CHILLICOTHE― Adrienne D’Souza is a lifelong dwelling cook dinner and baker who has spent a few years replicating household recipes from her childhood. Now, she’s engaged on documenting recipes for her daughter and two grandchildren.
Earlier than she was the president of the Ross County NAACP and an worker on the Chillicothe and Ross Public Library, D’Souza grew up cooking together with her mom Anne Wilson Robinson. She fondly remembers spending Sundays within the kitchen together with her mother and making particular meals when company visited.
Regardless of numerous conventional household dishes like cornbread dressing, candy potato fries, collard greens and rum cake, the household didn’t write down recipes. Robinson stated her mom by no means used a measuring cup or a cookbook. She additionally by no means wrote down a recipe.
Whereas making dishes she remembered from her childhood, D’Souza remembers asking her mom for specifics on how a lot of every ingredient to make use of in every dish. Her query was usually met with the reply “simply do what feels proper.”
“It wasn’t that recipes have been written down. It was extra of we noticed and we requested questions after which through the years recipes obtained perfected,” D’Souza stated.
D’Souza stated she did not begin making an attempt to make sure dishes till she was in her 40s as a result of she was scared she would not have the ability to make them the best way her grandmother made would. She stated some recipes, just like the cornbread dressing, took many days of trial and error to good it. After remaking the identical dish many occasions, Robinson agreed that D’Souza’s cornbread dressing lastly tasted good.
“I used to be afraid that I wasn’t going to have the ability to stay as much as how my grandmother had mounted it and the way my mother had mounted it,” D’Souza stated.
Now that she has two grandchildren, she paperwork how she creates the household dishes to remove any future guesswork.
One household specialty that has been handed down by way of the generations is a particular yellow cake with chocolate icing that was first made by D’Souza’s great-grandmother. In the present day, the dessert is considered one of her grandchildren’s favorites.
D’Souza cooks and bakes together with her grandchildren, passing down her household traditions to the subsequent technology. Now at any time when D’Souza makes a brand new recipe, she makes certain to make an observation to verify she will be able to move the directions on to her daughter or grandchildren.
Megan Becker is a reporter for the Chillicothe Gazette. Name her at 740-349-1106, electronic mail her at mbecker@gannett.com or comply with her on Twitter @BeckerReporting
