On Tuesday, August 25, 2015 at 10:26:00 AM UTC-7, Dave Smith wrote:
> On 2015-08-25 1:13 PM, Kalmia wrote:
> > My grands were all born in the 1800s, so you can well imagine that
> > they knew how to cook and ate real food. Fortunately, the knowledge
> > was passed onto my mother who was an excellent cook.
>
> As were mine. My maternal grandmother was the youngest of them, born in
> 1900. They ate real food, but they had a much more limited diet than we
> enjoy these days. My mother's father was a much better cook than her
> mother. He was the one who prepared the holiday meals and he was the
> one who did all the cooking. My other grandmother was a passable cook
> but had an extremely limited repertoire. She had a weekly menu, by which
> I mean that she cooked 7 different dinners. There was the Monday night
> menu, the Tuesday night menu, the Wednesday night menu..... It was the
> same thing every week.

My mother's mother prided herself on staying up to date, so she was
always clipping recipes from magazines and the daily paper. Winners
she kept in her recipe file, with a short notation. But she usually
cooked the good old favorites. Except for making jam in season, she
had quit canning by the time we grandkids came around.

When I was a kid, the weekly food section provided a week's worth of
menus, with recipes for the trickier dishes. I wonder how many moms
put their family's dietary fate in the hands of the food editor every
week.