Catching up with Jennifer Ann Blair

A five-generation family recipe, Depression-era recipes and why culinary history matters

A welcome and introduction

Welcome! I’m excited to share a recent conversation I had with Jennifer Ann Blair, a food writer, culinary storyteller, recipe revivalist and Substack content creator at The Dinner Bell.

A while back, Jennifer mentioned she had a Pan Haus recipe in her family that had been passed down for five generations, and I knew then I wanted to learn more, so invited her to join me here at Culinary History is Family History. And, I’m so glad she did! We had a wonderful talk and I know you’ll enjoy getting to know Jennifer and the stories and recipes she shares as much as I did.

Before we get going, however, I want to share some of my other favorite posts over at The Dinner Bell:

• The Midwest Recipe Box is a delightful collection of culinary stories and recipes from Jennifer’s family. From Grandma Jane’s Rum Balls to Mary Jane’s Memory Lane Chicken there’s no question as to why Jennifer calls herself a “culinary storyteller”.

• The Kitchen Guide: Timeless Tips & Modern Fixes is the ultimate resource on ingredient swaps and pantry essentials, cooking techniques and kitchen tips, and, my favorite section, how to adapt family recipes. I don’t know about you, but I printed the entire thing out and added it my favorite cookbook just to have handy.

• Happy Cinco de Mayo - Salsa, Guacamole and Enchiladas is California-inspired and Midwest-approved, meaning none of the recipes will set your tongue on fire, which is something I’m always concerned about as a Minnesota native!

Did I mention Jennifer tests and tweaks each one of the recipes she publishes, or that she collaborates with family members to reimagine favorite family dishes while updating them to a more modern palate?

Along with free subscriptions which include one free recipe and story a month, Jennifer also offers a paid subscription which comes with tons of great benefits including food and wine pairings, weekly recipes and stories and more.

Here’s our interview - enjoy!

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Show notes

• Here’s Jennifer’s family recipe for Pan Haus, a delicious breakfast meat made from shredded pork, cornmeal, salt and pepper. As I made it, and later thoroughly enjoyed it, I coudn’t help but think of that Minnesota classic, SPAM, only elevated. Like skyscraper elevated, in that it is sliced and fried and shares that luscious crispy pork flavor I grew up eating with my dad.

  Edition #40: "Pan Haus" Ahem, What?

• During our conversation, I mentioned a book about depression era food and the role home economists played in making sure mothers knew how much nutrition their kids needed to survive. That book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegelman, and I highly recommend it.

• We also talked about two family favorites, Swedish meatballs and potato sausage. Odd choices, considering my German heritage, but hey, Minnesota, right? Here are those recipes, which come from unsourced newspaper clippings found tucked into family cookbooks.

Swedish Meatballs

1 pound beef, 3/4 pound lean pork, 1 medium -sized onion, 1 cup bread crumbs, 2 teaspoons salt, 1/4 teaspoon allspice, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoon cloves, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, 2 eggs, 1 cup milk

Grind together twice the beef, pork and onion. Combine crumbs and seasoning and add to meat mixture. Mix thoroughly. Beat eggs slightly, add milk and add to first mixture. Shape into balls and brown well in small amount of fat. Put balls in a casserole and make thing gravy by adding flour and water to the fat of the skillet. Pour over balls and bake about 1 hour in a moderate oven.

Potato Sausage

Take one part lean pork (ground), one part fat pork (ground), one part raw potatoes (ground). Add to the above mixture 1 tablespoon salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, and 1 onion (finely grated). Pack loosely in casings and drop into boiling water. Boil 1/2 hour. Prick with a fork.

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Jennifer Ann Blair from The Dinner Bell.

A transcript of “Catching Up With Jennifer Ann Blair”

For those of you who would rather read than listen or watch, I’ve included a lightly edited transcript of my conversation with Jennifer.

