Nigella's Christmas Biscuits Little Legacy 23

I don't write about it much, I think because it is so engrained I don't think about it, but there is a huge food legacy in my family.  My grandmother ran the colliery canteen, her catering was legendary. My grandfather ran a dairy and had an amazing kitchen garden, my Dad is a consultant food scientist, my brother is a foodie.  On the other side my mum gave me the legacy of vegetarianism and wholefoods.  One of my earliest memories is of waiting for her outside the healthfood shop to get a jar of peanut butter refilled. Gran brought me the legacy of post war comfort and convenience food, toasted tea takes, tinned peaches and crinkle cut oven chips. Substances sneered at by the rest of the family.

Perhaps my cooking, although perfectly good, has been somewhat overshadowed by the legacies of my predecessors.  I'm not sure what my grandmother would have made of Nigella's approach, her frivolity offends the scientist in my Dad, who much prefers Delia's measured approach.  But, in a nod to my maternal Gran, I love the comfort factor and indulgence in Nigella's approach.  I love to read her cookbooks, and the way she writes so passionately about food.  

My favourite chapter in How to be a Domestic Goddess (how I love the irony) is the one about Christmas.  Nigella really encourages the reader to find their own Christmas traditions.  And so I did, with her Lebkuchen. We make them each year, wrap them up in greaseproof paper and string, and give them to relatives.  If you are really good at baking, and very patient, you can make holes in them and hang them from the tree.  Pointless exercise here, they'd be eaten in seconds.

The next chapters

I'm going to keep little legacying, it's cheaper, and possibly more effective than therapy and I've made some wonderful new friends.  But, I'm building up to a new project, with a weekly prompt, where we can each build up a collection of snippets from our family history.  I'll include some creative and life writing tips each week too. At the end we can each self publish our personal collection of posts as a memory book for ourselves and our children.  No need to contribute every week. Interested?

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Little legacy is a remembrance project , a positive and creative space, to celebrate small things handed down by predecessors.  Feel free to link up a little legacy you've been thinking about this week, or to leave one in the comments.  Here's the code and here's more on Little Legacy