Will Partain's cooking interests

(I do just barely enough cooking to count it as an `interest'...)

The little I know about cooking I learned from my mother, and it is her cooking (and that of my paternal grandmother) -- and of their times -- that are an `interest'.

If I had to give it a label, I'd call it `American primitive' cooking. It's from the days when ``housewives'' had to put three meals on the table every day for a half-dozen people. Even when bringing out the festive best, it wasn't ``the most glorious food that one can imagine'', it was ``how can I feed this crowd well in the time available''.

It is also `traditional' cooking, both in the sense of ``no recipes'' (e.g., my grandmother making cornbread), and in the sense of a semi-oral tradition of recipes that move through families and communities. I think of the recipe cards that I got from my mother 20 years ago, or of church cookbooks that give snapshots of such traditions.

I will add things to this page as inclined; for now, here are my Christmas menus for 1999, 1997, and 1994.


Will Partain, partain@dcs.gla.ac.uk; 1999-12-27.