Behind the recipe: president of the Ross County NAACP recreates traditional family dishes for Christmas
CHILLICOTHE― Adrienne D'Souza is a lifelong home cook and baker who has spent many years replicating family recipes from her childhood. Now, she's working on documenting recipes for her daughter and two grandchildren.
Before she was the president of the Ross County NAACP and an employee at the Chillicothe and Ross Public Library, D'Souza grew up cooking with her mother Anne Wilson Robinson. She fondly remembers spending Sundays in the kitchen with her mom and making special meals when guests visited.
Despite countless traditional family dishes like cornbread dressing, sweet potato fries, collard greens and rum cake, the family did not write down recipes. Robinson said her mother never used a measuring cup or a cookbook. She also never wrote down a recipe.
While making dishes she remembered from her childhood, D'Souza recalls asking her mother for specifics on how much of each ingredient to use in each dish. Her question was often met with the answer "just do what feels right."
"It wasn't that recipes were written down. It was more of we observed and we asked questions and then over the years recipes got perfected," D'Souza said.
D'Souza said she didn't start trying to make certain dishes until she was in her 40s because she was scared she wouldn't be able to make them the way her grandmother made would. She said some recipes, like the cornbread dressing, took many days of trial and error to perfect it. After remaking the same dish many times, Robinson agreed that D'Souza's cornbread dressing finally tasted just right.
"I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to live up to how my grandmother had fixed it and how my mom had fixed it," D'Souza said.
Now that she has two grandchildren, she documents how she creates the family dishes to eliminate any future guesswork.
One family specialty that has been passed down through the generations is a special yellow cake with chocolate icing that was first made by D'Souza's great-grandmother. Today, the dessert is one of her grandchildren's favorites.
D'Souza cooks and bakes with her grandchildren, passing down her family traditions to the next generation. Now whenever D'Souza makes a new recipe, she makes sure to make a note to make sure she can pass the instructions on to her daughter or grandchildren.
Megan Becker is a reporter for the Chillicothe Gazette. Call her at 740-349-1106, email her at mbecker@gannett.com or follow her on Twitter @BeckerReporting
This article originally appeared on Chillicothe Gazette: Behind the recipe: Adrienne D'Souza's recreates family dishes
