Shared by my high school friend, Kathy Kocak Gordon, who enjoyed a wonderful career in the Foodservice Division of Heinz in Pittsburgh, where she established the Heinz University Training and Culinary Center. The center was used to educate Heinz employees and customers through hands-on training, demonstrations, product sampling and testing, and recipe development.

Kathy’s Family Story: This is a special recipe that’s been handed down in my Slovak family. My mom “lived” in her kitchen and, after many, many trials and tweaks, came up with this version, which became her “go-to.”

She dictated this recipe to me about 30 years ago, and I included it in a cookbook our church was working on at the time. I’ve made it several times. It’s a good bit of work and makes enough for a large crowd!

The recipe takes two to three heads of cabbage, depending on their size. As a result of all her experimenting, my mom came up with three essential rules:

1. Never fully brown the ground beef. It cooks inside the cabbage rolls.
2. Always use River brand rice.
3. Use canned tomato juice for the sauce.

Why It Matters to Me:

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my mom was making memories, not just food. Now that she is gone, we all cherish those special memories. She loved to cook for people and put a lot of that love into whatever she was making, whether it was a Slovak specialty passed down from her mother or recreating the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve (we lived in an all-Italian neighborhood). Her curiosity and interest in food definitely influenced me.

Passed Down Through:

Grandma Irene Kocak → daughter Kathy Kocak Gordon → her children and grandson. My kids and my oldest grandson love it, and I’ve had them make it alongside me so they can learn how to prepare it.

“The contours of the story will be familiar to many,” Alexandra Lawrence wrote in The Florentine about LIFETIME. “A young woman, Carmela, leaves her poor village in southern Italy at the turn of the century to join her husband in America… The first generation refuses the culture of their parents, while the second embrace it, even returning to the homeland to pay homage and connect to their familial roots.”

For me, that journey began with my grandmother, Carmela, my north star and harbor in difficult times. Carmela and my mother, Laura, never got along, nor did my mother and I. Yet both were extraordinary grandmothers. I’ve often wondered why love sometimes seems to skip a generation.

As a child, I questioned my nonna endlessly about Rotondella, but she rarely spoke of her past. “They are no good stories. Go away with these ideas.”

Years later, when my life went off the rails, I traveled alone to Rotondella. I needed to touch the ground, smell the smells, and taste the foods she had cooked for me. There, I found family and began to understand not only Carmela but also Laura, a young woman desperate to be American and free of the constraints of her parents’ world. I began to see how Rotondella had shaped all three of us.

As Alexandra concludes, “The real drama, however, lies not in what happened, but in how the truth brings us to a place of love and forgiveness able to cross time and space—able to hold pain but also to be the antidote and the healing cure.”

Can the land of our ancestors heal us? I don’t know if it can for everyone, but Rotondella changed the way I understood my grandmother, my mother, and ultimately myself.

I’ve received many wonderful recipes and family stories for this series, and I thank everyone who has contributed. I’ll continue sharing one each month.

Cindy Martin Marshall, a high school friend of mine, shared this story, and it cracks me up.

Her mother, Nancy Ryan, was Irish and only seventeen years old when she married into an Italian family. At the time, marrying outside your nationality was a big deal.

Nancy’s Irish mother was so unhappy about her daughter marrying an Italian that she wore black to the wedding.

And although this happened in an Irish family, I can SO imagine the same scene playing out in an Italian one. My Nonna Carmela was shocked that I was marrying a German Presbyterian! She told me that she thought I should marry an Italian doctor.

Cindy’s story also demonstrates the strength of culture and tradition. While Nancy’s Irish mother was mourning the marriage, her new Italian mother-in-law welcomed the young bride into the family and taught her how to cook Italian food. And like all Italian mammas who are devoted to their sons, she was determined to make sure he would eat well!

This is why I love receiving these recipes. They tell us so much more than what people ate. They connect us to the people who came before us and remind us where we came from.