LORI:

So welcome Jennifer, thank you so much for coming. This is Jennifer Ann Blair. She writes at The Dinner Bell newsletter here on Substack, and she calls herself a culinary storyteller. So how could I not talk to her? So, Jennifer, why don't we start the morning by talking a little about your background and about your newsletter?

JENNIFER:

So my background is really in advertising. I started my life and career in advertising and worked on Microsoft and, gosh, a lot of intel, a lot of big companies, tech companies, and then, you know, as life goes on, you're like, Okay, what's my legacy in life? What do I want to contribute to my family before I before I leave this earth?

At some point in time, all of my aunts and uncles happened to be at my mom's house at the same time. So we started talking about recipes, and they'd all sort of gone to different homes, you know, my aunt's house, my uncle's house, my other uncle's house. So I'm like, “what do we do about all those recipes? They're not divided up, guys. They're in a recipe box, right? How do we make sure those continue to move forward? “

And I'm like, well, I'm the Digital Marketer, so why don't I step in and start using some of these recipes. So that's how The Dinner Bell started.

Then it just sort of expanded a little bit into adding the new generation. Like, I have my niece, she has a recipe that she created which is very plant-based, so that's been added.

So we have recipes that are older and recipes that are in the movement right now, sort of, they're kind of adding those in, as well.

LORI:

Let's just backtrack a little bit. When you had that family gathering, are you already into food or recipes by then, or was it just the opportunity that you saw all these people, and you were talking about food anyway, and you were like, oh, we should do something about this?

JENNIFER:

It was a little bit of both. I was like, oh, this is a great opportunity. And also our entire family has been just a family of farmers and cooks and bakers and people that open their doors and just say, “Come on in”, because there's always food being cooked, right?

We’re a family of gardeners and grillers. So it's been in our family all our lives growing up here in California. My mom moved out here and met my dad, and so this part of the family's out here. The rest of it's out in the Midwest. So when we would go back there, and we would go from house to house, there was always a big meal, always a big platter of bacon, we made bread.

My great grandmother worked at a candy shop that's still around called Abbott Candy in Indiana. So we would walk down the street and get candy for it. There was a lot of activity around food, making it and gardening and growing your own stuff.

Their history goes back to Germany, where they were all farmers. So Germany, then Pennsylvania Deutsch, and then here in the middle of the Midwest,

LORI:

That seems to be a really common pathway to ending. I'm all German myself, and I've got a line that ended up in Indiana.

JENNIFER:

I don't know, it's interesting, because it actually went from – at least for my family, from Germany to Pennsylvania, then Pennsylvania to Ohio, then Ohio to Indiana.

LORI:

In my line that ended up in Indiana, there were seven brothers, or something like that, and two of them started the chain migration. They came and landed right in Indiana, or didn't land there, but, you know, settled right there. And then the other brothers all came to Indiana, got their feet wet in America, and then went to Minnesota. And that's where I grew up, Minnesota.

So, when you talk about everybody's got a lot of food, Midwesterners are famous for that. If there are two people, you're making food for 12, just in case, right? There’s no such thing as individual servings, everything's family style. It's just like, get a big spoon.

JENNIFER:

Yeah, I've been modernizing things, because when you look at some of those recipes, some of the products don't exist anymore. Now we have stand mixers. Now you don't have to do it with the stiring thing anymore, but there's also a lot of sugar and a lot of flour, a lot of butter, so I try to figure out how to reduce that here and there for modern tastes.

LORI:

So, let's go a little into that corner of it, right? Because, recovering a recipe or reconstructing a recipe, or whatever you want to call it, updating it, modernizing it, that's a skill! Do you just do a lot of trial and error? Or how do you go about doing that?

JENNIFER:

So I start with the first original recipe, and I make it just exactly how it is. And while I'm making it, I'm like, “I don't think this tastes good”, or “this might need a little tweak”. So then I'll do the second one, and I'll start adding other things that I think might work or that might be better. I also sort of have this obsession with wine, so I've learned a lot about flavors and aromas California. So I start tweaking, and I do research as well. I look around and I see what else is out there, what are some other ideas, and decide whether or not that will make sense to include or add or consider.

