This blog features handwritten recipes of my paternal grandmother, Agnes Ann Miller Wolters (1905-2006). She was an experienced homemaker, a skill she had refined over three generations. 

 

Agnes was the oldest of 12 children and out of necessity mastered the basics of cooking at a young age. She learned alongside her mother while playing a key role in caring for her younger siblings. Such a key role, in fact, that she ended up quitting school in third grade to help keep the household running smoothly. She married in 1938 and brought up five children, while farming with her husband. When her daughter-in-law passed away in 1981, she helped her son bring up his six children, one of whom was me. 

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Grandma seemed to enjoy feeding people - it was her way of showing affection and care. She liked to bake, and a repeated refrain of hers was, "As long as you have bread, you won't go hungry." Some of her best cooking was done intuitively and involved adding a little of this and a pinch of that until the food was just right. She's the one who taught me to cook like that, and to this day I apply her guidelines for making gravy as well as a handful of other foods. 

 

But Grandma also collected new recipes, handwritten on whatever scrap of paper was handy. Her daughter hung on to those recipes - most from the late 1960s to the 1980s - and eventually passed them along to me.  After some years of languishing in a box, they are shared here periodically for posterity's sake. 

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Want to join the conversation? Send your comments or feedback to Anita at anitadualeh@gmail.com.

 

Happy cooking.