Given my fascination with family history and my love of cooking, it’s hardly surprising that it occurred to me there might be a way to connect with my ancestors not just via genealogical and genetic research, but also in a more visceral way, through their food and culinary traditions.

Whatever our differences in language or culture, we all have to eat and most of us like to eat. And to the extent that our genes affect our food choices—well, we share more DNA with our ancestors than with even our closest (unrelated) friends. When we study what our forebears ate, we learn not only about what they liked but also what ingredients were available to them and what tools they used to transform those ingredients into dinner. We learn what the food meant to them and how it was incorporated into or excluded from their rituals and ceremonies. It’s not just the recipe, it’s not just the bits and pieces we put into our mouths and chew and swallow, it’s the story behind the food that helps us place ourselves within the larger traditions we inherited just by being who and where we are and when we were born.

A seductive idea in theory, but where, in practice, to start? Most of my women ancestors cooked for themselves and their families, and shopped or bartered for the ingredients, though likely a handful of them had household help. Most of the men probably did little if any cooking, but many grew or participated in growing and perhaps in butchering some of the food their families ate, and at least one, my great-great grandfather Henry Stodola, was a professional baker.

I decided to focus on my four grandparents, each of whom represents a unique heritage of food and folkways. My goal was to get as close as I could to what and how they might have grown up eating, regardless of whether they cooked it, grew it, butchered it, or just showed up at the dinner table. As it happens, my maternal grandmother and grandfather and my paternal grandfather were all pretty much “mono-ethnic” for as far back as I could trace, extending beyond their history in the New World to their roots in Europe—English, French, and Ashkenazi Jewish, respectively—a chain they all broke by marrying each other! The fourth, my paternal grandmother, honored both her thoroughly English father’s heritage and her mother’s more mixed English/Irish and, just a generation or two earlier, German/Pennsylvania Dutch background. That was a bit of a complication, but I resolved to do my best to respect the mixed culinary traditions she inherited.

To enrich my understanding of their culinary traditions, I looked not only at the larger historical context in which they found themselves but also for the personal stories and images I had found in the course of my adventures exploring my family’s history.

I also hoped to provide a sampling of recipes from which the food they ate might have been prepared. Recovering actual recipes, let alone confirming their accuracy, however, proved to be a formidable challenge. In the end, only one of the recipes in my original booklet met all criteria—my paternal grandmother’s recipe for blueberry conserve taken from an actual journal she kept during the summer of 1943. What it boasted in authenticity, however, it lacked in specificity, consisting as it did of a list of ingredients and no further instructions.

Other recipes were sourced from published cookbooks that family members were known to have used—my mother-in-law’s amazingly clean copy (compared with any cookbook I ever owned) of a highly influential Québécois cookbook, for example, or my mother’s reliance, well known to her friends, on Fanny Farmer.

Any illusions I might have harbored that my mother’s recipes came to me intact from her mother, Daisy, were shattered when my cousin Paige and I compared meatloaf recipes we’d gotten from our mothers and found them to be surprisingly different, and not just in small details. Not only that, Paige’s older sister, she told me, had added her own twist to the recipe.

Another obstacle I faced was the severance of my family connections, though for very different reasons, with both my grandfathers. Clearly if I was going to dine with either of them, I would have to get creative—and get some help. If I couldn’t get my hands on their own family recipes, perhaps I could get a recipe or two from one of their friends, or from one of mine, or even adapt one of my own. One recipe actually fell out of a used cookbook I bought on eBay. Failing such divine intervention, perhaps I could use something I knew about them and their own particular traditions within the larger culture—even something they might have had occasion to cook professionally.

Luckily, once i opened the door to more creative sourcing, it wasn’t difficult to find other family members to connect with—for example, turning to my French Canadian in-laws as a proxy for the culinary culture in which my Pépère John Dahart grew up or in a pinch, “adopting” family members of friends of similar ethnicity (for example, my friend Miriam’s Grandma Sonia) or as a last resort, consulting Chef Google.

