My extended family on my mother's side has some deeply conservative tendencies. The vast majority of the family (that is to say, everyone except Stearns and I) have stayed in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We hold many inviolable traditions: Our beach trip to the Outer Banks each year is one of the central events of the year--we have the same set of dinners each year, painstakingly planned and prepared by my grandparents. They ask me if I'll be able to make it that year each time they seem me for months in advance. Another dearly held tradition is our Christmas celebrations--my grandfather always reads the Christmas story, the children do performances, my mother is always in charge of the Christmas carols singing, which we do by candlelight (I always protest, as I'm scared of candles since I have long hair and there are loads of small children).
Many of the traditions, too, are in the food: Christmas would not be complete without my grandfather's homemade ice cream (in the old days, Sundays would not be complete without a dish of his ice cream, alas). My grandmother's chocolate cake is a frequent accompaniment. But it is quite possible that macaroni's and cheese is the most adored dish in our family. Grandma has been making that dish for more Sundays than not over the past twenty-five years. Macaroni's are present both on ordinary Sundays as well as the high feasts of Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas. They're soft in the middle, crunchy on top and they're always made the same way.
That is, until this week. For some reason this week my 82 year-old grandmother decided to add mustard to her recipe. This confused us all--the mustard wasn't even mixed all the way--all we saw was little blobs of yellow. It sort of looked like curry. Our aunt thought it was melted plastic (our cousin suggested that there was a yellow spatula that melted in the macaroni's). Everyone was talking about it--"What happened to the macaroni's?" "Grandma was looking through recipes and decided to try something different." "Where was she even looking? She doesn't have the internet." Really, you try to pull something like this in my family, and you're going to have a lot of disgruntled people. We like things just the way they've always been. Please don't change the recipe.
1 comment:
Once my mother tried to serve the Thanksgiving mashed potatoes out of a different dish. She said that it wasn't big enough for all the potatoes we'd eat, and that she didn't really like it (the dish) that much anyway).
I'd like to say that I was mature enough not to freak out, but the fact is that I forced her to use the Thanksgiving Mashed Potato Dish.
You can't mess with tradition.
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