I do like to go into the garden and see what are the things that aren't in this dish that we could add, like thyme or parsley or a root vegetable or something that's not in this dish. It was just such a simple, easy dish.

LORI:

It wasn't even available, right?

JENNIFER:

Yeah. And I also don't have them standing next to me, going, “Well, what I did was…”

LORI:

But you can kind of imagine it. I’m in the middle of a long project about German chocolate cake and I found more than 100 recipes for German chocolate cake from the last 150 years, and I started to make them. And some of them were so confusing. They would say, “put in enough flour to make it thick,”, but how much is that? Or “bake in a moderate oven”, and then offer no temperature or timing.

My passion is not in that kind of experimentation. I like to try new recipes, but I like to make sure they're good recipes. I tried one of the cake recipes from the depression era without eggs, or butter or sugar. It didn't have anything in it, and it was just terrible!

JENNIFER:

It started out that way for me, too. In the beginning. I was like, these recipes, they're not good. I cannot post that!

LORI:

They didn’t have a lot of the ingredients listed or even available. Like you talked about, your family members were farmers. They used what they had in their ground. They might have bartered or traded or gotten it at the market, but most of it was, you went outside, you got what you needed, and that's what you ate.

JENNIFER:

If it wasn't there, it didn't go in the recipes. I'm making a coffee cake for next week that was made by one of my great grandmothers, and I just heard that one of my cousins started adding apricot to it, and I was like, well, that's a new twist that I hadn't even heard about, right? So everybody, as a recipe goes down the generations, everybody makes their own little baby tweaks to it.

LORI:

It sounds like this recipe revival is a bigger thing than just you. Like everybody in the family is kind of getting on this bandwagon, or am I misrepresenting what I’m hearing?

JENNIFER:

No, it is just me. But if I want to do a little research, I'll call them up and like, “hey, what have you been doing with this recipe? Did you ever make this recipe?” In fact, nobody that's currently alive, except for my cousin, has made this coffee cake recipe.

LORI:

Very nice. I love that idea. I like to always remind people that culinary history is a binding history because, in some ways, our palates come from the food we eat at home. I've lived all over the world, but my palate is still straight up Minnesota!

JENNIFER:

I have a California palate, which is funny when I do Midwest recipes. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the Pan Haus recipe, and that is a 100% Midwest and it's delicious.

LORI:

We're going to talk about that one because I, I love that recipe and the whole idea around it. Well, let's just jump into that recipe. It is really how I reached out to you. Because this is a recipe that's been in your family, what, five generations?

JENNIFER:

Yes, five. I can go back to my great, great, great-grandmother. I spend a lot of time on ancestry. I started in a tree in 2007, and I try to hunt for where these recipes may have come from. Where's the German line because we think that's where the recipe came from.

But then I had to do some research on where did the recipe actually come from? How did it land in Pennsylvania, and why is it not a German recipe because it is not. It is a 100% American-created recipe created by Germans that came to the United States. So, yeah, it's been passed down for generation. Other than changing the cut to a pork tenderloin, which is obviously not what they had, it's pretty much the same recipe, and it goes from one generation to the next.

LORI:

Do you know how it was passed down?

JENNIFER:

Mother to mother, as far as I can tell. I know that recipe isn’t in the male side of the family, but it is possible they were involved.

LORI:

But was it learned at the knee, or was it more, “Here's a recipe. I'm going to hand this recipe to you”. What do you think?

JENNIFER:

The elders would make it. And in fact, my sisters and I have decided to start getting my mom back in the kitchen. She's still in the kitchen, but like, back in the kitchen making the old-fashioned recipes before she leaves the Earth. We are making those videos on how to make those recipes. Because a recipe in your hand, like I said, is not the same as the person standing next to you showing you how they make the recipe.

