Everyone’s Internet Grandma, Babs Costello, On Family Traditions, Food, & The Holidays

Family legacy is something incredibly important to me — and I don’t mean a legacy of wealth or business or properties. I want to leave behind a family legacy that grows on the traditions and love my family has already built. I want my three daughters to know our family’s core values and pass them on to their kids... to feel a warm, happy glow when they think of me as their mother and what I brought to their lives and our stories.

It’s something Barbara Costello of @BrunchWithBabs fame knows a thing or two about. The mother and grandmother has been an internet sensation for years, sharing her favorite entertaining hacks, recipes, and, above all, the importance of tradition. Even I know that her family loves a Christmas morning breakfast casserole, so her recent partnership with Ancestry.com made total sense.

I got the chance to speak with her and share my love of traditions, how Ancestry has brought my grandmother and me even closer, and the joy of leaving behind a family legacy you can be proud of.

Scary Mommy: I’m so excited to talk to you about your partnership with Ancestry. My 87-year-old grandmother and I have been exploring our family history together.

Babs Costello: Oh, that's wonderful that you’re both sharing your history together. It's not like she's passed on, and now you're learning these things; it's almost an opener for more conversation and stories, right? Like a refresh of memories that maybe have been long-lost.

SM: Absolutely. One of the things I love about Ancestry.com is the preserving of a legacy ... I have three daughters, and I'm already writing recipes on recipe cards and showing them because I just want them to absorb all this.

BC: I have a recipe box that I've had for about 50 years. It's loaded with, I don't know, probably 500 recipes at least — and some in my mother's handwriting — and they're just treasures ... My grandmother's long gone, my mother is gone, and now, even recipes that I have that I want my kids to pass on, I could digitally preserve on Ancestry. It's such a blessing because they're in a safe place now.

Well, your grandmother's still here; you know what you should do? I did this with a dear friend of mine who was like a surrogate mother to me. You almost have to go over when your grandmother is cooking or baking, and sit with her, especially with cooking. And before she adds the Parmesan cheese to the meat or whatever, say, ‘Wait, Grandma, stop, we're going to measure it first.’ If she doesn't have an exact recipe, that's one way to do it.

SM: When all of her grandchildren got married, she actually made us a family recipe book. But even now, I have to call her because the directions will be like, ‘Stir until it looks right,’ and I'm like, what does that mean?

BC: Exactly. It was a different time. They cooked by sight, by taste, by feel. They were much more, I think, in tune with food than we are.

SM: What else have you discovered on Ancestry?

BC: I was very moved to find a picture of my grandmother as a young girl before she immigrated to the United States, and with her family. And I only have one remaining aunt, my Aunt Dolores, who's going to be 94 in January — she's the last remaining of that generation. My grandmother had nine children and 22 grandchildren, so she's the last of the nine.

She was so moved when we found my grandmother's manifest of the ship she came over on, her name, and the date that she boarded that ship in Naples. We can't quite make out the name of the ship, but my grandmother, they would always ask her, ‘Ma, what do you remember? Do you remember the name of the boat?’ We're going to blow that manifest up and get the name of that boat.

It's so moving to find out where you came from and what they went through and the life that they lived. And having that all stored, as well as all those wonderful recipes — because, for me, food is memory. When I'm making something that my mother made, or my grandmother made, I remember the days where we were all in the kitchen, and it was a lot of commotion and a lot of Italian being spoken 95 miles an hour. To reproduce those recipes is almost like preserving those memories.

SM: So, do you like to keep the holidays very traditional with meals?

BC: I do. For me, tradition is very important. I always say, if you have not had a tradition in the family yet, it takes two years to establish a tradition. Now, growing up, for Thanksgiving, my family would make homemade pasta, meatballs, the braciole, the whole thing. And salad, a big salad. Then they'd serve the turkey, the stuffing, the cranberries, the sweet potatoes. It was like, Oh my gosh, this is incredible. It's like the food never stopped.

For Thanksgiving, I don't do the pasta, but I am very much a traditionalist. I serve the turkey. I don't stuff my turkey; I make a fabulous stuffing baked outside the turkey, and then I do the typical: my mother's sweet potatoes, the mashed potatoes, the whole bit. And I have a wonderful make-ahead gravy; it's already in the freezer. All you have to do is take it out a day or two before and reheat it, and then it's ready to go.

SM: That’s genius. It’s always hard for me not to feel like I’m failing at Thanksgiving when I see that my great-grandparents all had like nine kids and managed to get dinner done on time. My grandmother always says, ‘I’ve got 60 years of Thanksgiving under my belt; you’re just getting started.’

BC: Isn’t she a doll? She sounds like a real treasure.

SM: She’s the best. I do wish I could ask my great-grandparents about raising kids. Like, how did they do it? Sometimes I’m struggling with just my three.

BC: You’re busy. But you know what? I think it was different expectations. I mean, raising nine kids, they were not going to soccer, football, basketball — they weren't living at the sports. It was a different time. Now, you almost have to have a couple of sets of parents for a couple of kids.

SM: You’re right. You need that village even more now, and I love having that for the holidays.

BC: I think the tradition that my family had was the gathering, really and truly, of extended family. Now, we live away from extended family. We used to go home, though, every Christmas, until I had four children. When Elizabeth was 4 years old, we got stuck in an airport for almost a full day — couldn't get home. We landed in a snowstorm. It took us 18 hours to get home from Chicago to New York. We were like, Oh my gosh, we can't keep doing this.

But the holidays — the spirit, the love, the food — that definitely is a tradition that I continue. You're establishing this, and it gives... it cements your family. It makes them feel like they're part of something bigger. It's these little traditions that matter, and a lot of them have to do, let's face it, with food.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.