older sister spoke French when she first started to speak, but my father could not understand her, so speaking French was stopped in our house. It was not as it is today when bilingual families are encouraged to teach their children both languages. It was You’re an American, so speak English. As a result, my sister forgot any French she had begun to learn, and the rest of us never learned French. Sadly, this meant that we were never told any of the kid stories about our mother from her mother, because we could not understand Memere (that’s French for grandmother) when we visited. We did learn a few stories from Mom and Dad, but not that many.

I hope you enjoy my memories that are part and parcel with the recipes. Have you found that a lot of memories are built into and around food? I think this may be the case with a lot of families.

CHAPTER 1

My Cooking Trials

Have you ever wondered why your food doesn’t taste like your mom’s?

Now, my mom wasn’t a great cook, but I liked her meals. I grew up on what we’ll call your basic foods, but there were some special items that have become family favorites. My brother and sisters all keep these recipes, and most of them are served on special occasions.

I am not the greatest of cooks, and I make a lot of mistakes when cooking, as my husband will attest. There are some things I have messed up so badly that he will no longer even try to eat them, and I have given up trying to make them—like pumpkin pie. I simply cannot get it right.

You know the normal excuses for your cooking problems:

Well, it doesn’t taste like Mom’s, but it’s okay.

Mom cooked in Vermont, and I live in the state of Washington at sea level—oven and cooking times are different at different elevations, so that must be the problem.

I can’t get the same types of ingredients that Mom used—milk right from the farm. I have to use the pasteurized and homogenized stuff. (Mom boiled—pasteurized—milk right on our stove.)

And so on.

There are any number of things you tell yourself to explain why your cookies, meat dishes, cakes, etc., don’t look or taste quite like your mother’s. But is it really true? Here’s what I discovered.

After my parents passed away and I saved all the family photos on my computer, I made copies and gave them to everyone in my family. That finished, I still wanted to preserve more memories of my parents. While visiting my remaining family, we got to talking about food, and I volunteered to copy all the recipes onto my computer for everyone else in the family. They all thought it was a good idea, and we collected everything we could. My older sister had my mother’s recipe box, but over the years, some of the recipes had been passed around, so my brother and younger sister also had a few of the recipes. Some could not be found at all, just copies that one of us had written down.

When I started this project, I discovered that many of my recipes were different from the original ones in my mother’s box. That was a real surprise. No wonder my cooking tasted so different! This was the case with copies I got from my