These recipes come from my own family: my great-grandmothers, my grandmothers, and sometimes my parents. Some are on worn recipe cards and scraps of paper, and some are dishes my parents still make. Each one comes with its story and a version you can make today.
Some of my grandmother's cards are a list and a prayer. This one is not. It's two full sides, front and back, with every amount and every step, right down to a warning that the buttermilk "will look curdled." It reads like someone was standing next to you in the kitchen.
This card is the opposite of the German cabbage one. My grandmother wrote down every amount: two cups of sweet potatoes, two eggs, three quarters of a cup each of sugar and milk, a teaspoon of allspice, and a quarter stick of butter. What she didn't write down was what to do with them. I guess she didn't need to.
Some of my grandmother's recipe cards are very detailed, with every measurement written out. Others are more like a reminder to herself. This is one of those. It lists five ingredients and gives three short instructions: layer it, cook it till tender, salt it. She didn't need more than that because she'd made it so many times.
My mom's cranberry horseradish sauce is sweet and tart and sharp all at the same time, and the sharp part is why it works. Fresh cranberries cook down with sugar and brown sugar until they pop. Then the pan has to cool all the way down before any horseradish goes in. That order matters more than anything else here, and I'll get into why in a minute.
There's a card in my grandmother's handwriting for cheese biscuits, and it is almost aggressively complete.
My great-grandmother owned a copy of the Huntsville Heritage Cookbook, and she used it. It's a brown hardback with a gold embossed hearth on the cover, published in 1967 by the Grace Club Auxiliary of Huntsville, Alabama, printed locally by Hicklin Printing Company, with the proceeds going to charity.