Always Something Good to Eat at Grandma Amelia’s
The past few months I’ve been learning about the life of my friend Corinne’s grandmother, Amelia. Corinne is filled with stories, and is a great baker, so I knew we would have a fun time baking up a few of her grandmother’s recipes together.
And boy did we. But! The recipe that really rocked my world was Amelia’s take on the Rustbelt classic dish City Chicken. I’d never heard of this quirky dish before, and had to learn everything about it. So I did. Despite being a quirky American culinary mainfestation, it’s also an incredibly delicious, Sunday afternoon comfort food.
Click the links below to check out her recipes, but we’ll put baked goods and meat on sticks aside for a brief moment. We now finally get to talk about the life and time of Amelia Machingo, Ukrainian-American, Ohioan-Californian mother, grandmother, and the woman who, as Corinne told me, “always had something good to eat at her house.”
Eastern Europe comes to the Rustbelt
Amelia (Cepin) Machingo was born in 1921 in Campbell, Ohio (located next to Youngstown) to Ukrainian immigrants, John and Anna Cepin. They had six other children besides Amelia.
Her parents came to America before she was born. More than 350,000 Ukrainian immigrants came to America at the end of the 19th century. Amelia’s grandfather Stephen continued to go back and forth to Ukraine to help other immigrants relocate to America.
“He worked as a sort of travel agent,” explained Joan Hutter, Corinne’s Aunt, and Amelia’s daughter.
Around this time, immigrants from Eastern Europe were finding jobs in cities with booming steel economies, like Youngstown and other large cities in the Great Lakes Region. We call this region “Rustbelt America” now, but in the early 20th century, it was far from rusty. It was called the Steel Belt and business was booming.
Youngstown, Ohio had a rich supply of coal for steel production up until the 1890s, when their natural resources began to run out. However, Youngstown was easily able to use the railways to ship in supplies of coal from neighboring states. This was enough to keep Youngstown’s steel industry thriving through WWII, after which the country’s need for steel dramatically declined.
(Check out this book if the region’s history interests you!)
The lives of men who worked in the steel industry were very hard. It was grueling and dangerous work, often resulting in illnesses and even death. Many immigrants who found work at the steel mills were often “strike-breakers,” i.e. cheap labor to undercut the efforts of unions.
Amelia’s father worked in the steel mill, where he developed bursitis of the hip and eventually was unable to work due to the pain. Bursitis is inflammation of a synovial fluid sac, and now-a-days is very treatable, but in his time there was little relief. “I remember he went up the stairs backwards sitting down.” Joan remembers of her grandfather’s condition.
But yet their hard work and dreams brought persistence. The Ukrainian-American families grew. Their children went to school, opened businesses, and fully assimilated into Midwestern life while holding onto a connection with their Eastern European roots and cuisines. In fact, there is no better way to see their influence than to look at the region’s cuisine.
Their culinary roots are present today all over the Rustbelt. To point out but a smattering of places and foods: Youngstown is home of Buttermaid Bakery, a large producer of the Eastern European favorite treat, kolachi. (They ship their nut rolls all over the country, but you can also learn how to make kolachi yourself.) Metro Detroit, notably the city of Hamtramck, is an epicenter for Polish-American cuisine and culture, and then Pittsburgh…the ancestral homeland for City Chicken.
For more mid-western food history, and specifically City Chicken history, check out this article.
Amelia Grows Up
Amelia grew up a proud Ukrainian-American woman in Youngstown. She was exceptionally bright, and was a member of the National Honor’s Society all through high school. As is so often the case, there was no money for her to go to college, so she made do by working at a raincoat factory (“Which she hated,” granddaughter Corinne informed me), and taking classes in shorthand and bookkeeping at night.
Editorial side note: This is the 2nd grandma I’ve written a history about who worked in a Midwestern raincoat factory! Coincidence? Maybe! But maybe not…
I had a tricky time figuring out just which raincoat factory Amelia would have worked for, but I eventually was able to find The Triangle Raincoat Factory of Youngstown (which changed to Weatherbee Coat Company in the 1940’s) by looking in a federal register. If you Google it, it’ll mostly just turn up as a mention in obituaries of women who lived and worked in Youngstown, Ohio, leading me to conclude this must have been a major employer of women in the city, early and mid-century.
Marriage and Family
Amelia met her future husband Stephen (Steve) Machingo at a big band dance in Idora Park, and she reportedly told a friend that “he’s the man I’m going to marry someday!” Future wife and prophet Amelia married Steve when he returned home from WWII, and they began a life together in Youngstown.
