In Her Kitchen - An Island Mother's Day Tribute

A page from A Taste from the Outer Banks cookbook and What's Cooking In the Everglades?

Granny, Grandma, Nana, Mammy, Mamaw.  It doesn't matter what you call her.  The women from Goose Creek Island were and are by far the most celebrated cooks.  Why is it that there are just some things our Grandmothers cooked that can not be recreated?  I can fry okra but they don't taste nothing like Grandmama Elma Potter's fried okra.  I've even tried to recreate Granny Audrey's spaghetti sauce.  She claimed it was Ragu with just a pinch of sugar added.  For some reason, my pinch of sugar is either too much or too little - never like hers.

If your roots are from this Island, rest assured you come from long line of some of the best cooks around.  With no formal culinary training, these women can take a spoon, a bowl and something from the pantry and create a meal fit for a king.  And they know how to "put on a spread" too.  I don't think many of us have set down to an Island meal without all the necessary items displayed on the table.  A meat - either beef, pork or seafood; something from the garden - most likely potatoes, collards, cucumbers, tomatoes. And no meal is complete with out the bread - biscuits or cornbread.  Look around on the table and you will see some fig preserves, butter, and hot pepper vinegar. 

Three years ago, I lost my Granny.  She was a great cook.  She cooked good collards.  But for some reason she never ate them.  She could take some simple ingredients and season it just right and it would be good.  If you trimmed the crust off the bread, she'd take them and make bread pudding.  A bowl of cut up tomatoes with some ranch dressing could be lunch.  In the winter time, it was not unusual for her to bake a few sweet potatoes every day.  

Although she was a simple cook, there was one thing that she enjoyed.  She loved cookbooks.  When we were going through her things, there was a big box of cookbooks.  I never remember her "using" the cookbooks, but she enjoyed reading the recipes.  There were cookbooks from the Island churches, the Fisheries Association, from Everglades City, and even some from Virginia that Glendine had given her years back.  But I think the best recipes she enjoyed reading was from the Pamlico News - Nancy Winfrey's weekly Kitchen Chatter column.  I think she had saved just about each one that was printed.

There were only a few recipes that she handed down to us.  Rambo's Lemon Cake - named after Aunt Glendine's Virginia Beach neighbor.  And her Pineapple and Coconut Cake - the secret was to reserve some cake batter for the icing.  The other recipes she shared were verbal - add a little bit of this to the water, don't over stir that batter, or use pig tail for seasoning collards.

All of the mothers and grandmothers of Goose Creek Island are a testament of our culinary traits.  We have learned from their practical sense of expertise.  Their knowledge is likened to those worn pages of their cookbooks.  Those big old grease stains or splatters of dough on the pages show the physical evidence of their ability to create food mixed with love. 

So in honor of Mother's Day this weekend, pull out those cookbooks.  I am sure there are some spark of memories that will come from those pages.  Better yet, look at all those dirty pages, that's where all the good recipes are!