Calling out my Non-Cooking Cousin: Laura’s Gingerbread

When I launched this blog, I made sure interested parties—relatives, friends, and featured cooks—would see it. My cousin, an amazing teacher, enthusiastic thespian, and voracious reader, emailed me to say, “I saw your earlier post about the recipe blog. It's a wonderful idea, but I'm sure not much of a cook.” Be that as it may, she’s not wholly absent from the recipe box. At some point, even she sent along a recipe, probably enclosed in one of her long newsy letters. Her name isn’t on it, but to paraphrase the March family's servant Hannah, “I'd know which those handwriting letters belonged to, ef I see 'em in Chiny."

Chris and her Aunt Betsy exchanged letters regularly; my cousin’s were often on repurposed paper, with something else typed or scrawled on the back. Even though the letters were not addressed to me, I always loved reading them for their descriptive, vivid, and full-of-personality anecdotes and musings. I remember one Christmastime letter with a phrase like “basking in the glow of piles of post-present wrapping paper” or some such. Betsy and Christine had a singular relationship; my mother was only twenty and in college when her first niece came along, and they were always close and in touch. My mom often recounted Chris’ adventures, observations, or tart comments with pleasure and amusement. When I look at my cousin today, I see some of the contours of my mother’s face—if I look like Bets in one genetic direction, Chris resembles her in another.

In her early 20s, Christine actually moved out from Indiana to live in the Boston area for two or three years. She lifeguarded at the Hyde Park YMCA and we saw her frequently. She even took me for the weekend one time. We swam at the Y pool, meandered through downtown Boston, and shopped at Quincy Market (where I was in raptures over a red satin heart pillow and unicorn shoelaces I bought at the now-defunct Have-a-Heart shop). We had a sleepover and I got to stay up and watch The Love Boat and the even more risqué Fantasy Island.

Chris married a Hemingway-reading art teacher, artist, and writer; they have two boys, now young men. She is a GREAT boy mom—she not only goes to Gen Con willingly, she puts on a costume to boot. After years of teaching in the Indianapolis school system, my cousin left the classroom in order to run a non-profit acting company for kids.

With all this in mind, Chris’ recipe contribution is more than apt. It's on a folded slip of paper, not a recipe card, and annotated in her quirky, distinctive hand (“We got this in Kiddie Lit”). It's timely too, given the recent publication of Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life.

Laura’s Gingerbread

(from The Horn Book, December 1953)

1 c. brown sugar blended with

½ c. lard or other shortening

1 c. molasses mixed well with above

2 tsp. soda in 1 c. boiling water (be sure cup is full after foam runs off)

Mix all the above well.

To 3 c. of flour add 1 tsp. each: ginger, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg,

cloves, ½ tsp. salt

Sift all into sugar/lard mixture and mix well.

Add 2 well-beaten eggs. Mixture will be thin.

Pour into greased and floured 9 x 13 and bake in moderate oven (350˚)

30 minutes.

Raisins or candied fruit may be added if desired.

Note: if a more dominant ginger flavor is desired, double the amount of ginger and omit the other spices

I love the chain of transmission here: Laura’s original recipe, reprinted in The Horn Book in 1953, was typed onto a piece of paper and mimeographed in purple (can’t you just smell the fresh wet ink?), given out in a university children’s lit class, sent to my mother through the U.S. Postal service and now blogged electronically some twenty-odd years later. Food itself is a transient pleasure, but this list of ingredients and directions persists, and in increasingly contemporary forms.

Funny the things that outlast us.

Snack Time Cookies

I don’t know that I ever sampled this recipe: it seems a pretty standard molasses cookie. But as an artifact, this index card opens into a volume of stories. My maternal grandmother, Esther Roof Carnall, passed this along to my mother from the kitchen of her sister, Aunt Jess. Born in Poneto, Indiana, in 1909, Esther was one of nine. She was a widow for most of my life; I have only a single fleeting memory of my grandfather, who passed when I was two. I do, however, remember meeting Aunt Jess on one or two of our Midwest odysseys. Because most of my mother’s family remained in the greater Fort Wayne area, we saw them infrequently. But my mother spoke fondly of every single cousin, aunt, uncle, and friend from her growing up years in Bluffton.

Another reason this recipe caught my attention is that I possess no culinary memories of my grandmother. She was patently not an apron-wearing, white-haired, sweet grandmotherly type. Nope: she was a Florida-dwelling, Winston-smoking, polyester-wearing, gin-sipping matriarch with a wry sense of humor and decided opinions she wasn’t at all shy about voicing. She came to visit us in Massachusetts for two weeks each summer. On the way home from Logan, we always stopped at Kappy’s to pick up some gin for her nightly cocktail.

The regular cigarettes and gin & tonics notwithstanding, Esther was around long enough for us to develop a warm relationship. She outlasted her eight siblings, living to just past her 93^rd birthday. At her memorial service in 2002, I read (with difficulty) my mother’s written tribute to her. By that point, Bets's ALS was too advanced for her to travel. At the funeral home, I also had a lovely conversation with Jess’s daughter Judy who seemed to look a little like the Aunt Jess I remembered.

