The Ties That Bind....

I love to bake. And I’m somewhat sentimental. Okay, slightly more than somewhat! My childhood is filled with fond food memories as possibly, yours is, also. I have simple memories of eating Rice Krispies sprinkled with sugar on Saturday morning while reading the comics (after having won them from previous readers!). Remember that last little bit of sugary milk in the bottom of the bowl? I can still remember sitting at my Grandma Cott’s small kitchen table on a regular Saturday night’s visit-we were never sent home without a late night snack. So Grandma assembled us at the kitchen table to eat toast with various toppings before climbing sleepily into a car for a short ride home in which we would invariably nod off only to be rudely awakened or hopefully to be carried in while still blissfully asleep. I have wonderful memories of my Grandma McLean’s Date Turnovers-a soft brown half crescent of rolled molasses dough filled with date filling and pressed tightly closed with fork tine prints around the half circle. Oh, how good those cookies were fresh from the oven! I would often run to my Grandma’s house after school instead of coming home and share something with her….my mark on a project or something that had happened at school and she was always there waiting with some kind of food handout in her warm cozy kitchen. I once asked her for the cookie recipe when I was grown. I can remember it like it was yesterday. She opened the old ivory icebox that she used as a cupboard, reached in and took out a teacup with a missing handle and told me that she uses this cup full of sugar and a certain number of it filled with flour…she lost me there and if I could go back in time, I would have persisted and wrote it down anyway. But I didn’t and so for more than 20 years I have searched for that recipe endlessly! I think I may have found something similar and will be sure to blog about it if it turns out like I remember. My kids laughed when I told them about her brown sugar sandwiches-a piece of bread buttered, with one half thickly spread with brown sugar and the other folded over on the sugar and taken from her soft papery skinned hands to be eaten while swinging on the steel porch chair and ruminating on the day’s events.


I have two cookbooks which regularly take me back to my childhood and which I have decided are my most used and useful cookbooks-The wooden Spoon Dessert Book by Marilyn Moore and Jim Fobel’s Old Fashioned Baking Book- you can never go wrong by making something out of them. They contain the Carrot Cake recipe that always wins at the Fair and the Rhubarb Cobbler Recipe that must be made in early June after an early evening dash to the garden for an armload of fresh Rhubarb. And they also have the Strawberry Rhubarb pie recipe that my daughter claims will bring tears to your eyes! I managed to snag the secret recipe my Aunt Joyce used every year to make Uncle Bill’s birthday cake which was a rich chocolatey cake with fudgy chocolate icing. It turns out that it was the $100 cake (also found in said book) which gets its moist texture from mayonnaise which makes total sense-after all what is mayonnaise? Eggs and oil…perfect cake ingredients. Those cookbooks contain all the old recipes that I remember from my childhood plus what my husband calls the mark of a good cookbook…generous splashes of ingredients from previous baking adventures.

I’m up for making food memories for my children. My eldest daughters, who are the first installations in our 2 part family, lived through our juicing/vegetarian/food combing era with not so fond memories of carrot and beet juice escapades and endless pots of vegetable curry with swollen raisins. Their least favourite memory is of being sent off to bed and hearing the toaster flush and the popcorn maker firing up as they lay hungry in their beds! Their best memories were of Bob Evan’s Salad which was a favourite at our house and the Fit for Life Award Winning Potato Salad. Wait? Whose kid’s favourite recipes were of salads? Greek Salad? Carrot Salad? Bean Salad? Curried Chicken Salad? My younger kids have memories of staying at their Dutch Grandma Van Gelderen’s house and having Grandma’s pancakes before bed-thin batter pancakes, thicker than a crepe and fried in hot oil so that the edges bubble up nice and crispy! They are best served with syrup but also good buttered and coated with a generous topping of brown sugar and rolled up into a tube! My kids claim that I don’t make them the same as Grandma Van. My daughter Amy continues my childhood tradition of an after-school treat of toast buttered and dipped in Maple Syrup (we made our own back then so it was cheap and plentiful!). Aren’t the best memories the simplest ones?

