Family Food and Recipe Traditions for New Years Eve

Our family tradition during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is to pull out the old cookbooks – not the commercial ones, like the Betty Crocker Cook Book (which I love), but the old binders stuffed with handwritten recipes from our mothers and grandmothers.

Over the next week, we’ll make:

• My mom’s Thumbprint cookie recipe
• My French Onion soup recipe (link to the recipe, below)
• My husband’s great-grandmother’s original ravioli recipe, which is an all day affair, including making the pasta dough from scratch
• One weird Italian dessert recipe from his grandma’s hand written recipe. I say weird only because his grandmother was notorious for writing half in Italian, half in English, and leaving out critical steps, like adding the eggs or what to do with the egg yolk after separating an egg.  You were just supposed to know.  These recipes are always a challenge to our cooking skills as we try to decipher and remember our kitchen chemistry, filling in the missing ingredients, while my husband pulls from his memory all the high school Italian he learned so he can translate the instructions.