"I have been thinking about culinary inheritance. By this I mean the food ideas, recipes, specific traits that are particular to your family. It could be the way you peel an apple because your mom or your grandma always did it that way; or how you cook something; or even just specific food that reminds you of home. What has been passed down to you?"

The question arrived in my e-mail inbox. It was sent by a friend who owned restaurants before she burned out on them. (You open a restaurant because you love to cook and eat and conjure up magical recipes and feed people. Six years later you wake up to the fact you are spending the bulk of your time managing staff and feeling stressed out.)

I share the cook's question with you because "Savoring Traditions" is this month's theme for Cuisine Noir and because we're getting to that time of year when, with all the holidays coming up, our thoughts turn to — exactly what?

• Is it eating?
• Is it sweating over the stove?
• Is it worrying about who to invite for dinner — and whether they'll get along this time round?
• Is it wondering what we will cook — or who will cook for us?
• Is it thinking with fear about the old waistline and what the holidays will do to blow the diet you've been battling with all year?
• Is it worrying about who you're going to travel to see — or how you're going to foot the bill?
• Or some version of all of the above?

Imagine, just imagine, focusing instead on culinary inheritance.

My culinary inheritance, to answer my friend's question, is all tied up with my dad. He loved to eat. He loved to cook. He loved to sweat over the stove. He never wondered what to cook; he just delighted in the cooking of it. He didn't bother about his waistline. Fat cooks are the exception, have you noticed? I reckon it's because they're too busy being creative with the food and the savoring of it to stuff themselves with unreasonable quantities of it. He didn't worry about the food bill because he bought from artisans (the local sausage maker, for example) and markets (ethnic, not designer), chose well, and rarely went to restaurants, unless he was working at them.

And he didn't talk much about food. He didn't make a big deal about it.

What, I wonder, would he have made of the trend these days that has people prosthelytizing around food? Have you noticed? It's like "fresh, local and organic" is the new religion. If you don't conform, if you don't buy the right thing from the right source, someone is going to strike you down; most likely someone poised to make a bunch of money when they get you to their newest trendy church, uh, I mean restaurant. At the very least, if you don't conform, you'll be excommunicated from the chorus line of the "converted."

Enough already of this obsessive-compulsive-elitism. Will these "born again" foodies for whom these things are new ideas please sit down, shut up, eat up — and stop giving the rest of us indigestion.

For the upcoming season of traditions, my request is that you savor the various holidays by looking to your culinary inheritance. If you care about the people in your life, it goes without saying that you will nourish them well. If you focus on giving them something to savor, you will buy the right things, prepare the right things and relish convivial times with family and friends. You will cook well. You will ask others to help out as needed. You will enjoy the people in your life. You will make things from scratch when you can; take short-cuts when you need to. You will not stress yourself out.

Somerset Maugham suggested we let tradition be our guide but not our jailer. I can go along with that.

To see tradition in action, meet Rachel Saunders and read about her Blue Chair Jam here. If making jam was part of your culinary inheritance, check out her The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook. She integrates old traditions and new ways and in the process gives us something to savor through all the seasons on toast for breakfast.