I cannot recommend The Momfood Project too highly. It is in the form of a blog or series of articles about food that your mom (yeah, it’s American: here it would be called “The Mumfood Project”…) used to make and that you affectionately remember and try to consciously continue to make and pass along to your own offspring or friends. I’ve already contributed a link to Mother Hansen’s Chicken Stew to them.
Some food isn’t strictly speaking “momfood”. Your mom might have cooked it at some point, but to her it was really momfood, as her own mother cooked it. Thus, to you it’s granfood (or, in the UK, nanfood).
New England is full of such foods. People there pass along recipes from generation to generation. Something that’s successful once continues down the decades as each generation’s mom replicates the recipes that her mom used to cook for her. Occasionally some dishes fall out of fashion. Who cooks Indian Pudding nowadays? People who crave it go to Durgin Park Restaurant in Boston! (Beware of badly-designed website: the “turn off the music button is at the upper-right-hand corner) and the menu link in the middle is delayed so that no menu appears until a few seconds after you click it, but I digress…) The Baked Indian Pudding is $5.95 at Durgin Park, by the way.
About a year ago I came across a recipe for Grapenut Pudding. It is the New England response to rice puddings of all kinds. Grapenuts, of course, refers to the Post cereal which consists of nuggets of wheat that are hard as rocks in the box. When soaked in hot water then doused with milk and sugar, they make a passable breakfast cereal. My mother didn’t like it as a cereal very much, so we only had it at my maternal grandparents’ house when we holidayed there every summer. We thought it was “grownup food”, but I think my grandmother believed that it was good for digestion (pardon my euphemism). If you didn’t soak the cereal in warm/hot water, then drain it and put cold milk on it, the individual nuggets were hard enough to seriously threaten your tooth integrity.
The only thing my mother ever did with Grapenuts is make pudding with them. This is a detail supplied by my brother, oddly enough; I have no recollection of ever having had this dish at home or at any time in my childhood. He assured me, however, that she used to make it often. So it must be true. I guess it’s now possible to make and eat momfood without actually recalling any occasion that your own mother actually cooked it.
I associate Grapenuts with my grandmother, which is why this is “granfood”. It’s basically a custard that is thickened and extended with Grapenuts cereal. I add raisins to it, but otherwise have left the recipe untouched.
Grapenut Pudding
Yield: 6 servings
1 quart milk, scalded
1 cup Grape-Nuts cereal
4 large eggs
1/2 cup sugar (I use Splenda as you can cook with it and I am diabetic)
1 tablespoon vanilla
Pinch of salt
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1/2 cup raisins (optional)
Whole nutmeg
Water
Heat oven to 350
must be yummy. hehe ..I am hungry
It was yummy…there is still 2/3rds left so we have dessert for two more nights.