This post is a response to the Ancestors Ball Blog Party.
We're approaching the holiday season, beginning now with our modernized holiday of Halloween. It's roots are much different, being the time of rememberence of our ancestors and the loved ones we've lost. In the very olden days, this was a special, spirit filled time when the veil between our world and the spirit grew thin and we could feel each other's presences more clearly.
I've been spending almost all my free time recently working with my sister on our family trees. Ancestry has been important in our families and we're lucky because both sets of grandparents had research that we've been able to work with. Unfortunately, enough of it has been discovered to be inaccurate that now it's left to us, my sister and I, with the advantages the Internet provides researchers, to straighten things out.
No matter many names and dates I find, I still wonder what their daily lives were like. Especially the women. We think women today shoulder most of the burden of homemaking and childrearing. I shudder to imagine my great,great grandmothers' lives. I wonder a lot about the meals they prepared. I have this fantasy that one day a handwritten recipe book belonging to one of my great grandmothers or aunts will appear on Ebay and I'll win it.
This is my great grandmother, Flora. She taught school before she married. She may have been a bit unusual in her day, not because she was a teacher but because she did not marry until she was 28 years old. I met her when I was five. Photos preserved the day, but I wish I could remember it. The black and white photo is her on that day, aged 85.
A few recipes and family traditions have survived through my mother's family. One of them most of us wish would have never begun, yet in reality it is very likely the most important of them all because it ties generations together across time.
Jello has been popular since its introduction in the early 1900's. But it wasn't until 1930 and the introduction of the lime flavor that this ghastly tradition began. Although I don't really know when Flora began making this "treat", our family history, as passed to us by my mother, is that the dreaded green jello salad was made as a special treat for visiting family. What made it special....prepare yourselves.... marachino cherries ...ok, not so bad..... American cheese bits.....getting worse...and OLIVES!
Mom would make this "treat" every Thanksgiving and Christmas, lovingly bringing it to the table each holiday with the story of her grandma making it and loving it as a child. (I think they had not yet discovered real food at that time.) As you can imagine, children in the late 1960's weren't nearly as enamored of lime jello "salad" as a child in the 1940's obviously was!
I grew up thinking this was a distinctly Flora Tollman creation. Recently, I have discovered how completely wrong I was. It seems as though someone in the corporate Jello kitchens decided that through the war years, lime would be the perfect vehicle to enable homemakers to use up bits and pieces of their non-rationed foods to perk up their meals. How ingenious.
Jello concoctions became almost patriotic, in their own way, and certainly allowed Mom to give the family a little treat. I also think they musth have had lower expectations back then about what qualified as a treat.
So that explains the beginning of the very strange combination of ingredients. But it doesn't explain why Jello kept at it through the 50's and 60's!
So now I know truthfully, my great-grandmother wasn't just being frugal, she probably was considered downright fashionable to be serving a weirdly colored jiggling mass of suspended bits of artificially colored food. Cool.
What I also know now is something more profound. My mother, who is in her late 70's, continues to make this, even though she is the only one who eats it. Really, she only has a couple of bites and is done with it. But that's not why she makes it. She makes it and brings it to the table in order to suddenly become transformed into a six year old little girl, thrilled to be having dinner at her elegant grandmother's formal table. When my mother sees the glistening greenness, I believe she sees the shining eyes of her grandmother and for an instant, feels the sense of belonging, security and love that you only get when a heartstring is tied.
And I leave you now, Wendelynn, daughter of Jolene, who is the daughter of Clara, who is the daughter of Flora who is the daughter of Fredericka. In this season of remembering our ancestors, I hope you'll find something that ties your heartstrings too.
Start by pounding the heck out of a sleeve of Ritz crackers. If you're really careful, you can do it and keep them in the sleeve. I hate clean-up, so I go for careful rather than full on aggression soothing attack on the cackers. I love, love, love my Pampered Chef weapon of mass destruction. I thought it was a little pricey when I ordered it, but no longer. It's very well balanced and heavy enough to pound anything into submission. You're going for medium size crumbs here. Set them aside when you're done. 
You'll also need about a dozen raw shrimp. Get the biggest one's you can afford. I have been know to do this with even salad shrimp, but it's so much better with larger ones. Thaw them ( Nebraska, remember?) and remove any shells. Here's where I betray my New England roots and toss in a Baltimore twist. 
Sprinkle about 2 Tablespoons of Old Bay Seasoning on the raw shrimp. Add 1 teaspoon of garlic powder. Squeeze on the juice of half a lemon. Mix them all together and let the shrimp marinade in this spicy goodness for at least an hour. 
Set your oven to 350. Grease a couple of ramekins, or a pie plate. I have nice 8oz ramekins, but trust me, no one is going to care what you cook these beauties in! Just try to not have them layered too thickly in the vessel. Put the raw seafood in the baking dish. Add a couple healthy splashes of white wine or sherry. If you want to be really adventurous, you could add some crispy peppered bacon crumbles to the seafood. I wouldn't complain one little bit. ( Don't tell anyone north of Hartford, but I've done it and it was awesome!) Set the dishes aside for now. 
Cut the orange, rind and all, into 8 segments. You don't have to be fanatical about it, but try to get them pretty evenly sized. And yes, I really mean the rind... I promise it will not kill you. Really. 
Place 4 orange segments and about half of the raw cranberries into a food processor. If you don't have a super spiffy food processor, you can do with with an old fashioned food grater, but if I were you and I wanted to make this, I'd go splurge on a food processor....even the tiny little ones will do this job. You'll just have to work in smaller batches. Alternatively, you might as well sit down with the old food box grater and watch the parade while you shred your fingertips.
When the first half is processed, repeat with the remaining orange sections and cranberries. Move all the goodies into a bowl. As you can see, I am quite partial to this gigantic measuring cup. 
