The Dinner Essays- Part 2

The Great Cultural Food Shift of My Grandmother's Time

If I could travel back in time and interview my grandmother, I would ask her about food. I’m not a chef, or a historian, and I’m not even that fancy of a home cook, so it’s taken me a while to understand why food is my window into understanding the past. I would ask her what meals they ate on regular rotations in her childhood, and how that shifted as she lived through cultural change in her lifetime. What ingredients did she have access to? What did breakfast look like in 1918? What kind of ‘treats’ were available in a post-depression era household? What did she forage?

When I was a little girl, I remember watching grandma pry up the burner plate to expose the hot fire underneath as she cooked on her wood cookstove, a curious thing we didn’t have at our house. Later when visiting as an adult, the old stove became an extra countertop – for the store-bought bread and frozen chicken nuggets.

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https://open.substack.com/pub/mytreehousekitchen/p/the-dinner-essays-part-2?r=88wfpn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web