Food for Memories

My grandmother, Mawmaw, was a key cook in all of my family’s holiday meals. 2024 marked the second Thanksgiving and Christmas without her, and today is the second New Year’s. She made the holidays so special just by being herself, so enthused and happy to celebrate and be with all her babies, grand-babies, and great grand-babies. However, her food always sweetened the celebrations—often literally through her cakes, pies, custards, and more.

Mawmaw’s Chicken and Dressing

One of her savory specialties spiced, or rather ‘saged,’ up Thanksgiving. My family tends to approach large holiday meals like potlucks. In 2024, Thanksgiving was a medley of casseroles made and brought by many hands to accompany ham and turkey and, of course, lots of desserts.

A few recreations were among all the goodies. We had two kinds of chicken and dressing: Nanny’s Dressing and Mawmaw’s Dressing. Nanny, my aunt’s mother-in-law, made her dressing with celery.

Mawmaw, on the other hand, did not put celery in her dressing. She’d freeze any biscuits and cornbread cooked but uneaten throughout the year, then defrost and crumble them up when she was ready to get started on the dressing. Onions were the main vegetable featured along with salt, lots of pepper, and lots of sage.

For the meat, she’d almost always go to a local grocery store and pick up her ‘hen’. After boiling the whole chicken, she would separate the white meat from the dark, then mix the white meat and chicken broth with the bread-y dressing base.

My dad—ironically a celery-in-dressing enjoyer—made Mawmaw’s version.

The dish was empty by the end of the meal.

Mawmaw’s Orange Slice Cake

Christmastime in 2024 felt off. The temperatures never got very wintery for long where I live. But we also didn’t have one of Mawmaw’s orange slice cakes to enjoy before and after Christmas.

This dessert was a bit like a fruit cake. Mawmaw would add dates, nuts, and orange slice candy to her cake batter and pour the mixture into an angel food cake pan. She’d pop it into the oven and wait. Wait. Do a toothpick test only for wet batter to stick to it. Sometimes, it felt like the cake would never cook all the way through.

It would, eventually, and then it was turned upside-down to fall out of the pan to be soaked in orange juice as it cooled.

This cake was incredibly dense and so delicious.

My aunt loves this dessert, and Mawmaw would make her a special one without the orange slices because they were the one part she didn’t like about the cake.

Mawmaw’s Pea Sausage

Greens for money and black-eyed peas for change. This is the main meal-related tradition my whole family maintains for New Year’s. My dad fixed ours for my mom and me today.

Most of the time, we would go over to my aunt’s house where she had cooked the collard greens and black-eyed peas and my uncle had fried up hog jaw.

And when the leftovers were divvied up, Mawmaw would repurpose the black-eyed peas into pea sausage. She’d mash up the peas with red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper and add flour, then fry patties of the mixture.

For something so simple and made of leftovers, Mawmaw’s pea sausage patties were amazing.

As another year begins without Mawmaw, remembering her recipes makes me happy. I’ve been fact-checking the recipes and my memories with my parents as I’ve written this piece. It always brings us comfort to remember her together. And one of Mawmaw’s love languages was keeping people fed and happy.

Through her recipes and our memories, she still does.

*Special thanks to my parents for helping me maintain accuracy with throughout this piece.*