Recipe: Spaghetti and Meatballs
Published in a Pittsburgh newspaper, June 1956

Cindy’s Family Story: My paternal grandmother, Ernestine, was born in Vastogirardi, Italy, and my grandfather, Frank Martin, was born in Alvito, Frosinone, Lazio, Italy. When my Italian grandparents arrived on Ellis Island from Italy, they changed my grandfather’s name from Martini to Martin.  

Why It Matters to Me: My mother, Nancy Ryan, was Irish and only seventeen years old when my parents married. At that time, marrying outside your nationality was a no-no. As an example, my Irish grandmother even wore black to my parents’ wedding. Luckily, my Italian grandmother took my mother under her wing and taught her how to cook Italian food.

Passed Down Through: Our entire Martin family. In fact, our family has a Facebook group called “Martin Family Recipes,” where family members scattered across the United States post recipes and share updates as they research our heritage.

Mr Lagakos, Pam, cousin Maria, and cousin Kanellos

Every once in a while, something happens during a book talk that knocks my socks off.  Recently, it happened again.

After one of my presentations, Pam Chaconas came up to me and said, “I felt as though I could finish your sentences.” She, too, had gone back to her ancestral village and found family she never knew she had.

Her family was Greek, her village was Kaminia, and the similarities in our stories were uncanny.

In 2002, Pam and her husband traveled to Greece looking for Kaminia, the village in the Peloponnese her grandmother Evangeline had left some eighty years earlier.

When they arrived, they stopped at a taverna where several men were drinking coffee. Pam’s husband explained in Greek that his wife’s Yia Yia had come from Kaminia and that they were looking for the Politis family.

Pam was holding a photograph of her grandmother.

One of the men, Mr. Lagakos, took one look at the photo and immediately called out the name, “Evangeline Politis.” Then he motioned for them to follow him.

He led them to a stone house surrounded by olive trees and called out to the people inside. A man and woman, Kanellos and Maria, appeared. After a flurry of conversation in Greek that Pam couldn’t understand, it became clear that these were the relatives she had come so far to find.

Kanellos walked toward her with his arms outstretched.

There were hugs. Laughter. Tears.

Then Kanellos went into the house and returned holding an old photograph. It was a photograph of Pam and her sister as children!

Evangeline had left this tiny Greek village eighty years earlier. Pam had never met these people. Yet they had kept a photograph of her and her sister.

They hadn’t forgotten.

As I listened to Pam, I realized that the desire to find our roots is more universal than I had imagined. It’s far bigger than genealogy. It’s about standing where your grandmother once stood, walking the roads she walked, seeing the mountains she saw, and meeting people who still remember the family name generations later.

Maybe we don’t go back simply to discover where they came from.

Maybe we go back because we are trying to understand where we came from.

Note: If you’ve read LIFETIME or Stay Close, please consider writing a review on Amazon or Goodreads. I’d love for LIFETIME to be translated into Italian as was done with STAY CLOSE, and reviews make a difference. Thanks for considering. 

My older brother with my sons, 2007

Throughout my book talks about It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live, one thing seems to resonate with people more than almost anything else: when someone dies, their memories die with them.

I hear it again and again. I wish I had asked my mother. I wish I had listened more closely to my grandfather. I wish I knew that story.

We always think there will be more time.

When we’re young, we don’t always care about the stories. We’re busy living our own lives. But then we get older. We have children and grandchildren of our own, and suddenly we want to know. Not just the names and dates we can find through genealogy, but the stories. Who were these people? What did they love? Why did they leave? What did they bring with them? We begin to wonder where we came from and who came before us.

And sometimes, by the time we think to ask, there is no one left who knows the answers.

I am one of those people who wants to know the stories. I didn’t set out to become the keeper of our family’s memories, but somewhere along the way, that is partly what happened. And since writing Lifetime, nieces, nephews, and cousins have thanked me for preserving pieces of our family’s history they never knew.

I hope this entry encourages you to safeguard some of your family’s memories. It has never been easier. Record yourself, write down the story behind an old photograph, buy one of those memory books and fill it in, or use technology to turn your recorded memories into something written.

Because somewhere in every family, there is someone who is the last person who remembers.

Maybe that person is you.

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