52 Ancestors week 5 2021: In the Kitchen

I'm going to say right here that my mother Ruth Belknap Prewitt was a cook of the 1950s.  We didn't have a huge amount of Jello in my memory but we did have some rather watery stews and a lot of clam chowder (canned clams, which considering we were living in Washington state is kind of sad).  My sister would make fudge from time to time, and we occasionally had popcorn, made in a probably lethal little appliance that popped the corn over a heating element.  Mom's cooking did get a bit more adventurous after we lived overseas where she was introduced to a more Mediterranean style of eating and also met Americans who had preserved their immediate ancestors' style of cooking.  The latter is how my mom ended up with a recipe for Chinese Fried Rice, taught to her by a wonderful lady named Alice who was of Korean descent, raised in Hawaii and whose home address at that time was in Texas.  We were all living in Israel at the time (early 1960s) while dad and husbands worked on a construction project on the Dead Sea.  I do question the authenticity of the recipe but it was one of the better things Mom made.

Me at age 2, enjoying some of that fudge

My late mother-in-law, Edith Kober Doerflinger, was not only a cook of the 1950s, but as a woman whose grandparents barely spoke English (this according to Edith but at least German was their native tongue), she only liked vegetables that had been cooked or otherwise processed:  sauerkraut was something she liked, though by the time I knew her, she rarely ate it because most of the rest of us were not that excited about it.  Near the end of her life she started describing the taste of horseradish sauce (she used a creamy version of this on her morning egg) as "sharp."  This made no sense to us for a while--was she losing words?--until I happened to see a reference to the German word for sharp also meaning "spicy."  A word she must have known from her grandparents when she was small surfaced again, perfectly appropriately.