I didn’t expect quite so many stories to tumble out before I got to the cookies. (I actually pruned a couple of anecdotes in the name of succinctness). This recipe is quirky: the measurements are specific, but the baking directions are a bit loosey-goosey.

Snack Time Cookies Aunt Jess

Double recipe

1 ½ C. sugar

1 C. shortening (2 sticks oleo)

2 eggs

3 C. flour

1 ½ t. soda

½ C. Green Label Briar [sic] Rabbit Molasses

Drop – Don’t know oven temp. Just experiment. Jess says she uses her mixer and just sorta puts everything [missing word: in?] at once.

[In my mother’s hand] 10 min @ 350˚

After experimenting as the recipe exhorts, my mother annotated the card with an oven temperature and a baking duration.

I’m charmed here by the reference to oleo (it strikes me as very WWII-era) and by Esther’s molasses brand transcription error. (Did she miss the Uncle Remus reference?) Clearly, this stained and torn card saw some use, but I wish I recalled the cookies. Perhaps I’ll have to procure some molasses and bake up a batch.

I bet they’d pair wonderfully with a gin & tonic.

All Butter, All the Time: Bets's Shortbread

Ask any of the dozens who enjoyed my mother’s hospitality over the years to recall something she served, and a healthy majority would mention The Shortbread. Buttery, irresistible, and always appropriate, shortbread was Bets’s go-to contribution, “the only recipe I can carry in my head,” she told me one time. So identified with her kitchen were these squares of buttery delight that I was surprised to learn the recipe actually came from our family friend, Dolly. The few lines needed for the finished product, on a scrap of blue paper, are written in an unfamiliar hand, probably Dolly’s, and feature a couple of doodle sketches. (Dolly is also an accomplished artist, but as I look, I think these show two slicing methods for the finished product—into wedges or squares—depending on the shape of the pan.) The impromptu slip of paper suggests a recipe quickly jotted down at a dinner party or outdoor gathering. My mother annotated the recipe after the fact: “ShortBread—Dolly” appears in the upper right hand corner; she also wrote “thickness” sideways next to the baking directions. The ink is blotted and the paper stained and smudged with use.

My first December at grad school in Texas, my friend Beth and I decided to throw a holiday party for our fellow English grad students. In those pre-email, pre-internet days, I had to phone my mom to get her shortbread recipe. Like hers, my own copy of the recipe is scrawled on a piece of scrap paper, also blue. With additional directions for trifle, mulled wine, and hot spiced cider (and a notice on the obverse about student-rate subscriptions to the Houston Chronicle), my recipe has lived between the pages of my More With Less cookbook for years.

To make (as written):

1 lb butter

1 cup sugar

4 cups flour

Mix and pat into 9 x 13”

bake in slow until lightly brown

1 ½ hour — 200˚ —

I would add only a caveat or two from my own copy: once the browning starts, watch carefully because all that butter will burn, burn, burn. Cut into squares or wedges while still hot. Delightful at teatime, a rich finish to any meal, and suitable for Christmas giving in a decorative tin, these little deadlies keep well, freeze well, and please well.

The story behind the blog

My beloved mother, Betsy Carnall Stine, was (among many other things) a talented cook and a warm hostess. A transplanted Hoosier who raised her family in Massachusetts, my mother subscribed to a kind of 1950s housewife school of cooking: scratch baking, casseroles, Sunday roast. Our house was always filled with people—my parents’ many and varied friends, neighborhood kids, our schoolmates, and students from the college where my father taught for 40 years. When my mom passed away in 2005 from ALS-related complications, her box of recipe cards remained mounted on the kitchen wall.

When my father sold the family home in 2008, I took the two-drawered wooden box, glad to have salvaged something that preserves my mother’s personhood so aptly. I treasure the box’s contents not only as the ingredients that flavored my growing-up years, but as small souvenirs of a generous life. The hundreds of recipe cards are almost all handwritten, and not only in my mother’s elegant cursive. Here and there I recognize my maternal grandmother’s hand; other recipes hail from the kitchens of the many good cooks my mother counted among her friends.

I never expected to find myself launching a recipe blog. I mean, it’s not a very original conception: the blogosphere is supersaturated with posting foodies. What’s more, anyone who knows me well can attest that whatever talents I may possess tend to lie outside of the kitchen. But even as I may be sharing recipes, I am far more interested in their histories. Each recipe is its own sweet or savory letter—often from another kitchen— recalling a friendship, a place, a meal, a memory.
The title of this weblog, “If you can read, you can cook,” was my mother’s practical-minded mantra. To this day, when I feel myself a culinary butterfingers (forgive a terrible pun), I remember to relax, read the directions and follow them in order, even if I think I have a better way.

It’s not bad advice, really.