Desserts

 Date Pecan Balls

1 cup soft butter

½ cup sugar

2 tsp. vanilla

2 cups ground pecans

2 cups sifted flour

1 cup chopped dates (pits removed)

Powdered sugar

Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla and flour and mix. Blend in pecans and dates. Roll into small balls and refrigerate for 2 hours. Bake on a greased cookie sheet for 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Upon removing from the oven, roll immediately in powdered sugar and then again after the cookies have cooled.

 Caramel Layer Chocolate Squares

14 oz. package of caramels

2/3 cup evaporated milk

1 (17 ½ oz.) chocolate cake mix

¾ cup butter, melted

1 1/2 cups chopped nuts

6 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips

Melt caramels and 1/3 cup of the evaporated milk in the top of a double-boiler, stirring frequently, to make a paste. Set aside.

Mix cake mix, other 1/3 cup of evaporated milk, butter, and nuts into a brownie-type dough. Press half the dough into a 9” x 13” baking pan. Bake about 6 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Remove from oven and immediately sprinkle chocolate chips over dough. Spread caramel paste over chocolate chips. Crumble remaining half of dough on top. Return to oven for another 15 minutes. Remove and cool. Store in refrigerator. When chilled, cut into squares, remove from baking dish, and wrap each square in a piece of tin foil.

 Canned Fruit

Canned fruit was not just canned fruit. It was a celebration of sweet, a visual cacophony, a contest for the cherry. Sometimes it was served over ice cream, sometimes under whipped cream, often served alone.

Certain riches like canned fruit stand out. There was the Sears Catalog that arrived twice a year. Two inches thick, it took hours to go through it and study the million things that could be ordered if one had the money, which we didn’t. Ever. But we got our money’s worth in the hours playing with the catalog, two or three of us at a time, turning the page slowly and then pouncing with a finger and a shout, “That’s mine!”

The last puzzle piece. It would take hours for the last puzzle piece to be put in place, because almost everyone hid a piece for the honor of placing the last puzzle piece.

A new package of construction paper, with all the red sheets still available and intact.

A full deck of cards. Not a deck with the jokers crayoned over to substitute for the lost card.

One year our mother gave us each a dollar and took us to Murphy’s Five and Ten to do Christmas shopping. Back then the streets of Wheeling were packed with people and Salvation Army bellringers and piped carols. Murphy’s was hot with people. We were allowed to split up into pairs and report back at the front doors in an hour. In those days stuff was in open bins. You could pick up the plastic boats and naked babies and hair barrettes, finger them appraisingly, weigh them for heft and value. Mittens, candy dots on a roll of paper, pencil erasers. Henry showed up at the front doors with all his Christmas presents concealed in a paper bag and twenty-three cents left over.

Airplane food.

Five cent ice cream cones from the Triadelphia Dairy Co-op. Big scoops of ice cream, teetering on the rim of the cone. We shouted “First Licker,” knowing that Carry and Tina would never eat their cones fast enough to beat the melting dribbles.

There were riches back then that can only be dreamed of now.

Garma’s Rice Pudding

Dump 1 cup of rice into a casserole with a lid, add 1 quart of milk, a cup of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla, a pinch of salt, and a half cup of raisins. Cover with lid and put in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes. Serve.

This recipe was Anny’s mother’s recipe. That’s a red flag. Whenever you see in this book that a recipe was Garma’s recipe, don’t try it. She never cooked. As soon as she lost her cook in the Great Depression, she turned the cooking over to her four children, who, in 1929, would have been 10, 7, 4, and 2. As children they never learned to cook. They made hamburgers and mashed potatoes every night. So this recipe is not a good one. The good rice pudding recipe, from Lou’s mother’s cook Monique, is included in the footnotes below.1

We liked this version of Rice Pudding as a child. We ate it a lot, until we tasted the French version. But back then, this rice pudding was the closest we could get to legal raisins, so we ate it with gusto.

The raisins were a luxury. Anny bought one box a year, the red box with the pretty lady in the hat on the front. The raisins in it were hard like pebbles for having dried out all year. We still loved the raisins. Even more than the raisins, we loved the challenge of eating the raisins without getting caught.

The goal was to eat as many raisins as Anny wouldn’t notice. Skim the top, so to speak. The problem was that the top was unskimmable. It was a solid block of graying giant raisin. Therefore, the skimmer needed time to dismantle the raisins from the block. And that required the time and secrecy only afforded by a nighttime raid.

The four girls slept upstairs, two to a room, and Henry had a room of his own off the kitchen. That gave him a distinct advantage, as you can see immediately: the roots of male privilege. The girls had to glide past the parents’ bedroom at the top of the stairs without making any noise. In a 100-year-old wooden house, that was impossible. The alternative was to travel through the heat grill.

