Svacina Project

I've recently been looking through Sean N. Gallup's wonderful book Journeys into Czech-Moravian Texas  (Texas A&M University Press, 1998) at the same time I've been looking through photos I took of my mom's last months. She passed away in January of this year. On page 83 of the book, Gallup has a poignant photo of small boy only a few years younger than my youngest son (at left). In the text under the photo, Gallup wrote "Trey [Ging] will likely never learn to speak more than a few words of Czech, and though the culture may remain evident in the values that guide him later in life, one can only wonder if he will retain his sense of connection to a Texas-Czech ethnic and personal identity." These words were in my head as I looked at photos from my mom's last Thanksgiving dinner. My family and my sister-in-law's family joined at the home of my brother and his wife in Houston. There was absolutely nothing Czech about our meal, I'll say right up

Looking through a box of recipes that my grandmother saved from local newspapers, I found a directive for dinner from Emily (Smolik) Buckert, who wrote the longtime Good Taste column in the Victoria Advocate beginning in the 1960s... "Now is a good time to return to the old fashioned goodness of pork chops and some of the dishes that grandmother served," she wrote before offering a recipe for Pork Steaks with Kraut. I absolutely agree, I thought. Now is the time. I made a date to spend last Saturday morning with my friend Lori at the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market and then Central Market looking for ingredients. Lori and I do what I imagine my grandmother did with her neighbors... share surplus produce or dishes we made too much of. Or we test new recipes on each other to get a second opinion. We're thinking about hosting a dinner party together soon, so have been talking a lot about food lately, especially food in the Texas  Czech community and what our grandmothe