I'm surprised I'm even going to be saying this because I am a HUGE fan of nostalgia and remembering and bringing back what was, in some capacity anyway. However, I'm not always as nostalgic as I think I am.
Don't get me wrong, I love the family history of things. My grandmothers wedding dress she wore in July of 1921. Keys that my dad stamped with my name. A crocheted bedspread my grandmother made for me when I was eighteen. A beautiful punch bowl that was a gift to my parents on their wedding 59 years ago. All cherished. All brings back memories or a degree of nostalgia.
And I love the passing down of family recipes too. My grandmother's cookies and breads. My mother's delicious Thanksgiving wild rice stuffing. Or, cookies my grandfather loved.
However, I find that too much nostalgia to be kinda frustrating. Because while a part of me enjoys that part of my family history in which these traditions stemmed from, I also enjoy the process of making them updated and my own, without for one minute losing the original feelings attached to it.
For example, my mom had talked a lot about how my grandmother would pull out a few ingredients and whip up fresh pasta anytime my mom wanted some. However, my mom didn't have a recipe and didn't remember how her mother did it, exactly. So, I went online and found a couple of recipes that I thought we could try. Let's just say that my idea did not go over very well. She INSISTED she wanted to do it the way HER MOTHER did it. While I didn't have a problem with that idea, she also didn't have a recipe or memory of how exactly the pasta was made.
See, to me, that is frustrating. The memory of nana making homemade pasta is not lost if I use a recipe I found on the internet (and I plan to at some point). I can still remember and think and cry and miss and hold closely all the memories I have of my grandmother and still make homemade pasta that wasn't her exact recipe. Upon looking over a few recipes I found my mother was growing more and more irate so I succumbed to just let her do the pasta the way she thought my grandmother might have. And they turned out pretty good, or at least as good as I remember nana making them.
I'm also confident that if I had tried the other recipes they would have also turned out good and I would have STILL remembered my grandmother.
I tweak my mom's wild rice stuffing but when I'm making it I still think of her. I might make my own variation of plum jam but when the plums are cooking on the stove the scent immediately reminds me of my mom making plum jam from the hundreds of plums off our tree in the backyard.
And, after my grandmother died in 2000, I began to make these breads (with a colored hard-boiled egg in the center) that she used to make and hand out to every single person for Easter year after year after year. I didn't use her bread recipe. I found a couple that I liked, one a little sweeter than the other, and used those...and I thought of my grandmother so intensely during the process that it brought me to tears.
It isn't the EXACTNESS that brings us closer to our past, it is the memory, however slightly off track it may become, that you can still hold close to your heart.
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