It’s no secret my mom is an amazing cook. She has been my whole life. She grew up the way pretty much everyone in that area and generation did. Someone pulled up a chair in the kitchen when she was little and let her help, and somewhere along the way, she learned to cook.

There’s a photograph on the cover of our cookbook from around 1965.

My mom would have been nine or ten years old, sitting at a formal family dinner for her Grandma Robinson’s brother and sister. The table was set with china, crystal and silver. In the foreword she wrote for the cookbook, she talks about how different that table could look depending on where the family was gathered.

So when I moved to Georgia for college, I guess I held onto that little piece of home. Once I got my first apartment, Saturday mornings became something of a ritual. Before my roommates got up, I’d head to the kitchen, make a batch of blueberry muffins from the White Lily mix at the grocery store, and settle into the living room with an old Western.