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Hidden among the simple lists of ingredients and directions for everyday foods are surprising stories. In Baking as Biography, Diane Tye considers her mother’s recipe collection, reading between the lines of the aging index cards to provide a candid and nuanced portrait of one woman’s life as mother, minister’s wife, and participant in local Maritime women’s networks.
In the spirit of this crazy time of year for baking and/or eating baked goods, the following excerpt focuses on Christmas traditions in the kitchen (recipe included!).
As is clear by now, most of the recipes my mother owned were not lovingly handed down through generations from mother to daughter. This seems to be true for her friends as well. Other women of my mother’s age let me know that their mothers passed along very few, if any, recipes; it turns out that their families’ favourite recipes are not generations old, either. My Aunt Peg, as well as my mother’s friends Anne, Sadie, and Helen, all talk about getting most of their recipes from friends. And all four say that they very often turn to community fund-raising cookbooks, many of them produced by women’s church groups that they’ve been associated with, for reliable recipes.
(…)
Christmas provides a striking example of how this generation of women created new baking traditions. This was the one time of year that my mother, and other women in our extended family and neighbourhood, allowed the scale of economy and abundance they so carefully managed to tip in favour of excess. Foods were exceptional in that they were of a higher register than the baking we usually had in the house. Mom used more expensive ingredients, like dried fruit and nuts; it was the one time that she baked with butter, and everything was made with white sugar. The variety was truly staggering. On Christmas Eve Mom would open boxes of cookies, squares, donuts, and cakes that she had made over the fall and then frozen.Mincemeat and apple pies sat on the top of the stove, and a frozen strawberry dessert, a favourite of my sister’s, was kept cool in a refrigerator so overcrowded that things fell out when you opened the door. Delicate shortbread cookies, each decorated with a dot of icing and a piece of cherry; gingerbread men with raisin eyes; sugar cookies cut out in Christmas shapes with dobs of bright icing slopped on by children; peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate; cherry surprise cookies so rich they were hardily edible; donuts, usually so tough they were hardly edible; fudge, both chocolate and divinity; cherry squares; cherry cake; gumdrop cake; light fruit cake; dark fruit cake; mince pie; apple pie; frozen strawberry dessert: these were the Christmas foods of my childhood, and the holiday lasted until they were gone.
Although I knew that many of the traditions and foods associated with Christmas were not of ancient origin but dated back to the rise of the Victorian Christmas in the nineteenth century, I only recently realized that the excess that marked Christmas in our household was my mother’s invention, or at least that of her generation. So were the rich recipes that I associate with the holiday: sickeningly sweet creations like cherry surprise cookies and gumdrop cake. My grandmother’s Christmas foods were different: mince and apple pie along with several cookies, squares, or more likely “Droppies,” which I viewed as globs of various combinations of ingredients mixed together and dropped onto a baking sheet. In contrast to my mother’s, my grandmother’s baking was often hard and tasteless. It did not compare either in its richness or its expansiveness. Although dark Christmas cake may have its origins in the sixteenth century, Christmas foods that I regard as traditional, such as the white fruit cake that I once imagined being passed down through generations of rural working-class Nova Scotian women, actually do not date back beyond my mother. The familiar taste of white fruit cake that for me represents Christmas is based on a recipe that Mom found in Tested Sweet Recipes:
White Fruit Cake
3 squares butter
2 cups white sugar
6 eggs
4 cups bread flour (sifted then measure)
1 lb white raisins
¼ lb citron
½ lb cherries
2 slices pineapple
1 cup almonds (bleached) to decorate top of cake
½ cup milk (fill cup with boiling water)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla, almond, lemon flavouring
Boil raisins 2 minutes, drain well until dry. Cream butter, then add sugar, add 2 eggs at a time, flour fruit well. Bake 275 for 2 hours. 300 for 1 hour.
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