Baking
My mom didn't or couldn't cook anything but scrambled eggs, canned tuna with mustard and saltines, and grilled cheese. "Burn me some toast," was a frequent request made by her baby brother. She never bothered about it or let it bother her. She'd have scoffed at the mommy blogger idea that all good moms must be professional bakers, baristas, and culinary geniuses with everything from cupcakes to kale all rolled into one. I liked that about her and I still do, but I also like to bake. I learned from her mom at an early age, standing on a stool at her elbow, watching as she added ingredients for pound cake into the spinning bowl of a stand mixer. Sour cream, eggs, vanilla, butter, sugar, all whipped into the frenzied noisy beaters, watch your fingers.
"It don't make no difference," was Grams' motto for mistakes in the kitchen, and she showed me how easily a flaw is covered by frosting, but she was nevertheless an artist, with precision in every movement as she scraped batter from a bowl with a spatula, or wiped a drip from the edge of a pan so it wouldn't scorch in the oven. Countless times I watched her blend flour and lard into biscuit dough, or whisk eggs, vanilla, and brown sugar in a pot on the stove for chewy cake, careful not to let it boil. She taught me that no good cornbread has sugar in it. That sweet yellow Jiffy stuff is trash. To go well with greens and ham it should be savory, crisp, and brown on top, but not too dry inside. She liked it best sliced in half and slathered with country crock (I prefer butter).
She made chocolate layer cake for my birthday every year the easy way, with Duncan Hines yellow cake mix and pink candy letters spelling Happy Birthday on top of store bought chocolate frosting, but oh, it was good. My cousins liked what she called jelly cake, glazed with homemade scuppernong jelly or strawberry rhubarb jam. We ate it every year too, but pound cake was her crowning glory, and for good reason. It was heaven; rich as King Solomon, moist and crumbly, and perfectly sweet.
She baked each one in the same old bundt pan, and found fault with each one.
"It's cracked on top! Look at that crazy shape! Ohhh, Lord it's ugly!"
None of us cared. At family get-togethers my mom's three brothers ate it greedily with their coffee, united, for once, by their mutual enjoyment. I have never sullied its memory by making my own, but my desire to create good food has been there as long as my need to write.
My forays into solo baking turned sour in high school as I got myself into Anne Shirley-esque scrapes: dry peanut butter cookies, lemon cake boogery with lumps of unsifted flour, olive oil foolishly substituted for canola. In my twenties, I bought a useless bread maker from Goodwill in which yeast dough refused to rise, and burned brownies and the tops of bundt cakes in my tiny, overheated apartment stove. I tried to impress my husband's parents with Grams' chewy cake one Thanksgiving, but it turned to inedible gum filled with hard bits of dough.
"I just don't have the knack for it," I told myself. "Whatever, it's just another womanly task I don't need to feel guilty for being bad at, like ironing or sewing." I turned to box brownies and Tollhouse break-apart cookies, but late at night, as a teacher stressed over progress reports and standardized tests, I still found solace in easy trash recipes from Pinterest; cool whip cake batter cookies and microwaved mug brownies.
Recently, I watched the Great British Baking Show, and started baking again in my mother in law's nice spacious kitchen and brand new oven. An oven makes a baker, my Grams could tell you that, but so does confidence and force of will. I've made lemon pie, banana bread, yogurt muffins, strawberry bundt cake, and banana pudding. This morning I made chocolate chip scones from scratch. As I grated an entire stick of frozen butter over the dry ingredients and then blended it into a dough with my fingers, I grumbled, "What sadistic lunatic thought this up?" But then I tasted them. They were not as divine as the sour cream pound cake of old, but they were good enough that I closed my eyes and sighed over them, and for a moment the world went away.
Grams can't see to bake anymore. In some ways we're estranged, but I know the ways we are still connected. The other day my husband showed me a photo he took of me standing in the garden with a denim shirt and a straw sunhat on. I looked at it and for a moment saw her instead of myself, recollections of hoeing in the tomato patch, sticky petunias, the scent of earth and the sun on marigolds. Unlike my inherited anxiety or rampant pessimism, this I understand, appreciate.
I spilled flour and a handful of sugar on the island while I was making the scones, and muttered to myself, "Oh Lord, L.S, what a mess." But she was right, it didn't make no difference.
