Renate Becker

Favorite recipes of My Mother and Grandmothers Renate Becker

This cookbook was assembled for my children. My old Davidis cookbook is printed in German Fraktur font, the pages have yellowed, and the terms are often hard to understand even in modern German.
The recipes I selected were used in my home. Most of the instructions in this cookbook were listed for households that had several kitchen helpers, and they had to prepare the meals from butchering a rabbit, chicken, and deer. It contains social-etiquette suggestions in regard to entertaining tea parties, dances, and great dinners. It lists menus for every day of the year, a simple table, and a rich table.
These instructions were for us children great reading and amusement. However, I can find our recipes easily by the smudged and dog-eared pages. My grandparents had no kitchen helpers. They were of the class of industrial workers. Everyone worked physically hard and needed good nourishment. Both families valued good-quality meals. To celebrate holidays, special dishes and cakes were a custom. And these are the traditional cakes that I introduced. The sauerbraten is the Christmas roast, the stollen is the Christmas bread, and best of all, goodies are the spiced cookies.
In my household, I treasure the simple cooking utensils, dishes, and tablecloth handmade by my mother. Many items are still from the households of my grandmothers, therefore Rhenish pottery. I hope to give a sense of this tradition of a Rhenish household from the 1900s to our modern families.