I loved hearing about their relationship from Corinne. They sounded like two high school sweethearts who had great love and mutual respect for each other. They loved to go out dancing, and even once went to go see Frank Sinatra together.
My favorite Amelia/Steve story Corinne shared about them, was how Amelia became the first woman on the block to own a washer and dryer. Amelia would always do their washing by hand, requiring boiling water, a wringer washer, and hang items to dry on a line. She was recovering from a tricky birth that required removing an ovarian cyst, so Steve was at home with the children while she was at the hospital. He saw that there was laundry hanging out on the line in the backyard and it was starting to rain. He realized he needed to get it all in the house so it wouldn’t be ruined, so he ran out there with the children and tried to gather up all the laundry before it got soaked.
The whole experience of gathering up laundry before it got wet was profound enough to Steve to make him decide that his wife shouldn’t have to have three children (they eventually had six) and suffer through laundry like that.
Even though money was tight, he went out and bought his wife a Westinghouse washer and dryer. It was the first one on the block, and it was hot stuff. The neighborhood women would come over to admire it (and for good reason! I can’t imagine doing all my laundry by hand and I have zero babies.) Joan remembers neighborhood women coming over, setting up chairs in front of the washer, and watching the laundry go around, “like watching TV up close.”
Steve and Amelia eventually decided to move away from Youngstown to the San Fernando Valley in California. They settled down in their new climate, had three more children, and enjoyed the rest of their lives in California.
Much of their family stayed close by in the San Fernando Valley, including Corinne’s family. They lived only 10 minutes away from Grandpa and Grandma. She would often go over to Grandma’s house, who would look after the kids when they were young and after school when they got older.
“There was always something delicious at Grandma’s house.”
Corinne fondly remembers Amelia cooking a combination of Midwestern dishes and Eastern European comfort food. “They would express their love by forcing food on us,” she told me, and with dishes like holubky (stuffed cabbage), pierogi, and stroganoff coming out of her kitchen, nobody was complaining.
Thanks to the temperate weather of the San Fernando vally, Amelia had fruit trees growing in her backyard, like apples, pears, loquats and peaches. Eating a warm, juicy peach from Grandma’s backyard is one of her treasured food memories.
Recreating Amelia’s Recipes
Corinne and I had the chance to make Amelia’s recipes for kolachi (a sweet bread, with nuts and raisins, rolled into a log) and cheregi (sweet, flaky fried pastry dusted with powdered sugar.)
Even after Amelia’s passing, her family continues to make a lot of her recipes, including both kolachi and cheregi. I often have to go into Canned Peaches recipe recreations rather blind, stabbing around until I think I’ve made something right. But fortunately, this time I had a trusty guide!
I needed it, too. I didn’t get my cheregi dough rolled thin enough, and I bought us the wrong kind of raisins for the kolachi (golden! Why did I pick golden!), but everything still turned out delicious. And heck, I’m here to make those mistakes so *you* don’t have to.
Getting together for the better of a day to make two recipes that both have quite a few steps (and that yield “grandma-sized batches” i.e. huge) got Corinne, Kiley (who took these beautiful photos) and I talking about how important it is for women to get together and cook. Not only does it make light-work, but it gives you quality time with someone who maybe you only get to see a few times a year.
Corinne fondly thought about how her mom and aunts get together to make food together, and we all started strategizing on how to make pierogi night happen in the near future (ahh! quick before it gets warm out again.)
Next time you have an ambitious kitchen project, whether brought on by curiosity of a new recipe, or maybe an ingredient surplus (the tomatoes of August!), call up your friends or your sister you kind of like or your neighbor you’re getting to know, and invite them over to make it with you. You should probably make lemonade or open some wine, and at some point, maybe there should be cheese. Otherwise, you’ll know what to do.
Kitchens are simultaneously places of hard work, and sacred spaces. Through practice, we’ve found ways to combat the drudgery and turn it into joy. Let’s continue to share it.
Thank you so much to Corinne and her family for sharing Amelia’s recipe, life and stories with me. It was such a pleasure to learn about her and recreate a bit of her food, her life and be able to share it here.
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated with corrections about Amelia’s birthplace, the occupations of her father & grandfather, and more details about her and Steve’s relationship. Thanks so much to Joan Hutter for her contributions to her family’s story.
More from Grandma Amelia