LORI:

That's the difficulty of reconstructing those old recipes. Like a lost recipe, you know everybody ate it, but nobody has the recipe anymore. How do you recreate a recipe when Grandma maybe put in an extra twinkle of salt or something unless she's standing next to you? You have no idea why it doesn't taste the same.

JENNIFER:

So, yeah, my mom has been making the Pan Haus recipe. Her brothers and sisters have been making it, and so now we're all asking them to teach us how they make it because each sibling makes it slightly different. One of my cousins said, “You know what you should try, pork shoulder.” That's a great idea, but let me try that next time, ok?

LORI:

That would be a fun little thing too, to have everybody's version of the recipe and talk around that, too.

We don't really have a lot of long term recipes in our in our family -- a meatball recipe, or something.

JENNIFER:

A lot of the recipes [for Pan Haus] are the same, or the same base. And then, every family has their own tweak,

LORI:

Which is, I mean, that's the fun part of it, right? Because then it does taste like home. Yeah, that's great.

So, with a five-generation family recipe like that, can you talk a little bit about how you're moving that recipe forward – it sounds like maybe the whole family is making a conscious effort to move it forward – and why is that so important to you guys?

JENNIFER:

Well, all of our aunts and uncles are getting into their 70s and 80s so they're not going to be here forever. I'm the traditionalist in the family. I'm like, let's make sure we have the genealogy set up. Family members are now doing their DNA. Let’s get this on record, because at some point somebody's not going to be here. We won't be able to ask those questions or get those photos, or whatever that is.

In terms of the Pan Haus recipe, we made a few tweaks, like adding that better bullion instead of the older bullions. So we added a little bit of both, but put more of the better bullion in there. I was going to try polenta with it, but it made me nervous because I didn't know how polenta would work out. So I tried the cornmeal first, and then I haven't done the polenta version, but I'm going to try that just to see if that how that changes it.

LORI:

When we lived in in Adelaide, South Australia for a while, we couldn't get cornmeal, so I decided to try polenta. It's not the same.

JENNIFER:

Right. Let's not mess up the recipe.

LORI:

Right. I just have a chicken or egg question for you. So you said that you've been on Ancestry and doing genealogy since 2007, which came first, genealogy or culinary history?

JENNIFER:

Genealogy.

In my position doing branding and stuff, I did a lot of writing. So I think what happened is I was going through the genealogy, and we were going through these recipes, and I was writing all my branding stuff, it all kind of just coalesced into sort of this thing on Substack, and now that's what's happening.

And I would love to do this for a living forever, because I think this is great. I really enjoy writing and doing the research.

LORI:

I've always been curious about family food, and I think part of it was because we didn't have, again, we didn't have five generation recipes. Or, if we did, nobody really talked about them.

Several years ago I got all the family recipes, and I put together a little cookbook, and as a genealogist and a writer, it was a light bulb moment. For me, a lot of family history is about what were they eating? How were they serving it? You know, what were the conversations around the table? Those kinds of things that are just really meaningful to me, as opposed to, you know, the details about the house they lived in, or the jobs they had, or the year they were naturalized, or something like that. It all feeds into family history, of course. But for me, the really fun part is asking, “Where did the food come from”.

JENNIFER:

Yeah. Who was the cook? You always think of the women back then, at least, you don't know for sure. I do know that my great grandfather was an amazing gardener, and so a lot of their food came out of that. They also had a root cellar when we were little. They would take us down to the root cellar, and we were like, this is like, Harry Potter! It was dark down there, and we are coming from California. We’re like, wow, this is a different world.

LORI:

I know, it was just put it down in the ground, and it's going to stay fresh forever, right? And rows of pickles and pasta sauce and all that stuff.