My more recent food memories I’ve made for my family involve a Chocolate Cake with Cayenne pepper nicked named the Sex Cake by a family friend (think Johnny Depp and Chocolate!). It always draws complaints from non-heat lovers because it’s such a sexy looking cake which they refuse to eat! Too bad for you! More for the rest of us! The cake increases in moistness and spiceyness as it ages so it is irresistible and scarce by the third day! It's especially yummy with a good helping of vanilla ice cream to balance the heat and sweetness. My mid August meal of ribs, chicken, fried green tomatoes and corn on the cob is a great memory…especially because it takes almost as long to eat as it does to make! Another longstanding food tradition in our family is the Angel Food cake which my mom or I can whip up from scratch in a few minutes. It is best served with Strawberries and ice cream on a muggy July evening. I’ll never forget my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary when we served a dozen Angel Food cakes with bowls of mixed berries that I had bought frozen and thawed. The men were drawn to them in droves all the while exclaiming, “Who picked all these berries?” I laughed, thinking that it’s May, Boys. There are no berries to be picked in May! I think there may have been some early hunter-gatherer instincts kicking in there to attract them to the girl who picked the best berries!



I think that food memories are the ingredients that bind a family together just like eggs and gluten bind a cake. I recently learned how to make a steamed Christmas pudding for the annual Nethercott family gathering, then took it a step further and made Sticky Date Puddings with the butter/brown sugar/ cream sauce-I think it may have almost killed my husband because he developed a blood clot that Christmas! At least that’s what we blamed it on! It was the Sticky Pudding’s fault! A recent addition to my repertoire is a Lemon Poppy Seed Cake which incorporates my husband’s Dutch heritage (his dad was always up for a good piece of cake with a tiny cup of coffee) and goes over well with that side of the family. The family friend that also emigrated from Holland, Tante Annie, loves the cake and shares my husband’s birthday so I always make her a cake of her own which she splits up and freezes and eats throughout the year. At eighty-two she is full of life and asks about the cake every time we meet! It has become a family favourite. I found the recipe in the LCBO cookbook which they publish several times a year. I know, I know…the LCBO…but the recipes are fabulous and few contain alcohol (although I don’t mind a good Rum flavoured  Christmas pudding sauce myself) and is also the source of another favourite, the Legendary Key Lime Squares! The Lemon Poppy Seed cake binds my husband’s Dutch heritage to my Irish one as I pass over the electric juicer for the chipped glass one that belonged to my dad’s cousin, Helen Abbott, and also I’m sure, her grandmother, Susannah Abbott who is my Great-Great-Grand Mother (Helen never married and stayed in the family home with her brother, Isaac and they maintained the farm for their entire lives). As I twist the lemons over the glass ribs I imagine my Great Great Grandmother’s hands on that juicer and think of the recipes that she has made with it. Perhaps she juiced lemons and oranges to make lemonade to take to the fields for the threshing teams my dad remembers…or perhaps she also juiced lemons to make a cake for the family reunions which were so well attended when I was a baby. And then I realize that her hands guide my hands…a woman I know only from a photo.…carrying on family traditions and building memories which may or may not last, but which bind our lives together as inexorably as the eggs and gluten bind the ingredients of our life’s traditions.



The Abbott Family around 1900

L-R: Robert, James,Isaac, May (my Great Grandmother), Susannah, Frank and Gordon.



A Barn Raising at the Abbotts in the late 1800's.









The Infamous Lemon Poppy Seed Cake and the chipped Lemon juicer.







My Daughter Chloe continuing the tradition by helping with the annual baking of sugar cookies.













 

Lemon Poppy Seed Cake recipe: http://www.lcbo.com/lcbo-ear/RecipeController?action=recipe&language=1&recipeID=2547&recipeType=1