A family project
About Grandma Rose
Ohio farm country
Rose lived on a farm out in midwestern Ohio, where the roads still take their names from the families that settled them. Her kitchen sat at the back of the house, right off the mud room where boots came off before you set foot on the linoleum. The pantry ran along the back porch. That's where the flour and the sugar lived, and where the jars she put up in August waited on the shelves till winter. Her garden stretched down the fence line to catch the sun.
She raised a family in that kitchen. There were threshing crews to feed at noon. There were school lunches to pack by first light. Most Sunday afternoons she had a pie cooling on the sill because a neighbor was almost always on their way over. Her cooking followed the seasons without her ever calling it that. Sweet corn in August. In October the apples came in, and by the week after Easter, the ham bone was going into soup.
Rose would tell you she wasn't a fancy cook. She'd say she just fed people. What she could do, though, was feed twelve of them from a pantry and a garden and still put a piece of something wrapped in wax paper into your hand on your way out the door.
The tin box
Rose kept her recipes in a tin box on the shelf above the flour bin. Most of them she'd written on whatever paper was handy at the time. You'll find feed store receipts in there, an old church bulletin or two, lined index cards from the drug store on Main. Some of the recipes came down from her mother. Neighbors passed a good many along at potlucks. The rest Rose worked out on her own over the years by cooking them a few times till they turned out right.
Several of the oldest cards had been folded and refolded so many times that the creases split right through the writing. One winter, Casey, who was one of Rose's own, sat down at the kitchen table and copied those cards over onto fresh paper so nothing would be lost. The recipes are Rose's. The handwriting on a few of the cards is Casey's.
The box passed from Rose to her daughters, and then along to the nieces and grandchildren, until it came to rest with the family member who's kept it safe ever since. When we started worrying about the paper crumbling, we sat down and scanned every card and typed out what was there. That's what this site is. Each card sits at the top of its page in Rose's own hand, and the typed version sits below it so nobody has to squint at a fifty-year-old scrap to get supper on the table.
For the family
This site is for the family. That means cousins and grandchildren and in-laws, aunts you only see at Christmas, anybody who ever sat at Rose's table. Every recipe here is yours to cook, yours to print, and yours to teach your own kids from when the time comes. That was always the point of the tin box.
A cookbook is on its way too. The same recipes, bound into one edition, with the notes Rose left in the margins over the years. You'll find a waitlist for that if you'd like a copy when it's ready.
For the family. From Grandma Rose's kitchen to yours.