A little history first. My father died when I was six years old, and my grandmother moved into our apartment in New York City to take care of me. Suddenly our kitchen smelled of sugar and butter. My mother had never been much of a baker, believing that sugar was bad for you. But my grandmother did not share that belief. She fed me apple pie for breakfast, pointing out to my outraged mother, that after all, apples are healthy for you, are they not? Now, when I came home from school there were always chocolate chip cookies or snickerdoodles in the cookie jar waiting for me.
From that point on, I hung out in the kitchen with my grandmother watching her bake. She didn’t measure. She didn’t use recipes. She added a cup of this and a pinch of that into a bowl and poured the mixture into a pan to bake. So simple. And then there was dough.
I was fascinated watching my nana roll out pie dough and make strudel. She rolled the strudel dough out on the dining room table. It was so thin that when she got done that you could read the newspapers she had spread out on the table through it. Once in a while, if I was being good, she let me sift the flour and the baking powder together, cream the butter and sugar, or crack the eggs into the batter.
It all seemed so easy. Just mix everything together and viola, magic happened. When I was nine, I convinced my friend Linda to help me bake something in her family’s kitchen. We didn’t measure. Instead, we copied my grandmother ‘s method, and added a little of this and a lot of that. That’s when we discovered that if you add enough baking soda you get an explosion when you put the cake in the oven. We were thrilled. Her parents not so much. After that, I was banned from the kitchen unless I was supervised.
Coincidentally, around that time, my interest in baking waned, my fascination with boys grew, and I forgot about baking. Then I moved into my first apartment after I graduated college. With no money, the idea of baking became more attractive, and I decided to give it another try.
One of my roommates’ moms had a recipe book that her high school PTA had put together for a fund raiser, so I decided to try their recipe for apple pie. It didn’t turn out well. The crust was tough, and the apples weren’t sweet enough, but we all ate it anyway. More importantly, my boyfriend ate it, even though he told me later that the crust tasted and looked like cardboard, the result I later discovered of over kneading.
But it didn’t matter. The smell of cinnamon drew me back to my childhood love. I began to read cookbooks, to understand that baking wasn’t magic, that if you followed the steps in a recipe, you would get the promised product.
Cookbooks. They are a world unto themselves. I’ve collected many over the years. My favorites are stained with splashes of butter and flour and open automatically to the recipes I’ve made week after week. Others are piled on my nightstand waiting to be read. When I do read them, I like to picture how the ingredients come together, how people in different times and places lived and ate. As time went by, I tried to bake my grandmother’s yellow cake with chocolate icing, but it didn’t come put right, so I did the only logical thing. I went back home to learn how my grandmother did what she did.
I stood by her elbow while she baked, watching what she did, and to her intense annoyance, measuring the ingredients out before she put them in the bowl. Even though I never learned how to pull strudel dough, my grandmother did show me how to roll out pie crust, transfer it to a pie plate, and crimp the edges. There was and is something profoundly satisfying about watching the crust turn golden brown in the oven. It’s almost as satisfying as watching bread bake.
And speaking of bread, yeast is amazing. Without it we wouldn’t have bread as we know it. The Egyptians were using it to bake bread around 1300 BC, and before that they used wild yeast, possibly as early as 3,000BC. Without yeast, we wouldn’t have baguettes, rye bread, croissants, English muffins, or coffee cakes.
I started making bread when I moved Upstate. It helped me get through the long, dark cold winters. There was something comforting about kneading the dough and turning it from a sticky mess into a round, silken ball. I loved watching the dough rise. I loved that you could form it into different shapes and sizes.
There are so many different kinds of bread to learn how to make, so many kinds of flour to use. White. Rye. Whole wheat. Spelt. Some flours are easier to make into loaves, some are harder to have come together, but all of them smell wonderful when they’re in the oven. Best of all is the feeling of coming into the house when it’s ten degrees out, the wind is whipping the snow around, and the smell of baking bread is perfuming the house.
Baking evokes memories, and not just for me. The other day I was with one of my sons and someone asked him if there is one food that reminded him of home and he said, banana bread. I made two to three loaves of it every week for years. Now my children have the recipe, and they make it for their children. They say home is where the heart is. I say home is where the oven is. Baking reminds me of the times my grandmother made magic in the kitchen. I’d like to share her recipe for rugelach. The shape of these isn’t traditional (the name translates to little twists) but they taste delicious all the same.
Ingredients.
8 oz. cream cheese -room temperature.
2 sticks butter cut into chunks.
2 cups flour.
½ teaspoon salt.
Mix together until all ingredients form a ball. Wrap in Saran wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours or for overnight. When ready to use make the fillings and preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Walnut filling.
I cup finely chopped walnuts.
½ cup raisins
¼ cup sugar.
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Preserve filling.
1 cup raspberry or apricot preserves
2 tablespoons cinnamon-sugar.
To assemble, remove dough from the fridge and butter two cookie sheets. Then divide dough in half. Roll each half out on a floured board and fill each circle with one of the fillings. Then roll up each half jelly roll fashion. Score the slices for cutting with a sharp knife and sprinkle with coarse sugar. Then bake for twenty to thirty minutes or until golden brown. Take out of the oven and let cool before serving. These freeze well.
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