Kitchen

[ID2]

We NEVER had sweets in our house!! My older brother was diagnosed a type 1 diabetic back in the 50's. So the three of us kids grew up eating extremely healthy without any sweets or definitely no fried foods!! Yuck. I marvel at those that deep fry because I wouldn't even know how. 

[violann]

"The Real Deal"......I love reading that. My grandmother, an AMAZING woman, was an Irish immigrant from a family broken when she was a child by her own mother's death, and her father's remarriage to her stepmother, who, I have often thought, considered Grandma an inconvenience.

She came across the sea at he age f fourteen, BY HERSELF, and was Blessed by her Faith to meet my grandfather, ten years her senior, and theirs was a love match that lasted for the next 50 years.

Grandpa was a railroad man, and that meant that she could usually have milk and meat and butter on the table, AND THAT WAS HOW SHE COOKED. Anything that could be delicious cooked without butter could taste better when cooked WITH butter, and cooked with butter she did, and taught my mother to do the same.

EVERY YEAR OF MY LIFE UNTIL MY FATHER DIED, THEN FOR A SHORT WHILE AFTER, my mother made her boiled fruitcake and her butter cookie cutouts.

The fruitcake was a hefty, dark, more-fruit-than-cake powerfully spiced loaf, thick with raisins, citron (what IS that?), cherries and BUTTER.

The cookies were a relatively simple butter cookie recipe, fragrant with the BUTTER and her cherished vanilla extract (always PURE vanilla, nothing but the REAL thing).

I'd come home from whatever school I was attending or working in one afternoon in earlyDecember, and my nose would inform me the instant I'd crack the door, that this had been Christmas Baking Day.

Sadly, I never learned her art from her side. She was a nervous, perfectionistic woman, and when she cooked for others she required, and demanded, NO DISTRACTION from her task.

Sitting at my kitchen table as I write, the scents and visions and sounds of Christmas Cooking Days stir like her wooden spoon within my memories of the magic that came from her kitchen.