Wednesday, November 14, 2007
A cornucopia of your Thanksgiving recipes
Lindsey Nair
Front Burner blog
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Recipes
Every Thanksgiving for the past 16 years, Sue Reavis has set out to make pumpkin pie with a lump in her throat. Her special recipe, which includes molasses, was her son-in-law’s favorite part of the meal.
“This is the best pie I’ve ever eaten in my life,” he told her. “I can taste the molasses and it’s wonderful.”
Ron Testerman was killed in a single-engine plane crash on August 16, 1991, less than two years after he married Reavis’ daughter. After that, Sue almost couldn’t bear to make the pie again. One year, she even tried to dull her grief by replacing the molasses with honey, but it just wasn’t the same.
Now, the pie has to be baked every year in memory of Ron.
“If I live to be 100, I will never make the pie without remembering him,” she said. “I always feel like I need to cut a slice for Ron.”
This Thanksgiving, many cooks will lovingly mix together the ingredients for a dish that brings their family much more than flavor and sustenance.
In the past several weeks, I heard from more than two dozen readers who shared 35 different recipes for dishes loaded with nostalgia.Many slide their scalloped oysters or applesauce cakes into a hot oven every year as a way to carry on a tradition started by mothers or grandmothers. Others make sure to prepare their child’s favorite even after the kids have grown and moved far from home.
“My mom always made sweet potato pies and pumpkin cake for Thanksgiving,” wrote Doris Foutz of Blue Ridge. “She loved her garden, so she would grow her own sweet potatoes and cook them for the pies.”
Foutz’s mother died just before Thanksgiving last year at age 86.
“This year, we’re thankful for her recipes as we start a new tradition,” she wrote.
In the Snyder household in Wytheville, it wouldn’t be the holidays without a hot bowl of oyster stew topped with Grandma Jones’ Oyster Catsup. Wilma Snyder wrote that her grandmother, who died in 1961, always made the homemade catsup with fresh tomatoes, ground mustard and cayenne pepper. But the recipe was lost for years until Snyder and her siblings cleaned out their mother’s house and found it.
Oysters are plump with memories for other families, too. For Scottie Pritchard of Grayson County, the shellfish are so important that even when she lived in Germany for three years, she purchased them at $1 apiece.
Video
Video by Lindsey Nair | Produced by Evelio Contreras & Lindsey Nair
In the Pritchard household, the story goes that Great-Uncle Roscoe Phipps loved oysters so much that he would order a shipment to be delivered every year.
The oysters arrived, still alive and in their shells, in a big wooden barrel at the general store across the street from Pritchard’s mother’s house in Elk Creek.
Pritchard’s mom loved to visit the store and throw handfuls of cornmeal into the barrel.
“The oysters gobbled it up and she could hear their shells snap, snap, snapping,” Pritchard wrote. “The oysters 'kept’ this way and fattened up nicely as corn-fed oysters.”
When I asked for family recipes, Pritchard sent her grandmother’s scalloped oyster recipe, which is rich with butter and cream. “What good eating that must have been, here in the rural mountains of Virginia, far from the ocean,” she wrote.
Chris Collins of Moneta has a sweeter tooth. She wrote that it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving for her family without a bubbling dish of Apple-Cranberry Casserole.
Collins says she and her daughter have always loved to eat leftover casserole for breakfast the next day. “When our grown children can’t be home for Thanksgiving, they always call to report that this dish is in the oven,” she wrote.
In the Turner home in Wytheville, Thanksgiving is “Scalloped Potato Day.”
For the Arthurs in Roanoke, it means a piping bowl of Grandma Arthur’s Potato Soup.
For the Woody family, it’s time to make what everyone has nicknamed “That D---ed Salad.”
“We laugh and are totally convinced,” wrote Susan Johnson Woody of Rocky Mount, “that if one of us did not bring it we would be asked to leave — not just the meal, but the family!”
In fact, anyone who doubts the importance of food and its comforting power need only flip through the thick file of Thanksgiving recipes on my desk. I wish I had enough space to print every one with this column, but I don’t. Fortunately, there’s the relatively limitless space of the Internet, where we have posted all of the recipes I received, from Cranberry-Sour Cream Salad to Scalloped Onions to Giblet Gravy.
Check out the full list here. Perhaps you’ll find a new addition for your own holiday table.
