Family Recipes

The past couple of days in Los Angeles have been cold (by Los Angeles standards) and rainy. And I think that’s what prompted Jackson to ask if we could make rice pudding. Good rice pudding feels cozy and we needed a little of that.

I told him he could make it, but only if he used his great-great-great grandmother Bertha’s recipe.

I’ve made that once before, during Covid, when everyone was making bread and comfort food as we burrowed in our homes wondering how long we’d have to wait out the pandemic. Back then, I told Jackson and Charlie stories about their ancestors and how resilient they’d been. I told those stories for myself as much as I did for the boys.

My great-grandmother Clara had nine children - eight boys and a girl - and then her husband died in the middle of the Great Depression, and two of her children came down with polio. One of the girls with polio was my Grandma June. (She would give RFK Jr. an earful.)

My great aunt Iva used to tell me about living on the farm during the Dust Bowl, and when the wind storms came, they would stuff wet towels around the windows and they would still end up with a thick layer of dust everywhere, and Iva would put wet sheets over the table and then put her baby and toddler under the table to try to protect them from the dust.

And my great-great grandma Bertha (two greats for me, three for the boys) left her family in Kansas when she was nineteen, just six months after her baby Opal died, and she and her husband Dorsey rode horses and wagons and walked until they reach the Cherokee Strip - a narrow piece of land between Kansas and Oklahoma - and lived in their wagon until they could build a sod house.

And as I told Jackson and Charlie these stories during the pandemic, I pulled out the Hutchins Family Cookbook. It was typed on a typewriter, with a black plastic binder like the ones used for school projects in the 80s. Each recipe features the name of the dish and the contributer. Most of the recipes are dishes that were somewhat modern at the time, including lots of jello salads and casseroles. But I knew that some of Bertha’s recipes were in there too, and once I found the rice pudding, I knew we had to make it. And though it was delicious, we hadn’t made it since.

So last night, Jackson and I made the rice pudding again, this time adding a little vanilla and substituting ground cloves for nutmeg, and it was the perfect companion on a cold rainy day. I bet it tasted even better in a sod house during the rain.