My analysis is that you can, in fact, go home again, but most people don’t want to. As for Grandma, she’s just as likely to be remembered warmly for her corned-beef salad (chopped corned beef in lemon Jell-O) as for her perfect molasses cookies. Her beef stroganoff with ketchup gets a fond mention, too. Once, memorably, she offers a batch of head cheese made from the head and tongue of a hog. Mom turns up in community cookbooks with a pan of noodle pudding now and then. So many other experts have bombarded us in recent decades, especially via television and the Internet, that the once-indomitable power of home cooking as a lifelong standard appears to be much diminished. Either way, it’s not clear how much influence they still wield in our kitchens. They’re the ones who discovered and deployed shortcut ingredients long ago, some of them with reluctance and considerable finesse, others with the joyful abandon of a prisoner released from a lifetime sentence. Grandma and mom are elusive figures in these books.
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