Every room upstairs was heated by an opening in the floor with a grill so that the warm air downstairs could travel to the upstairs. It wasn’t all that effective, but the grills worked well for listening in on conversations downstairs and even getting a limited but useful bird’s eye view of happenings downstairs. The girls would listen to Anny and Lou’s breakfast conversations. They would watch the comings and goings of guests in the dining room. One year they could even see the Christmas Tree and the presents. (That was the year they learned the Facts about Santa Claus — not the Truth — the Facts.)

Anny and Lou were well aware of this condition and used it regularly to wake up the girls in the morning or to remind them to set the table for dinner. What they didn’t take into consideration was that the grill was removable. Henry once hung Tina’s doll Suzy by the neck from the grill, but the parents focused on the social justice issue, not the architectural vulnerability issue.

The red raisin box sat on the middle shelf of the pantry, which was located right beside the wall oven, which was directly below the heat grill. If one removed the grill, one could fit one’s head, arms, and shoulders through the opening (at least until one was about 10 and then a smaller child would be commissioned), just far enough to reach the cabinet door above the oven. Swing that open and then retreat back to the bedroom. Then one sortied again, feet first, because now one could reach the floor of the cabinet, providing a foothold. Crouching in the air, perched on the cabinet floor, one then hung from the second floor and sought out the oven handle with one’s toes on one foot, and the lower cabinet door with the other foot. Once secure, one could let go of the second floor and lower one’s body down til one’s foot hit the lower cabinet, then release and drop to the first floor Navy Seal style.

The return trip was easier because one was traveling upward and there were hands to grab and pull one through the opening to the second floor. The parents enabled this raid tactic a few years later by cutting an opening in the second floor closet into the rafter space, cutting an opening in the ceiling, and mounting a permanent ladder on the wall directly behind the pantry. But by that time the family was no longer eating Garma’s Rice Pudding.

1 Ris au Lait (pour 6 personnes)

In a quart of whole milk, cook 1 cup of rice on a low flame for an hour, stirring often to prevent the milk from burning or the rice from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Add a vanilla bean, a cup of sugar, and a pinch of salt. When the rice is cooked, add a cup of raisins, cook another 10 minutes, and remove from heat. Serve warm or cold. The dessert should be creamy, like melted ice cream.

 Lane Cake

Lane Cake was Tina’s birthday cake choice. It also served as La Galette des Rois, or the Kings’ Cake, to celebrate Twelfth Night which was also Tina’s birthday.

It is hard to imagine gussying up a Lane Cake for Twelfth Night. By itself, Lane Cake is gorgeous, the icing a cloisonne of red, yellow, white, and black. The cake inside is a sponge cake soaked in bourbon. For full flavor the cake is made four days before presentation. But just to push the cake over the top, Anny would add Twelfth Night charms to the cake batter: a dime for the millionaire, a bean for the farmer, a button for the tailor, a ring for whoever would get married first, and so on. And of course there was a chess piece for the King who would then be coronated with a gold paper crown and preside for the rest of the evening.

Twelfth Night, or Le Jour des Rois, is a big holiday in Europe, a vestige of the Catholic celebration of Epiphany. If presents from our French grandparents arrived after Christmas, Anny would save them for January 6th. The French Package was always exciting: a big box, usually falling apart after the 4000 mile journey, filled with wrapped presents, one for each of us, and special foods we relished. The buttery cookies, made by LU, now available in every grocery store, were only available in those days in the French Package. The grandparents also sent little chocolate booze bottles that were often crushed and gooey, but we learned to lick them from the tin foil wrappers. Everything about the French Package was exotic: the smell, the wrapping paper, the ribbon, and our grandmother’s choice of age-appropriate gifts: wooden bowling pins that looked like soldiers, a Beccasine doll, a sweater set, leather gloves. Another dressed bear for the Christmas tree.

As we grew older and more devious, we learned how to peak at the presents before the official unwrapping. Henry claimed one year that he had unwrapped every single French present and wrapped them again without anyone’s knowing it.

Cook, beware! The Lane Cake is a once-a-year production. In addition to the advance planning it demands, it’s a multi-step recipe: the cake, the filling, the boozing, the icing. It’s worth it.

To Make the Cake

1 cup butter, softened

2 cups white sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 ¼ cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

¾ teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

8 egg whites

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease and flour four 8 inch round cake pans.

Cream 1 cup of the butter or margarine, 2 cups of the white sugar, and vanilla together until light and fluffy.

Combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture to the butter mixture in three parts alternately with the milk in two parts, beginning and ending with flour.

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter. Spread the batter evenly into the four prepared pans.

Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow cakes to cool. Once cool spread Lane Cake Filling between layers and frost with Butter Frosting.

To Make Fruit Filling:

½ cup butter

1 ¼ cups white sugar

8 egg yolks

½ cup water

1 teaspoon brandy flavoring

1 cup chopped pecans

1 cup raisins

½ cup candied cherries, chopped

½ cup flaked coconut

Put 1/2 cup of the butter or margarine and 1-1/4 cups of the white sugar into the top of a double boiler away from the heat. Beat together. Add egg yolks and beat well. Stir in water and brandy flavoring. Place over boiling water. Cook and stir until thickened. Add pecans, raisins, cherries and coconut. Stir filling until all ingredients are well combined. Remove from heat. Allow filling to cool before spreading between cooled cake layers.

