Ever since I started staying home with my children, cooking and baking have become a creative outlet and a way to connect with my little ones. Trying new recipes or reimagining old ones is an intellectual and creative challenge I can take on from the comfort of my own home, without having to find childcare and usually without having to spend much money.
Making some of the recipes from my childhood is a particularly interesting endeavor: it involves reaching out to the family member who made the recipe, interpreting their description of how to follow it, and inevitably challenging myself to make it taste EXACTLY as I remember (which we all know is, 99% of the time, impossible.)
I come from a large extended family. I have one brother and one sister, but I have 21 aunts and uncles, 34 first cousins, and now each year there are more of us as we partner and have children. Communicating with family members to find and understand our “family recipes” has become an unexpected and fun way to connect with relatives I might not otherwise talk to more than once every year or every few years.
Hi! How are you? What have you been up to lately? Do you remember that thing that your mom used to make? Do you have the recipe? Any notes or tips? Thanks! I’ll send you a photo when I make it, and let you know how it turns out. See you at Christmas!
Some of these recipes are homemade and complicated: Italian biscotti, sand tarts, pickled shrimp, stuffed artichokes, turkey gravy. Some are made partly or exclusively from boxed ingredients: strawberry poke cake, fish in red sauce, rigatoni noodles boiled in water with a certain number of chicken bouillon cubes. They are all special, regardless of the time, effort, or number of ingredients they require.
Today I made Strawberry Summer Cake, a staple of summer cousin swimming parties at my Grammy’s pool. It’s basically a strawberry poke cake, made in our family’s particular way, and everything comes from a box or a tub – and it’s delicious. It’s light, creamy, sweet, and addicting. It can be sliced into squares if you let it set up long enough, or served scoop-style in a paper cup or bowl.
I mixed the boxed yellow cake mix, and while it baked, I prepared the other layers: vanilla Jell-o pudding, strawberry Jell-o, strawberries in sugary syrup, thawed cool whip. As I carefully built the layers of the cake, I couldn’t help but experience a flood of memories. Rosy cheeks kissed by the sun, skin that felt tight from the hours of salt-water water skiing and tubing, humid meals on the porch with green astroturf underfoot, giggles and shouts from cousins and babies as we fought for spots to eat with our paper plates damp from the wet beach towels on our laps. My Grammy’s perfectly coiffed hair even in the humidity, and the endless stream of snacks she brought out from the kitchen. PawPaw’s brown leathery skin and white socks with boat shoes, bent over the fish cleaning table as he gutted a freshly-caught redfish or speckled trout. The oppressive summer heat that could only be sliced with box fans and the Gulf breeze as the sun went down and the glow of the porch lights flickered on.
It’s funny what a family recipe can do, besides fill your belly. It’s a thread that connects you to your kin; it’s something to talk about when you haven’t seen each other in months or years; it’s a taste of childhood or maybe your last conversation with a relative. It’s a door to the memories housed in your heart and mind, a window that offers a peek into where you came from. It’s a connection between a delicious manifestation of your family consciousness, and who you are as a unique individual, stirring a bowl of yellow cake mix, today.
You can find the Strawberry Summer Cake recipe here.
