Cooking Traditions

Michelle: Did you used to cook a lot for holidays, Sara?

Sara: I didn’t cook much this last time. When I was home with my mom and dad, we always had a cook to do it. And it was normally the cook that cooked for us anyhow.

Michelle: What about when it was just the four of you? With Barbara and Bill? Did you always have Thanksgiving at home?

Colonel: Oh yeah, yeah. My mother was with me. My father died in 1969, not long after we came back from the mid-west. So we always had my mother and ya know, somebody else of that nature. I bought a turkey from Alpontere (spelling?) who had a turkey farm around Elverson every year.

Michelle: What was your favorite dish or food?

Colonel: I sure did like the pumpkin pies! When I was growing up my mother made cream pies. A cream pie has cream filling with a meringue top. Like lemon meringue, but its cream pie. Its not popular, but the cream is like cream pudding. I mean, it’s a cream with a pudding texture. And then she put a meringue over top of it.

I may have told you – every meal, 3 meals a day. On my grandfather and grandmother’s farm. There was a raisin pie. A raisin pie. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. A raisin pie. That was a tradition at the time; they had some Pennsylvanian Dutch in them and that was part of it!

Trish: Did you like it?

Colonel: Oh yeah! Yeah! And for the evening meal they had other pies – it might be raisin and apple, or raisin and cherry, or raisin and shoofly, or something of that nature. Pies were a big deal. They had what was known as a pie safe. A structure about this big [motions about 3 feet by 3 feet]. Two shelves. And it was filled with pies. And this shelf was out on the adjoining porch. It was suspended form the ceiling. It was a pie safe they called it. And three sides were solid, but the front was screened. So that was the door. You opened the door, took out the pie that you wanted and so on, put it back. Pies were just… they kept replenishing the safe.