Svacina Project

I did not grow up eating buttermilk pie, but have seen it consistently ( always passed up until now)  at school bake sales and on family reunion dessert tables or as one of many different gifted pies to teachers at my son's school around Thanksgiving. It is one of those classic Southe rn dishes that Texas Czechs have embraced and recipes for it are included in many community cookbooks. I have actually seen old recipes written by Czech-speaking ladies that spelled the word pie phonetically (in Czech) as paj.  From TasteAtlas.com, I read " The origins of this pie date back to the Depression and WWII, when women used pantry staples and what they had on hand." Of course, living in an apartment in suburban Austin, I never have buttermilk "on hand", but I do use it for some dishes (biscuits, pancakes, marinating fried chicken) after which I may have some leftover. What to do with extra buttermilk? Make pie.  The recipe I used is from Mrs. Joe F. Blinka, Jr. included i

My gorgeous sister holding Easter court in her gorgeous dining room, 2022.   Holiday meals at my sister's house yield ample leftovers to experiment with and our gathering for Easter last Sunday was no exception. We devour the plentiful appetizers, eat meager lunch plates, and then I fill up multiple Tupperware dishes of leftovers. Though there were 11 adults and five teenagers, I came home with ham and the ham hock, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, boiled eggs, most of the mascarpone torta appetizer I made, and most of the strawberry tartlets I made. We were all too stuffed from lunch to eat the three desserts that were there.  My mom's recipe for Strawberry Devonshire Tart prepared as individual tartlets.  I love turning leftovers into other dishes, stretching the work I did into another meal while stretching my culinary creativity muscles so we don't eat the same dish over and over. Like so many other people this week, I will make egg salad or deviled eggs from the Easter e

Photo by Dougal Cormie “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  -William Faulkner  On the west side of Hallettsville in Lavaca County, there’s a large, white house on Highway Alt. 90 that’s been vacant since 2010. It’s my maternal grandparents’ house and my grandmother (our Datu) lived there for over 70 years. (Her husband died in 1979.) My mother (born in 1947) and all her siblings were brought home from the hospital to that house, except my Uncle A. J., who was born inside in June of 1940, when the Lavaca River rose so high, my grandparents couldn’t get to the hospital. Though my grandmother died in 2012, the family still owns the house and has been gathering there ever since. As a complete group, we’ve gotten together only once a year, if that, but smaller groups of us have met there for Easter, for my brother’s 40th birthday, to attend various events in Hallettsville, to retreat from our busy lives for a weekend, or just to visit with each other. In 2019, we held

It's summer in Texas, so tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, okra, and squash are all in abundance. And since it's summer, both my sons are away in different states at the moment, so my ability to cook and eat vegetables to my heart's content is also abundant. I've been scouring community cookbooks, my collection of recipes, and my grandmother's clippings for summer vegetable dishes and pulled out this one from "Molly's Corner ," a column written by Hallettsville native, Molly Pesek. According to her obituary, Molly (1925-1986) was also a correspondent for the Victoria Advocate for some time. She was also the vice president of Pesek Memorial Company, which produced the headstone for my mother's grave in Hallettsville. I don't know if my grandmother knew Molly, but she had clipped many, many of her recipes from the Lavaca County Tribune, some with a Texas-Czech bent, some not. Molly also self-published a cookbook, "Molly's

Happy Fat Tuesday!   In the Czech Catholic tradition, the period of days leading up to Ash Wednesday is called Masupost and is similar to what American Southerners know as Mardi Gras, and Carnival that Brazilians celebrate. It’s a time of food, music, costumes, and revelry before the self denial of Lent, the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter.  An article on the Czech Expats website declares five “sinful” foods to have during Masupost , presumably dishes to gorge on before giving up things like sugar or fried foods during Lent. The list includes koblihy (according to the article’s author, “ Masopust wouldn’t be Masopust without a batch of Czech carnival donuts”), and bozi milosti . These are fried squares or triangles of unleavened dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. My mother made neither of these things, and my aunts don’t remember their mother, my grandmother, making them either. However, in an oral interview done with my grandmother in the 1990s, she remember