When I asked readers and friends to share their recipes with a history, I wasn’t sure if anyone would respond. Well, I was mistaken!

I’ve received so many wonderful recipes, each with a family story of its own, that I’ve decided to make Recipes with a History a monthly feature. Once a month, I’ll share one recipe and the family history that comes with it.

Thank you to everyone who has already sent in a recipe….and please keep them coming! If you have a treasured family recipe with a story behind it, I’d love to hear from you.

For this month, I couldn’t have imagined a better recipe with which to begin.

This one comes from my longtime friend Judy MacWilliams. It began with her grandmother, Ida Gibson, who passed it to Judy’s mother, Lil Morgan, and then down through the women of the family. By Judy’s estimate, the recipe is about a hundred years old.

A hundred years!

Think of all the hands that have pulled beets from the earth, peeled and sliced them, filled hot jars for winter, and placed them on family tables at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

That’s exactly what I hoped Recipes with a History would be about. Not simply the food we make, but the people we remember when we make it.

Recipe: Sweet Beets

Judy’s Family Story: We were a family of farmers and watermen. We lived off the land and the sea. Every year, we planted a huge garden. Growing vegetables and preserving them for winter was a necessity because we did not live near a grocery store. Grown from seeds, beets are ready when they practically burst through the dirt. Similar to carrots, they are a root vegetable with green tops that can be eaten in salads.

Why It Matters to Her: We would dig the beets or pull them out of the dirt. Mom would wash them and then boil them until they were tender enough to pierce with a fork. After peeling and cooling them, Mom would make the pickling sauce. She canned most of the beets for the winter. Because of their vibrant red color, beets were always served at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners and on special occasions.

As I make the recipe, I remember being in our family home, with no air conditioning back then, preparing the hot jars for canning and peeling and slicing all those beets. We worked all day preparing the jars for winter. My hands would be red by the end of the day. Maybe that’s where the expression “red as a beet” came from!

Passed Down Through: Ida Gibson, Bushwood, Maryland → Lil Morgan, Bushwood, Maryland → Judy MacWilliams and Debbie Morgan Nisson, Southern Maryland → Amy MacWilliams Schisler, St. Michaels, Maryland