Gifts that Last

Over the Christmas holidays my nephew often brings me a pound cake. He’s mastered the method of creaming the butter and sugar, mixing the batter, and consistently turns out perfect cakes that practically melt in your mouth. The cake he brings me won’t last long in a house full of relatives. Even some of the children will pass up decorated cookies for a slice.

Why would a perishable cake be part of an essay on gifts that last? Because my nephew is part of the fifth generation to make the cake from Mary Etta Merrill’s recipe. Mary Etta, or Ma Ette as she was called, was my great-grandmother. Since she died before I was a year old I don’t actually remember her. I know of her from a single photograph, some family stories, and the pound cake recipe. She gave the recipe to her daughter-in-law, my grandmother, who then passed it down to the rest of us. It’s a simple recipe, made from ingredients found in a farm wife’s kitchen: sugar, real butter, eggs, flour, and vanilla. No fancy extra ingredients or frosting, just a plain cake. The delicate flavor is comforting; its simplicity makes it memorable.

Perhaps this came to mind because I was thinking about the treats that I make, some of them only for the Christmas holidays. As I come across new recipes, I try new things, but it is the old recipes that mean the most. They have stood the test, the kinks worked out, the seasonings adjusted, et cetera, before they were passed on. Beyond that, they have a history, a connection that the new things don’t have yet. It brought a smile to my face when I pulled out the recipe for fruitcake cookies on which my mother had noted “Recipe given to me by Pat Garner’s mother in 1964.”  I helped Mother make the cookies that year, and have made them either with her, or on my own every year since. If you do the math, you’ll see that for me this year’s batch marks fifty years, a half century of my making these same cookies.

            I’ve written before about the almost sacred ritual of making candy at the holidays with my mother, and of the sadness when the time came to make candy the first year after her death. To my great comfort, one of my sons asked to make candy with me that year, and continues to do so. His wife, my daughter-in-law, makes chocolate fudge with peanut butter from the recipe that my mother received when she was in college.

            Trends in gifts come and go, often heavily influenced by advertising agencies that produce the slick gift catalogues, catchy slogans, and glitzy television ads that bid us buy, buy, buy. But my great-grandmother, grandmothers, and mother were the wise ones. Although I received other gifts, material things that for the most part have long worn out, other than a few treasured pieces of jewelry, it is the other gifts that have endured. The gift of their patience in teaching me to cook, the lesson that some things are made special by preparing them only for important occasions or holidays. And the most treasured gifts of all, ordinary little slips of paper with recipes written in their familiar handwriting that bind me to them with memories as delicate as the aroma wafting from the oven, and as warm and sweet as the just-baked cookies and cakes.