Tastes remembered from our mother's kitchens have been an abiding theme of Cook's Corner columns over the past 25 years. My favorites are those that educate as well as endear, and in so doing celebrate the lives of women who warmed our lives with sick-bed chicken soup and after-school brownies.
We've learned a good bit along the way about the homelands of our forebears as we tried recipes for Irish bannock, English toad-in-the-hole, Italian struffoli, Cuban crema de leche, German pletzel and oh-so-many other lovely dishes like readers' moms used to make.
In 1986, for example, we received recipes from all over the country in response to a request for Welsh cookies, which, we learned, were better known as griddle cakes, cooked on top of the stove.
Kathleen Pareira shared a fifth-generation family recipe brought from Wales by her grandfather and passed down to her mother, Bronwyn Medlecot Klinger. ''Holidays would not be holidays without Welsh cakes,'' she wrote.
The recipe had made its way into regional American cooking, we learned, particularly around Scranton, Pa. ''The cookies are a staple in that area, where many Welsh people had settled after immigrating in the early part of the century to work in the coal mines,'' Scranton native Karen Backus told us. ``Many church groups, using their favorite recipes, meet on a regular basis and make mountains of Welsh cookies, which are sold everywhere for a money-maker.''
Childhood birthday cakes have been another popular request. There was ski cake -- so-called because icing flows down the sides like a run on the slopes -- luscious lemon pound, red velvet and, of course, the many whimsically named cakes such as Better than Sex, Sock-It-To-Me and YumYum.
Even more often, though, the dishes were not special-occasion foods but everyday dinnertime fare, taken for granted until Mom wasn't there anymore to make it or had forgotten how. These vividly remembered dishes range from Yankee red flannel hash to Southern corn pudding, fried green tomatoes to Lyonnaise potatoes, Polish stuffed cabbage to Nicaraguan red beans and rice.
Many of the recipes harken to leaner times, when wasting even a scrap of food was unfathomable. So stale bread was turned into dumplings, leftover mashed potatoes into rolls and the morning's uneaten oatmeal into chocolate cake.
I hope the sampling of recipes here will help us all remember our apron-clad heroes.
