How I have enjoyed my grown daughters calling to ask how to make the traditional Christmas morning pastry ring or Fourth of July breakfast pizza. However, in just the brief decade of my oldest daughter marrying and leaving home, the modus operandi of sharing has transitioned from laboriously copying the recipe onto a cute little card, to creating a file and emailing it, to snapping a picture with my iPhone for m'ladies-in-the-moment of needing mama's stroganoff directions while grocery shopping. One can google "Gramma's old-fashioned penuche cake" and come up with pretty much the same delectable delight that showed up regularly over decades of family reunions. So, lest these treasures be lost and forgotten, I gathered up family favorites on recipe cards in the handwriting of mothers, grandmothers and aunts--authentic spills and drips included--to help my girl adorn her home.
Among the smudged, well-worn recipes that will be displayed in the kitchen archives of another generation's home, is the one for apple dumplings scripted by my own mother who was not destined to tarry on this earth long enough to know and to be known by my children. I held the card pensively before I tucked it into the frame, relaying to my daughter the daily routine of my childhood during apple season. Monday, being wash-day, Mother began work early and soon had the first load of laundry hanging on the line outside to dry. While my two sisters and I picked up fallen apples in the yard, Mother would cook the starch into which she would dip the collar and cuffs of my daddy's shirts and then hang them to dry. Later she would dampen them with an old gingeale bottle filled with water and a sprinkle-stopper atop and roll and wrap them for ironing. Back to the apples. The only dreaded part of apple season was picking up the rotten ones which fell to the ground and were in various stages of decomposition helped along by birds and ants. A disgusting project that made my sisters and me hold our noses and gag. It seemed to me, although this may be a faulty childhood recollection, that as the middle-child I got the rotten end of the deal, quite literally. Either the two oldest sisters were instructed to retrieve the rotten-apples-of-the-day or the two youngest sisters. Either way I got snagged.
Nonetheless, any distaste for the process was forgotten when the fruit of our labors was rewarded at lunchtime. Somehow, amidst the morning of washing laundry, clothes-pinning wash to the line, folding and starching, mother managed to make pastry rolled into squares that she filled with apple slices stirred together with cinnamon, sugar and butter. The four corners were folded toward the center and the dumplings baked in a scrumptious syrupy liquid which would turn sticky in the oven and be pure delight to scoop from the edges of the pan with a spoon before it cooled and stuck fast. Lunch. A whole entire apple dumpling--still warm--would be placed in a bowl with milk poured over. So there you have it...just a small card framed on the wall. But maybe the story will pass through my girl's head now and then to be served to another little apple dumpling gang in days to come.
Projects. Hanging curtains over beautiful leaded-glass windows, slipping aprons over porcelain pulls and fashioning a curtain tie-back from a door knob. Making the most of quirky cubbies for storage in a vintage house. And some of our best projects were consumables, like the pie we made from rhubarb fetched at the Saturday farmers market. Uh, yes, I think this daughter forgot to register for a pie pan, so we improvised and fashioned a square version. What fun to employ all of her spankin-new dishes and accessories in our culinary adventures. And no, I must confess. We did not make a cow cookie. The li'l guy below is actually cheese.
PS Since we are here in the heart of dairy-land I should mention that my daddy liked to plop a slice of cheddar atop his apple dumpling. Yum!
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