Anna Curvin

I currently live in Camden, Ohio. I'm from East Tennessee. I have brought with me today a cookbook that it was actually cookbook I had made of my grandmother's recipes, a few of her recipes and old photographs of her, like from when she was in her late teens and early 20s.

When I think of family, I think of these particular two grandparents on my mom's side, and I'm named for my grandmother, so we're both Anna. In fact, on that side of the family, it kind of goes back five generations. I'm an Anna. My mom is a Fay. Her mom was an Anna, her mom was a Fay, and her mom was an Anna. And if I had had kids, if I had had a daughter, would have been a Fay.

My grandmother wasn't the best cook, but we always had our family gathering. We had what we call burn and serve rolls, which a lot of people might call brown and serve rolls. That's how they're packaged and labeled. But in my family, they're burn and serve rolls because every gathering my mama would make these rolls, and every gathering we would all start to sit down to the table, and then it'd be like, ‘Oh my God,’ and then she'd run back in and rolls were burned. So that was our family tradition, was burn and serve rolls.

Now my dad's side, his his parents died young, so I didn't know them, but he had a family recipe passed down. My dad's grandparents, maybe great grandparents, immigrated from Prussia to Chattanooga, and they carried with them what we called Sour taters. But I later came to understand its German potato salad, but we just call it the sour taters. And I don't even have a written recipe for that. He just taught me how to make it.