An easy way to remember ancestors
My grandma gets frequent mentions in our house thanks to her namesake rolls
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Each year at Thanksgiving, my family eats a special roll that is spiraled and buttery. In the family cookbook, they’re called “refrigerator rolls” because the recipe calls for making the dough one day then storing it in the fridge overnight before baking.
But in recent years, I’ve noticed that some of us have started using a different name: “Grandma Maxwell Rolls,” after the grandma who originated the recipe.
I’m not sure why this change happened, but the unexpected result is that Grandma Maxwell is now among the most-mentioned deceased members of my family. Just this holiday season, I probably told my kids five different times about going to Grandma’s house and having the same roles that we still make today. I don’t think anyone intended for this to happen, but with a name like “Grandma Maxwell Rolls,” stories naturally come up.
This is a good thing. A few months ago, I wrote about how genealogy and the sharing of intergenerational family lore can have positive impacts on mental health, particularly for adolescents. Turns out, sitting around and sharing stories is good for you.
At the same time, family stories don’t always come up naturally. Since learning about the mental health effects of genealogy, I’ve gone hunting for family lore. I’ve come across some interesting stories, including one about a great great grandfather who survived a gunshot to the face when he was an old time-y sheriff. But I’ve also noticed that many of the stories tend to fade after a while. I told the gunshot story constantly for about a month, after which time it basically never came up again.
Which is to say, recounting family history is demonstrably good, but it can be challenging to work it into everyday life.
Food names offer a solution to this problem, keeping a particular ancestor’s memory alive with basically no effort. The name of the dish functions as a kind of touch point between present and past family members.
Food also appears to work in a way that other heirloom items can’t. For instance, my dining room table and chairs also come from Grandma Maxwell, but each time we have a meal we don’t say “let’s sit down at Grandma’s table.” That’d be confusing. And at this point, the table is simply ours, fading as most household objects do into the background. Stories do occasionally come up and the table is one of my most treasured possessions, but there’s no need to give a table a name. And so the table doesn’t automatically inject the original owner’s name into daily life.
I’ve found that to be the case with most furniture and decor heirlooms I’ve inherited. My walls, for example, are covered in art I’ve inherited from various family members1. Stories do come up and having the art does keep memories alive. But we don’t typically refer to the pieces by the name of the person who bequeathed them to us.
Food on the other hand calls out for a specific label. What are we having for dinner tonight? Rolls. Which rolls? Grandma Maxwell Rolls.
This may not come as a surprise to people who already have family-named dishes.
But I’d like to stress, for everyone else, that dishes can acquire new names. Grandma Maxwell’s rolls were not “Grandma Maxwell Rolls” until very recently. Here’s another example: Over the years, one of my sisters — who is often responsible for making the rolls for Thanksgiving — started bringing a different type of roll to dinner. I don’t know if these rolls ever had a specific name, but in an effort to differentiate them, I’ve started calling them “Grandma Marla Rolls” because they come from Grandma Marla’s cookbook. More relevantly still, the general consensus seems to be that Grandma Marla never actually made these rolls herself. So the name is a something of a historical stretch. But that doesn’t really matter because it creates a touch point with Grandma Marla anyway.
What I’m saying is that you can kind of make this up as you go. I’m fortunate that my family does have a few recipes that have been passed down. But even if we didn’t have those, we could have simply chosen a recipe resembling what our grandmas used to make, then assigned that recipe a family name — which is not far off from what happened with Grandma Marla Rolls. The historical credentials of a recipe are less important than the ritual act of making, eating and remembering.
(And consider the fact that most rituals are post hoc inventions that come after the thing they commemorate.)2
In any case, food names are quite potent. Over the last year, my kids heard Grandma Maxwell’s name far more often than the names of other great grandparents. That wasn’t because I set out to make her the most important family member of that generation, but because part of her legacy coincidentally includes something that bears her name. Ancestors are not in a competition for attention from their descendents, but if they were Grandma Maxwell would be winning.
Family-themed food naming isn’t revolutionary or new, I know. It’s a small thing. But it’s easy and it’s fun. It might lead to a few more stories being told around the table, which is a positive thing on many levels. And if nothing else, it’ll keep the memory of beloved family members alive for as long as their descendents enjoy their food.
Thanks for reading Nuclear Meltdown. If you enjoy this blog, there’s a decent chance a friend might as well.
Headlines to check out this week:
The Intrinsic Value of Committed Relationships
“The reason it is not good for man to be alone is that he lacks someone who can oppose him, who can challenge his will and constrain him. God decides that a solitary man suffers from the absence of conflict, the absence of altering. Narcissism can be defined as the inability to be opposed, a telling revelation about God’s own self-conception and motivation for creating humanity.” (Emphasis added because that’s such a great line.)
The Rights of Women: A Natural Law Approach
Understood in this way, both rights and duties are, in the words of John Finnis, twin ways of naming what is objectively right or just vis-à-vis other persons, and as such they are always correlative. Natural duties, he helpfully explains, are the normative foundation of the virtue of justice (providing the oughtness – one should love one’s neighbor as oneself); rights are the ontological foundation (one is due just treatment because of the radically equal rational creatures he or she is). Rights and duties, so viewed, never exist independently of one another.
[…]
As Finnis writes, “[O]ne acts most appropriately for the common good, not by trying to estimate the needs of the common good ‘at large’, but by…fulfilling one’s responsibilities to ascertained individuals (i.e., to those who have particular rights correlative to one’s duties.”
To say I’ve “inherited art” makes it sound like I have a collection of Van Goghs. I don’t. The art I’ve inherited is more like decor, pleasant to look at but not worth much money. Indeed the reason I have most of it in the first place is because no one else wanted it.
The challenge is that it does feel like you need to know enough about a person to assign them a recipe. One of my favorite people in my family was my dad’s mom, but while writing this post it occurred to me that I have no idea what her favorite foods were, and she wasn’t much of a cook in general. We also didn’t do a lot of big celebratory meals (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., with her.) It would thus feel weird to me to name a recipe after her, so we’ll have to find other ways to remember her. I guess everyone has to decide how much fiction they can tolerate in their history.
Thank you, I love this concept.