After Harvey, classic sides and dessert offer taste of home

Lisa Kudchadker DeViney keeps thinking about her grandmother’s Thanksgiving recipes. Written on index cards, they were placed in an envelope tucked inside her copy of “The Joy of Cooking.”

Where that cookbook is now, she’s not sure. After DeViney’s Meyerland home flooded during Hurricane Harvey, friends helped her family — she and husband Darrick have three children — pack up what they could. Some belongings went into a storage facility, others were packed in boxes and sent home with friends who agreed to hold on to them until the DeVineys are able to move back in. That might be three more months from now.

“I have no clue if they survived,” DeViney said of the treasured recipes for Thanksgiving staples such as cornbread dressing, cranberry relish and giblet gravy. “We’ll find out when we unpack.”

DeViney is one of thousands of people throughout Greater Houston who won’t be able to enjoy their traditional Thanksgiving routines because their homes were damaged and their kitchens ruined. The floodwaters washed away cookbooks, recipes and, for many, generations of memories invested in handwritten instructions for pulling together the most important meal of the year.

The loss of cherished recipes is a raw reminder of Harvey’s destruction.

“It just doesn’t feel like the holidays, to be honest,” said Danna Lynde, whose Memorial home took on 6½ feet of water in the post-Harvey flooding. That water sat for two weeks.

“It’s gone. All gone,” she said. “I lost all my favorite knives, my cookbooks, my blender and coffee makers, and stuff like my grandmother’s rolling pin. I’m crushed over it. I also had several of her pie pans. They’re gone.”

So, too, are the handwritten recipes from both of Lynde’s grandmothers. “My mom said she may have one copy. Everyone’s trying to find copies for me,” she said.

Ann Criswell understands and sympathizes with those who lost family recipes. She’s a great believer in the living recipe. Which is why, as the Houston Chronicle’s food editor from 1966 to 2000, Criswell packed the newspaper’s food section with recipes, especially at Thanksgiving, when heirloom recipes were the most requested.

“I am a real traditionalist about Thanksgiving,” said the now-retired Criswell. “As food editor, we repeated recipes every year along with an hour-by-hour schedule worked out by my husband because readers asked for those recipes. If anyone cooks, especially newlyweds, it’s usually at Thanksgiving. I don’t recall anyone ever asking for kale salad, starfruit soufflé or any other current ‘celebrity’ food. Readers seemed to be more adventurous at Christmas, but at Thanksgiving it was turkey and dressing, that ubiquitous green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, yeast rolls and pumpkin and/or pecan pie.”

Those classic recipes — Criswell’s most requested Thanksgiving Day favorites — are especially welcome this year as a traditional taste of home in a post-Harvey city.

Lynde is trying to put a positive spin on her predicament of cooking without her recipes in an unfamiliar kitchen in a rental townhouse. “I know that we’re blessed, but I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t missing my familiarity and comfort,” she said. “We’ll be fine and we’ll be together, but it’s strange — that comfort is gone.”

DeViney, meanwhile, is hoping that “Joy of Cooking” is in a box somewhere that her friends packed. This year her family’s Thanksgiving dinner will probably take place at Luby’s or Cracker Barrel, she said.

“But we’re all going to be together. Twenty years from now my kids will have a good story to tell.”