When my family gathers around the table this Thanksgiving, they will be seated on some very old chairs. They’ll also be passing the gravy from an ancient table that’s served my family since the 1890s.
I’m mentioning this to take exception to the idea that children and descendants don’t want their family furniture, china, silver and other stuff. I say, yes they do, under the right circumstances. Find a place to mothball it and sooner or later someone will say, “I’ll take it.” Maybe.
This year I found a new home for a set of 1956 china that’s made a couple of moves to keep it in the family. My niece Katie Whaley, who’s bought her first house in Binghamton, New York, said yes to my offer. Her car left my house a lot heavier than when it arrived.
I’m also planning to make an open offer to all those present. What do you want here? What appeals? Take it today or I’ll put your name on it. And don’t hold back with requests.
Some 13 years ago, when my father died, we had to settle his estate and clean out the old Guilford Avenue house where the extended family had resided since before World War I. This was a big place, one of those three-story plus cavernous cellar made-in-Baltimore brick piles.
At that time, there were six Kelly siblings living. I pulled out a composition notebook and we went through the place, room by room. We didn’t leave much behind until it came to the big elephant — that dining room set: a table, six chairs, a huge sideboard and a china cabinet.
(There was actually a small zoo of plaster and metal elephants because my great-grandfather was an ardent, old-fashioned Republican.)
The dining room set was bound for the auctioneers until a notion popped into my head. Why should it disappear? Yes, it’s big and heavy and far from stylish, but it has something else. It’s been a part of the family since my great-great-grandparents’ era.
It started its life when my family lived on North Broadway, near North Avenue, in the 1890s.
I sold off my dining room set I’d assembled in the 1970s and once it was gone, it was largely forgotten. But the old set, the one I’d known as a child, the one my siblings and their children recognized, owned the memories. These were the pieces where we gathered for all the family birthdays and the big holidays.
I found a good furniture restorer who agreed to take on these heavy mahogany pieces. After six weeks, the movers brought them to my house, polished and looking great, liberated from years of the paste wax my grandmother and her sisters applied.
The old furniture likely looked better in the home where I grew up. The dining room had parquet floors and a beamed ceiling and looked every minute of 1914, when that Guilford Avenue house was new. My dining room is not so fancy, but most everything fit.
We Kellys keep so much stuff. And the family rule is, when someone dies, the possessions go back into a kind of family treasures pool.
A few years ago, another niece, Elizabeth Wright, accepted my mother’s extra fancy china. That leaves about three or four sets (many just partial, but with the all-important dinner plates) awaiting takers. The family’s own home-styled china department store has plenty of inventory, perhaps because we are always discovering something we didn’t know existed.
The chairs, tables and china are just one component of Thanksgiving. What about the food? It’s got to taste like 1960 and that’s a tall order. The old recipes often died with the cook. My grandmother, Lily Rose, and her sister, my great-aunt Cora, were spectacular Baltimore cooks who sought no attention and just made sure their household of 12 ate well. Oh, so well.
I’ve been torturing my sauerkraut for years trying to duplicate theirs. This year I stocked up on pork shoulder in an effort to try to nail that just-so flavor. I’m also doing a fail-safe Sussex County, Delaware version (not Baltimore at all) that came into the family via a marriage and a Daughters of the American Revolution cookbook.
The family co-matriarchs generally had no written recipes, although Aunt Cora was an accomplished newspaper recipe clipper if she thought something looked worthy. Her recipe for macaroni and cheese would have been lost to the ages were it not for a family friend who brilliantly watched the process and painstakingly wrote it down 65 years ago.
The recipe came to me about 40 years ago and when I reproduced the dish, my family agreed it was the right taste and the real thing. Then they disputed the directions!
This year we vow to re-create our fabled Christmas cookies. The recipe, in my grandmother’s hand, does exist by a miracle.
This one is simple but it makes huge quantities of no-frills buttery cookies. We’ve got to locate a 1920s device, a type of dough gun with a crank handle, to make the long, thin strips these delicacies require. That’s a project and, if successful, will produce a supply of treats that will disappear faster than Wedgwood china for 12.
Have a news tip? Contact Jacques Kelly at jkelly@baltsun.com.
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