It’s that time of year when you go digging through the back of your recipe box for those old traditional family favorites. A lot of times, those recipes come with great holiday stories to boot. Here’s a few that Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards collected from our listeners.
We start with Shay Howlin from Laramie:
Shay Howlin: My story is actually about two recipes. My mom is a great cook, everybody would agree. One recipe that she has is called Old South Eggnog – and it's delicious. It is about a third egg whites, a third egg yolks, and a third whipped cream, full of sugar, rum and bourbon. It's all whipped together, and it's this frothy, foamy goodness covered in a little nutmeg.
Every Christmas Eve, we would have Old South Eggnog. One Christmas Eve, when I was home from college – and you know how you're homesick when you're away from college, missing your mom's food – I came home from college one year, and my sister and I used to work in the mall over the holidays. So we're exhausted. We come home Christmas Eve, and there's the bowl on the counter.
The Old South Eggnog is always served in this big punch bowl. And she serves it in these little tiny cups, like crystal, about one inch. They look like mugs, but they're like one inch tall. Not me though. I go over and I get a big old glass, and I get the ladle and I stir the eggnog because it separates a little bit. I stir it up and I pour myself a big glass of this eggnog and I take a sip. It wasn't the eggnog! That's where the other recipe comes into this story. Yeast waffles!
They also come frothy in a big punch bowl. If you read the recipe, you'll note that we let it rise overnight on the counter and it's a Christmas morning recipe. Both excellent recipes, but only one of them do you want to drink out of a glass!
Melodie Edwards: Here's another recipe that’s secret ingredient is also spirits. It’s from Tim Fennell in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Tim Fennell: What we make is a chocolate covered cherry with a kick. What we do is take Maraschino cherries, drain them and then soak them in whatever you want to soak them in. We normally soak them in Captain Morgan's. The longer you soak them, the more kick they'll have. We typically soak them for about a month. We take them out of that, and we let them set for a little while on a paper towel. Then we dip them in melted chocolate, whatever you prefer: milk chocolate, dark chocolate. We prefer dark chocolate. I try to get cherries that have the stem on them, and then when you dip them in the chocolate we set them in a pan and they're finger food. So that's what we like to make for Christmas.
ME: Ana Castro grew up in Jackson. She remembers this Christmas recipe.
Ana Castro: Ponche is traditional to Mexico in Posadas, an eight-day celebration that happens in Mexico City and sometimes in other parts of Latin America. People go in the streets and it's a lot like caroling. There are specific songs that people sing to their neighbors. The children are all in the street and there's fireworks and lights.
Ponche is like a mulled punch. Some people will put alcohol in it, but for the most part, there's no alcohol in it. It has things like sugar cane and oranges and pears and apples. It has very specific fruit, but the big, big part of it is the sugar canes.
Growing up, my cousins and I would fight for the sugar canes, because there's only a limited amount. If you got one, you would just take it out of your cup and you can suck the fruit punch out of it. It's so fun. It's so delicious. And then you chew on the sugar cane. It's sugary. It's got so much flavor. What kid wouldn't love it?
ME: And here's Jeanne Koschnitzki from Laramie with a Lithuanian recipe.
Jeanne Koschnitzki: The recipe is called latkes. I think it's like a Jewish tradition. However, in Lithuania, it also was a tradition with our family back in the Old Country, so to speak. When my grandparents came over from Lithuania, they continued the tradition for having latkes or potato pancakes on Christmas Eve. That was part of our Christmas Eve tradition before we went to midnight mass.
It's basically grated potatoes with milk and eggs and a few little spices in there, and then they're fried. Back in the day, they were fried in lard, which gave them a very distinct flavor. As a child, I remember having to peel pounds and pounds of potatoes because I lived with my grandmother. The Christmas Eve tradition was always held at grandma and grandpa's house.
In our tradition, they were kind of flatter and thinner, more crispy. The traditional was always sour cream and applesauce were the choices [for toppings]. It kind of evolved over the course of time. We started doing a little research on what other cultures used for their toppings for potato pancakes. You could substitute cream cheese for the sour cream and add capers and smoked salmon. Pears and blue cheese was another topping. Our traditional Christmas Eve thing was borscht, the latkes and some type of smoked fish. If we were going to do salmon on it, that would be it. But more likely we would have herring.
Standing next to my grandmother was just kind of fun. I remember having to stand on a chair to be able to reach the stove. So I was probably maybe five or six when I started doing it with her. We both wore aprons, doing it together. At the time, we would speak in Lithuanian, back and forth. So that was a real treasured memory.
Special thanks to Uppbeat creators for use of their music:
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/elves-workshop License code: DIKDVWPZAKWAI9VA
https://uppbeat.io/t/ra/snowy-road License code: BPAM9ETPSHLBWZAW
https://uppbeat.io/t/dan-barracuda/greensleeves License code: EGLXBI2SCNV3PFQR