Just to add, I was confident about the similarity of my in-laws’ to those I might have gleaned from my maternal grandfather’s descendants, knowing as I did that because of a period in French Canadian history when consanguinous marriages were the only alternative to dying out altogether, “we are all cousins.” (This is quite literally true; I am a very distant cousin of my husband, not visible in our DNA but traceable using conventional genealogy.) That said, recipes that were written down or dictated might be in French or Franglish, or annotated with metric-to-English conversions. How far wrong these conversions could go was brought home to me by a French graduate student who spent a couple of months with us many years ago and who, as an expression of her love and gratitude, wanted to cook us a meal. Despite her sophisticated scientific skills and experience with managing data in the lab, she solemnly informed me that she needed 600 pounds of ground beef for the stuffed peppers she planned to make.

Although in general I tried to get as close to the actual recipes as possible, I didn’t—I couldn’t—check my own taste and judgment at the door. Sometimes I just had to modify; I couldn’t bring myself to use a double layer of frozen piecrust on a tourtiere like Aunt Estelle, for example, or resist adding a little seasoning to a recipe that specified none because probably none was available to the cook.

In case you’re wondering about the title, my inspiration for this effort came from watching relatives or old friends cooking together, gracefully navigating around one another, chatting happily or in silence, but seeming to know without negotiation who needed to be at the stove or at the sink or at the cutting board at a given moment. The trope was that I might somehow be able to achieve, figuratively, a similar choreography with my forebears. It also captures the joy I have taken in trying to know my grandparents at the level of our shared cuisine, as well as the semi-scripted changes that occur as recipes and traditions evolve to meet the needs of subsequent generations.

I in turn have passed recipes and rituals along to my daughters, fully expecting them to be further modified in their next iterations but having not a clue as to what will stick and what will fall away.

Case in point: Lasagna chez Pomerleau. During our vegetarian years, I started experimenting with various ingredients to compensate for the absence of the distinctive texture and taste that, it seemed to me at the time, the meat had provided. Somehow the one that had stuck in our household was canned whole-kernal corn, which added not only texture but also a pop of color and just the barest hint of sweetness.

When one of my daughters invited a friend to dinner, I served lasagna at her request, omitting the corn because I’d never considered this quirky family pantry meal a dish to be served to company. But my daughter took one bite, then wailed, “The corn! Where’s the corn?” She had told her friend about her mom’s special lasagna recipe and they had both been looking forward to it. I had to invite the friend back another time for lasagna, this time with corn.

It is probably neither the first nor the last recipe to come about this way.

Having now taken the metaphor as far as I can, I cast my bread upon the waters, hoping it will return to me in the form of unalloyed pleasure, but also welcoming comments, corrections, and additional recipes. Meanwhile, Enjoy! Tuck in! Bon appétit! Es gezunterheyt!

Disclaimers

Whenever I start describing something by saying what it is not, my husband always interrupts to request that I tell him what it IS. So I’ll start with the positive spin before providing a few cautionary words:

1) I am an enthusiastic and reasonably competent home cook seasoned by over sixty years of experience as the cook in the house. It feels wifely and motherly, it fills a need too deep for me to fathom. (Don’t worry, my husband does more than his share of home repairs and cleaning, including the litterbox.) The disclaimer: I claim no special expertise. My mother was reluctant to make her kids work as hard as she had and I was too shortsighted to insist, so I came late to home ec class. I have a friend who spent her first year of marriage cooking her way through Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking when I could scarcely make a roux. I’ve never learned to fast-chop.

2) The Kitchen Dance is the tale of my adventures and misadventures in attempting to connect with my ancestors by learning as much as I could about what they ate, how they made it, and the rituals that accompanied the meal. To accomplish this goal, I leaned heavily on relatives, friends, and cookbooks. In short, it’s a crowd-sourced collection of recipes—perhaps a second cousin of those spiral-bound church and fundraising cookbooks. The disclaimer: The Kitchen Dance should not be regarded as an online cookbook. These recipes haven’t been tested and retested repeatedly, as would be de rigeur for a professional cookbook author. Some haven’t been tested at all. If you try any of these recipes, please let me know how it turns out and if you have any modifications to suggest.