The biggest influence in my culinary life is my grandmother. When growing up, despite being 800 miles away and growing up on the ranch that rarely afforded us the opportunity to visit her, it was my grandmother’s cooking which inspired me as a young teenager to begin cooking on my own.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend much side-by-side time with Grandma in the kitchen. However through the cookbooks I inherited from her, I’ve been able to explore and learn through her sources of inspiration.
Grandma loved to make notes in her cookbook. Scribbles with variations she liked, ingredients that appealed or didn’t appeal to her, and her ever-present “X” ratings. She would give recipes she tried a rating from one to four “x”s.
She had enough savvy to rarely choose a recipe which she rated a meager single “x”, however when there was top rated “xxxx” I knew it was a recipe I needed to try. I’ve yet to make one of Grandma’s “xxxx” rated recipes and not love it. And this banana bread recipe is based off of one of those four x ratings.
The cookbook was called Private Collections, recipes from the Junior League Palo Alto. Based on the amount of scribbles and notes, Grandma loved this book. The original recipe was named “Kona Inn Banana Bread”.
We’ve adapted it to our own taste, incorporating a bit of vanilla extract and including the addition of dark chocolate chips. One could always add nuts, or even use regular chocolate chips, but since Grandma loved to cook to the tastes of the family, I follow suit and always include dark chocolate chips for my mom, even when she isn’t going to get a slice.
—White On Rice Couple
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