My grandma was born in 1908, so, you know, she went through both World Wars, the Great Depression, so she was a hoarder to her core when it came to food. She would have a case of black olives in her pantry, and, we would only have black olives at Christmas! She didn’t even like them, but she needed to have food in the house just in case.

JENNIFER:

When you go through that kind of environment, when you lose everything, or you're surrounded by people that lose everything during the depression or again, two world wars, it has an impact. I have a great grandma that sort of operated the same way. She was very careful in how she spent her money and how she made food, and, you know, what she used. All the recipes were very simple, and that's okay. I'm sure they tasted good back then. We just have different expectations.

LORI:

It’s a hierarchy of needs, right? Years ago, I read a book – I’ll see if I can find it and include it in the in the comments here. [ A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegelman] But there was a book written about the food of the Great Depression and, what fabulous stories. One of the things was that Home Economics really started raising up during that time because mothers, especially, were so worried that their kids were going to starve to death because they weren't getting enough nutrition. So the government hired all these home economists to create regional recipes based on the food that was readily available, and that had the number of calories that kids would need to live.

JENNIFER:

I did not know that – that is fascinating.

LORI:

Yeah, that's when home economics really started rising up. And it was because there was this whole fear, I mean, imagine it, right, that you're worried that you can't feed your kids enough calories. I remember there was a section, I think it was in the Midwest, the Dakotas, maybe, where the cookbooks actually had recipes using tumbleweed! And I remember the comment was that they didn't taste great, but they had enough nutrition that kids wouldn't die.

JENNIFER:

Oh my gosh!

LORI:

So, when we look at those simple recipes and we're like, that is just such a simple recipe, the truth is, they just wanted to have food that could keep their families alive, which, I mean, hard to think about.

JENNIFER:

Right. And they were also big families.

LORI:

I didn't really have a lot of huge families in my lines. But yeah, I mean, when I look at recipes from that time period, my bias is like, man, this could use some spices. Or that, you know, this would really be a lot better if you put some cream in that thing.

JENNIFER:

And more butter!

LORI:

Right, but then I’m thinking, well, what's the historical context of this recipe, what was going on then? And you're like, man, they were doing good!

JENNIFER:

Right? They were doing really good, right? If they could get their hands on some butter – great!

LORI:

Well, one of my ancestors was a buttermaker during that whole time. So all of their recipes had like two cups of butter in them.

JENNIFER:

And then you have the farmers that were milking the cows that they had, as well. So everything was like, whatever you could get from your farm.

LORI:

So true. I’m going to pivot a little bit, because something you said reminded me that before we went live, we were talking a little about the pandemic, laughing about zooming during the pandemic. I remember there was a lot of talk about how the pandemic was going to change the way we eat and the way we saw food, remember? That didn't happen for me.

JENNIFER:

No, it didn't happen for me, either.

LORI:

I don’t mean the hoarding part. We’ve lived overseas for a long time, so I hoard everything! Sometimes it was two years between boxes of Cheerios, so you buy 10 boxes, right?

JENNIFER:

Yeah, exactly. Going a little nuts. I did notice that I started cooking more because I was at home. And I actually love working from home. Like, when that happened, I was like, Oh, my God, this is crazy! And then it went on and on and on, and I literally worked and launched three or four brands from my house. So it worked out really well for me. But I also found that I was able to like, “Let's go make breakfast. Let's go make lunch”, instead of running out to a casual restaurant and eating something that wasn't healthy for you.

LORI:

Right? Gosh, we just went wide ranging on this one, didn't we? That's awesome, though. Let's see. Let’s just wrap it up with kind of a bigger conversation about why culinary history is so important. Because I think we agree that it is, right?

JENNIFER:

We do agree that it is, and I feel like it creates this sort of section in your life that you remember your family event, or that family person that's no longer here, or the events don't happen anymore, and that food reminds you of that memory.

I remember the dishes that one of my great grandmothers made when we would go to her house, and she would make these specific green beans with lard and bacon. And again, those recipes I remember because of going to her house, and I think that is so important.

