52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2025 – Week 48: Family Recipe

NOTE: I accepted the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge headed by fellow genealogy blogger Amy Johnson Crow. The idea behind this challenge is that you will receive email prompts, a word or phrase, every week, and you find something about your research or family history to write about.  Click HERE to read my first 52 Ancestors blog post in 2019.

I come from a long line of great cooks. Women and men who could walk into a kitchen and feel completely at ease preparing meals for their families. It didn’t matter if it was after school snacks, weekend lunches, Sunday dinners, or holiday meals; my grandmothers and father made it look easy. I don’t ever remember seeing anyone ever use a recipe, yet everything was always delicious.

They cooked with instinct and many years of experience. They never measured anything. It was always a dash of this or sprinkle of that. Then they would taste it to see what was needed. The end product was always the same familiar taste. With all the pies, cakes, barbeque, pot roast, fried fish, slow cooked greens and so many more family favorites I have eaten in my lifetime, none of these recipes were ever written down. Now their recipes live on in my memory. The flavors of my youth that I still try to recreate. I often joke that I season my food “until I hear the ancestors tell me to stop.” Maybe that’s my way of carrying them with me in the kitchen, trusting my senses the way they trusted theirs.

Some of my mother-in-law, Phyllis Govan Cummings, recipes

The first time I was in the kitchen with my mother-in-law, it reminded me of the days I was in the kitchen with my grandmothers. She’s a wonderful cook as well. She cooks has cooked family favorites so long now that she no longer uses recipes. But unlike my grandmothers, she has a book of recipes; some are handwritten, some are cut out of magazines or newspapers, and some are printouts. She has a family treasure that is appreciated more than she will ever know.

While I haven’t inherited any recipe cards from my family, I like to think that I have inherited their love of cooking, their spirit of creativity, and cooking from the heart. Cooking, in my family, was not just about nourishment. Maybe that’s why recipes were never that important. It was about feeding our soul, about laughter around the table, conversations drifting from serious to silly, and the warmth of being together. Those are the memories that I carry with me today.

Click HERE to read more about food and my family