To Make the Butter Frosting: (This is optional. Anny covered the whole cake, top and sides, with Fruit Filling.)

⅓ cup butter

4 ½ cups sifted confectioners' sugar

¼ cup milk

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

In a bowl beat butter or margarine until fluffy. Gradually add 2 cups of the confectioners' sugar, beating well.

Slowly beat in the milk and vanilla. Slowly beat in remaining sugar. Beat in additional milk, if needed, to make of spreading consistency.

Moosetracks Ice Cream

This isn’t a recipe for ice cream. This is a discussion about fat-shaming and slut-shaming.

As the mother of four daughters (and one son who will be ignored for this discussion), Anny was not incapable of shaming her girls. In fact, it was an odd undercurrent of a lot of our upbringing and it popped up in our cooking.

We girls have talked a lot about it over the years; not one of us was spared. Our responses on it are different. Jenny’s take on it is nuanced, after many years of studying Anny as Jenny walked in Anny’s footsteps through Bryn Mawr College, through France, through Philadelphia, and, of course, through West Virginia.

Anny was a feminist in the age before women identified as feminists. Anny walked in the footsteps of her mother’s friends – not necessarily her mother’s footsteps, but rather the extraordinary women who befriended her mother. They were many spinsters, college-educated women, volunteers in the First World War. They modeled themselves on Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. One founded a day school, another endowed a college. Aunts Shooey, Tookey, Anne, Bucketty, and Miss Ratledge and Miss Barnes. They had a much bigger role to play in our lives than our Lake Forest grandmother did.

Anny emulated and honored them, paid her own way through Bryn Mawr College, found herself marrying and raising kids in a style of mocking traditional women. That’s why she didn’t teach us how to cook. That’s why she disparaged taking typing courses in school. That’s why she prohibited mirrors in the house anywhere but the bathroom.

Tina wanted to sign up for cheerleading, and Anny forbade it. “No daughter of mine will ever be a cheerleader. You go out there and you play the sport!”

On the other hand, Anny didn’t give Jenny a middle name at birth because she said Jenny would get a middle name when she married. Jenny married, unmarried, remarried, and never changed her name.

It was confusing.

Anny said on more than one occasion that the male body was the more beautiful. This to her four daughters. It took its toll.

Which brings us back to fat-shaming and slut-shaming. There was always dessert, at every meal. And there was always lots of ice cream, especially Moosetracks, the one with chocolate and caramel in the ice cream. Anny veered toward the “pleasingly plump” and was unself-conscious about it; in fact, she loved eating, celebrated eating, and made every day a celebration of eating. Hers was a defiance of female standards of beauty.

Hence, passing up dessert, or wearing make-up, or in any way showing a care for personal appearance was target practice for Anny.

Follow the Moosetracks to safety.

The Big Ug

The Big Ug was a huge chocolate cake we baked for our mother’s 37th birthday. It was so big that it cracked and fell apart. We tried to fill the crevasse with icing and it fell apart some more. Cousin David, visiting from New Mexico, named it The Big Ug and we served it to Anny.

This recipe is Aunt Lydia’s recipe. The catastrophic results were not her fault. Just follow the instructions and don’t quadruple the quantities.

4 squares unsweetened baker’s chocolate

1/2 cup butter

1 cup boiling water

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup sour cream

2 cups flour sifted with 1/2 tsp. baking soda

2 tsps vanilla

Melt the chocolate in the top of a double boiler; add the butter and the cup of boiling water. Mix and add the sugar.

In a mixing bowl, beat the eggs, then add the chocolate mixture. Stir in sour cream, flour, and vanilla. Pour into 2 baking pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 t 30 minutes. Let cool comppletely before icing and assembling.

Mary Barton’s Fluffy White Frosting

Beat 2 egg whites (room temperature for best results) with a dash of salt (and maybe a pinch of Cream of Tartar, just sayin’), then add slowly while beating 1 cup of Karo White Corn Syrup (send each of us a nickel in royalties), and 1 tsp. of vanilla, and beat 10 to 15 minutes until Fluffy and White.

Baked Alaska

Baked Alaska was our father’s favorite dessert and he made it. It’s kind of a masculine recipe: no ingredients, no measurements, just drama.

You cut up a pound cake into even 1” slices and arrange them tightly on a baking pan. You turn on the oven to broil. You whip up a dozen egg whites (room temperature for best results) with some powdered sugar, a spoon of Cream of Tartar and a pinch of salt until it’s really whipped, like upside-down icicles. You plunk down a half-gallon of ice cream on top of the cake slices, slather on the egg whites as thick as possible as fast as possible, and shove that baby under the broiler. When the eggwhites turn golden brown, you pull the cake out and serve to a whole bunch of little kids jumping up and down and cheering.