Sitting around the kitchen table more and staying home these last few months due to the pandemic has many us thinking back to a slower paced time in our lives when we were growing up. Children have been playing outside more, people have planted gardens and discussed how to grow their tomatoes bigger. Friends and neighbors have gathered (socially distanced of course) in backyards and visited together over coffee or sweet tea. And many have gone back to their grandparents or great-grandparents familiar recipes to reminisce of the good old days.
This Labor Day weekend, as we finish out the summer, my husband and I decided to pull out his great-aunt’s sweet pickle recipe passed down to his favorite aunt, who graciously shared it with me years ago when we were first married. We went to the produce market to get fresh, homegrown cucumbers, I pulled out my grandmother’s pickling crock, and we have started the 4-day pickling process.
This has me remember sitting in the kitchen with both of my grandmothers, watching them cook, fry chicken, bake a homemade cake with homemade icing, remembering certain smells from each of their houses. I even have music playing and the TV isn’t on like usual. The windows are open with a fresh breeze blowing in as we detect the first tiny bit of fall arriving.
Not only did my grandmothers like being in the kitchen, my mom spent many summers canning from my dad’s abundant garden. Of course my brother and I had to do the gathering (with snapping turtles and snakes and all). Recalling memories of sitting on the porch, eating dinner completely from our garden and fruit trees — NOTHING tasted better. Fresh sliced tomatoes, fried okra, fried squash, sliced cucumbers, canned blue lake green beans, and frozen (but thawed) applesauce from our June apple tree. It was so fun climbing that tree and shaking it to have the ripe apples drop, so we could gather them.
I want to pass this along to my grandchildren, sitting around the kitchen table (which came from my great-grandparents on the back of a covered wagon to where my granddad and dad grew up), talking about our day, cooking with them, sharing the lost days of canning, baking from scratch, laughing, and dancing to music from the bygone days while cooking, and making memories with fun experiences in the kitchen.