Even now, like I said, with my niece, making this plant-based dish. She made it. She's made it a long time, but she actually made it and put it out on the table for Thanksgiving this last Thanksgiving, and we all tried it finally. And I was like, this is a really important event happening because you're sharing this dish. And it's delicious,

LORI:

Right? And it tells part of her story.

JENNIFER:

It is her story, and she will remember sharing it with us. I’m hoping that other people learn about that dish when she's older, and they'll be like, “Oh, Aunt Olivia, you did XYZ when you were a kid”.

LORI:

Culinary history adds so much context to the family history, right? Because you're having conversations about who was at the table, what were you talking about, what were you eating?

JENNIFER:

It sort of shares your stage of life. You know, the food that you're eating marks the stage of life that you're in.

LORI:

Yeah, right. Because when we're young, there's this tiny bucket of food that we like, and then for most of us, at least, as we get exposed to other things, we’re like, “I'm going to take that, but I'm going to leave the wasabi out there. I'm not taking that, but I'm going to take this with me, you know, right? It's a timeline. It is.

JENNIFER:

Not everybody takes each dish, right? Some people make them for themselves and don't like them, and some others pick a different recipe that they’re happy with. And some recipes like our Pan Haus stretch across the entire family, which is amazing. But then, you try to share it outside the family, and they're like, “this is a little weird”.

But our entire big family, everybody in our family eats Pan Haus. I love that, yeah. I love that recipe that everybody eats and remembers.

LORI:

And they’re going to talk about it, and pass it on.

Anything else you want to talk about? We've got like, five or six minutes left.

JENNIFER:

Oh, I don't know, this is my first interview, I really enjoyed talking with you and I can’t wait to read more of your Minnesota culinary stories.

I have some wonderful subscribers that are from Minnesota and Michigan, and I get really great feedback about some of the things they're making. You know, they take it to the one of the events that are happening, or the fairs or the festivals or something m and winning a blue medal. And that's exciting, that people are still doing that. I really love that.

LORI:

Bringing that forward, you know, growing up in the growing up in the Midwest, in Minnesota, we tend to have a very small palette, traditionally. My husband is from Texas, and I remember him coming up to Minnesota one time, and he's like, “what's a dish that's really a Minnesota dish?” And I'm like, “well, we've got, you know, tater tot hot dish, we've got lutefisk , we've got Swedish meatballs”. And he's like, “do you have anything that has a spice in it?”

JENNIFER:

Swedish meatballs, wow. We grew up with those.

LORI:

And potato sausage. I did love potato sausage.

JENNIFER:

That's interesting. Oh, wow. I'm going to ask my mom about that.

LORI:

It’s basically, ground pork and ground up potatoes in a sausage casing that you boil.

JENNIFER:

That sounds delicious. We should make that.

LORI:

I'll see if I can pick that up.

It's funny, once we start talking about foods it catches on. That's one of the things I like to do on my Substack too, is just kind of prime the pump. I'll share a recipe or some idea or memories of my food, and then people are like, “I completely forgotten about that!”

And I think those are such connectors for people.

JENNIFER:

Yeah, because you just brought that up, and I'm like, “that's interesting, and we should make that.”

LORI:

I love that idea, and then you add your little tweaks, and we all do, and we have that to share. Anyway, thank you so much for joining me, Jennifer. It’s been such fun!

JENNIFER:

Oh, thank you! I enjoyed it.

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If you’d like to drop by and chat about culinary history, the intersection of family history and food or just shoot the breeze, drop me a note and let’s talk!

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In case you missed it

If stories at the intersection of food and family history are what you’re looking for, look no further than our archives! Here are a few of our favorites.

A family history in biscuits

Nothing secret about potato salad in my family

Saying Goodbye with Minnesota Funeral Food

A family love story that tastes like chocolate

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