by Alyssa Hickman

Writer and historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes about the idea of tracing "female inheritance through recipes." It's an interesting thought, although she finds it has its flaws. However, family recipes certainly have a connection to family history. A simple (and often-told) story about pot roast started me thinking about this connection. In the story, a young bride is preparing pot roast for dinner. Her husband watches as she carefully cuts each end off the roast before putting it in the roasting pan and placing it in the oven.

"Why did you cut the ends off the roast?" he asks.

"I don't know," she replies, "that's just the way my mother taught me." The next time the young woman talks to her mother, she asks about trimming the ends off the pot roast.

"I don't know why," her mother answers, "but that's how your grandmother always did it." On a visit to her grandmother, the young woman asks about the pot roast.

"Oh," replies the grandmother, "I had to do that simply because my roasting pan was too small to fit an entire roast."

Grandma's answer explains the mysterious "cut off the ends" tradition. It also raises the question, Why didn't Grandma have a larger pan? The answer is probably simple enough-perhaps she just never bothered to buy a larger one. On the other hand, a family historian with an active imagination might indulge in a slew of fanciful questions: Were Grandma and her husband too poor to afford new pots and pans? Could they only afford a small home with a tiny kitchen and scanty cupboard space? Had they been forced to jettison a lot of household goods to travel to America or across the plains?

Granted, these questions take a sizeable leap from the starting point of the pot roast story. But they do illustrate how details of a family's history can be linked to what, and how, a family cooks.