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Over the weekend I spent sometime working on the new blog — the Valentine Cookbook Blog — and, as I was entering the recipes that have been made thousands of times by women in my family, I realized that the three primary ingredients in most of them are things I no longer eat — shortening, white flour, and sugar. It’s kind of amazing really. All the things I loved as a child and have made many, many times as an adult, are now no longer part of my life. Great Aunt Mary’s keuchels, Gram’s mincemeat tarts and apple dumplings, all of Mom’s breads and cakes are composed of shortening (or margarine), white flour, and sugar. Those three ingredients constitute the mainstay of much of good old fashioned Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. And now we find out they are bad for us. How did we all survive?

Actually, I think that about a lot of things. One of the things we most loved when I was a kid was riding in the back of Dad’s truck. All the neighborhood kids would pile into the back of the truck and Dad would drive us around the neighborhood and sometimes as far as the airport where we could watch the little planes come and go. Boy, we thought that was grand entertainment. Nobody ever fell out. But today my Dad would be in jail for that.

We loved to sleep outside in the summer, too. We’d pitch a pup tent down in the field below the house, build a big fire and roast potatoes and hot dogs on a stick and tell stories until our mothers screamed out the window at us to shut up and go to sleep. Nobody ever fell in the fire or poked anyone in the eye with a burning stick or got kidnapped or lost. No parents were ever reported to DSS for negligence.

Later when we were a little older we liked to sleep in the woods across the street. We did that all the time —sometimes there would be three or four tents of kids — the Valentines and the McMackins and the Olsons and the DeLullos. Nobody ever got eaten by a bear or feel in the creek and drowned or anything like that. Our dog once got squirted by a skunk but that was all. We all survived.

I think about these things now and I wonder what in the hell ever happened in the world. Did the world just get so dangerous that we can’t let kids do such things anymore or did all our precautions and safety devices make people become more careless and less protective of one another? I wonder which came first.

It’s the same with the food. Sure, we ate lots of flour and fat and sugar. But we played outside all day and we walked a half mile to school and back every day and over a mile when we got into high school. And we had chores. I wonder today if kids have chores.

I can remember every Saturday my chore was to sweep down the steps to the laundry room, gather up the rugs and take them outside and give them a good shake and then sweep out the laundry room. It took about half an hour if I stayed with it but most mornings it was a couple hours before I got it done. Lolly-gagging was part of the process. But no one ever accused my mother of being abusive for making me do that. They were too busy trying to get their own kids to do their particular chores.

From the time I was old enough to handle utensils I helped with the bread-baking and the jam-making and the pickling and all the other homey chores people did back then. I learned to mend socks, sew buttons on, repair hems, and iron. Sometimes a bunch of girls from the neighborhood would sit on the front porch and gab while we did our mending. Nobody sewed their fingers together or bled all over the socks. When did we stop trusting we could do these things?

So working on the cookbook is good. It reminds me of how it was. I don’t know if it will ever be that way again but I have hopes for the generation of young women who love to sew and knit and bake. I record our recipes for them. May they raise children with memories as fond as mine.

Thanks for reading.