I come from a family with a strong connection to food. My parents and grandparents have been trying new things in the kitchen and keeping up with trends for decades. I married into a family that has an equally strong connection to food. They have been passing recipes down to new generations for decades. I am both excited and intimidated by this. I enjoy trying new recipes and new things in the kitchen but trying to recreate something I have never eaten and that my husband remembers vividly makes me frightened and touchy about feedback.
My husband is from a large family and his mom’s side is Mexican. Some cultures have a stronger recipe arsenal that gets passed down from generation to generation and the mexican culture is one of those cultures. There are recipes that are always made for certain holidays and are always the center of family gatherings. Everyone remembers their own favorites and if you can agree on nothing else in a large family it appears you can almost always find common ground talking about the recipes grandma made. There are so many great stories about Tom’s grandma, aunts and mom in the kitchen together. At some point during any visit with his family the conversation drifts to memories of these recipes. The joy they have telling these stories and talking about the food they grew up on can been seen on their faces and heard in their voices. Some of the recipes are ones that my mother-in-law found on her own and passed on to her daughters. Recipes like the carrot cake, pancakes, and hot cross buns fall into this category. Others like the tortillas, albondigas and tamales are recipes that have come from her mother and have since been passed on. I love listening to the stories he tells about each of his favorite recipes.
Luckily, they recipes are documented even if some of them have no measurements and are written in spanish. In the marriage I got some amazing recipes and of course a husband. I was also lucky enough to get a some new sisters and by some I mean 5. All five of the them have been great about sharing stories and recipes. I am grateful to them for answering my panicky text messages, emailing when I need a recipe, answering question about how things taste or photocopying stacks of recipes for me. I made learning some of these recipes one of my Baker’s dozen goals this year so making them wouldn’t become something I never got around to. Sticking strong to my goals, the other day I finally mustered up the courage to try the flour tortilla recipe. Prior to this I watched them being flattened and cooked once. I have eaten them twice. I still felt completely overwhelmed when I read the recipe.
The most challenging thing about making recipes handed down from grandmothers is they read like folklore. This isn’t like the recipes from my mom, a photocopy of a recipe from the newspaper that has important notes in the margins. This is a hand written recipe that says informative things like, add some of this then add some of that and mix. Then form and cook. The translation of this is; mix and then form them just like you used to watch me do and then cook until they look how you remember. I wasn’t lucky enough to sit with this amazing group of women and watch them cook so I don’t have these memories. I have instinct and a desire to make my husband happy.
After a few deep breaths, a text to find out what kind of margarine to buy and a resolve that if it didn’t turn out perfect it would be ok as a first try, I was able to get started. Lucky for me the recipe said you can’t over knead them because there was a point when all the ingredients were mixed together that I almost quit because I couldn’t imagine how this sticky mess was going to come off my hands or ever turn into anything usable. I kept with it and eventually the dough was smooth and silky just like the recipe said. I was so excited. I formed the balls just like I had seen and let them rest. Then I rolled them and Tom cooked them on the griddle. I was really proud of them because they looked like tortillas when we were done. That was all I needed for round one. As long as they looked like what I have eaten I knew I would feel good about it. I was still a little scared to eat one.
Tom is extremely sweet and supportive of me trying these recipes. He is also very honest about if they are anything like his mom’s. There is no telling me they are good just to be nice. So when he ate the first one and said these are good and really similar I called it a success. After dinner he offered this very excited and sincere nugget: “Now you need to make the beans too. The tortillas are good but the flavor is just different with the beans.”
Our tortillas by no means look perfect but they are homemade and most times that is better than perfect. Making tortillas is so much easier than I thought, with relatively little planning and few ingredients you can make a batch rather quickly. I found the entire process to be very relaxing. I made a second batch the other day, to go with the beans I made, and I am slowly getting better at tortillas. For the record, Tom was right they are better with the beans. Can’t wait for my new electric griddle to arrive so I can have a larger cooking surface and better control over the heat.
| pinch off balls of dough between your thumb and forefinger |
| The thinner we got them when rolling the better we liked them |
| They bubbled up after a little time on the griddle and that is when we flipped them |
You can’t send me panicky text messages but I am open to answering questions via email if you have them. If you want more information I checked and there are lots of great links out there that will show you videos on how to make your own tortillas. I am going to tell you now that reading those or watching videos is nothing compared to the experience you get with real world practice. The beauty of simple foods like these is that you make them how you like them and learn your own techniques over time. Years from now I will be able to do this in my sleep. When I pass this recipe down it will probably read: mix and then form them just like you used to watch me do and then cook until they look how you remember.
Do you have recipes handed down from grandma or mom? Are the recipes easy to follow
