Are you hungry? I’m not, having consumed a generous helping of Spanish rice and Italian sausage, enhanced with sauteed onion and a pepper fresh from the garden. I limited the pepper contribution after the aroma cleared my nose as I sliced it; that sensation made me think my long green pepper was a Garden Salsa, classified medium hot. Spice is nice, but too hot is not!
But tomorrow is Saturday, and even though there are no cartoons in my future, I’ll roll out of bed just a little jollier knowing there’s a Mrs. Peters’ coffeecake on the counter to accompany the first cup of coffee. It’s a simple dish, the kind of cake you can make anytime with what’s in your cupboard: two eggs, some milk, sugar, oleo, flour, baking powder and cinnamon. That’s one reason this coffeecake is one of my favorite recipes. Another is its provenance: I copied the recipe word for word from my mom’s card, right down to the admonition to use a toothpick to check for doneness because it’s a terrible flop if it’s not. She got it from my godmother, my mom and dad’s landlady when they moved to Lemont, Illinois for my dad’s first job out of college. My godmother and her husband, Emil, were German. Mrs. Peters was a wonderful cook and a generous lady, sending birthday cards with five dollar bills, the most money I ever had to spend. Their house was cozy, piled high with rugs and afghans and pillows, but its most captivating feature was the cuckoo clock that hung in the hallway. My sister and I watched that clock like hawks, enthralled by the little bird popping out of his door on the hour.
The only downside of Mrs. Peters’ coffeecake is what pan to use...my mom cooked it in a 9”square pan and never seemed to have that dreaded ‘flop’. I struggled for years with a slightly smaller Pyrex square, but finally settled on a fairly large pottery pie plate….and it makes for a prettier presentation!
Though Mrs. Peters is long gone, her legacy continues up here in northwest Missouri, far away from Lemont and her native land.
My father basted almost everything he grilled with a sauce of Worcestershire, butter and onion. He’d call in from the garage door to my mom when he was ready to sauce up the burgers or chicken or steak. The only exception was barbequed chicken, a painstaking production requiring multitudinous bastings with the mixture of ketchup, the ubiquitous Worcestershire, and butter. It was a special meal whenever my dad grilled. My mom made a dish she called “Boccherini ala Romano’ that I loved. Made with round steak, green peppers, ham steak, and mozzarella cheese layered and baked in the long Corningware pan with the blue flowers, it doesn’t really sound like something that would appeal to a youngster, but the meats would be super tender, the pepper added zest, and no kid turns down an opportunity to string mozzarella from plate to fork to mouth. I cannot find a recipe with that name after all these years, but perhaps that moniker was a creation of my father’s inventive mind…
It isn’t just what we cook but who we cook with that makes our food memorable. Putting up sweet corn, or processing chickens, or canning tomatoes or freezing apple pies, are jobs that beg for company, for conversation, for storytelling, commiserating, and handing down of traditions. I used to peel bucket after bucket of little apples in Millie’s old kitchen while she rolled out pie dough amid a cloud of flour and spice on her kitchen table. Now, I peel buckets of apples at Lee’s sink while she rolls out dough on her kitchen counter. The pies are stacked and frozen, close at hand for a funeral dinner, or a 4-H food stand, or just a homemade dessert during harvest.
Grandma Hurst would always help with corn, standing or sitting, slicing with her knife toward her and huffing for breath as she worked.
I think of Millie’s dinner rolls, the first item on everyone’s plate during the holidays, a food I never cook...and never will...because her rolls are better than anyone else’s. Several years back, she gave all the “girls” a tutorial on her dough...a kind gesture, but we all know that kind of cooking is more art than science, more earned than learned.
Apple bread is what I bring for all occasions. The recipe is super easy...if you don’t mind peeling...and is another one of those plug and play breads that cooks for an hour every time and...almost always...comes out of the pan cleanly. It can be bread...or dessert. It can be frozen. It can even pretend to be a “healthy” treat! I don’t know how many loaves I’ve made through the years, or how many times I’ve given away the recipe, but I hope it gives as much pleasure in the eating as I have had in the making and baking.
When I make my very favorite recipe, it is almost a reverential experience. That’s because the cream cheese coffeecake is such a special occasion dish that I almost always make it for Christmas and Easter mornings. Unlike many of my go-to baked goods, this one requires time and planning: each cake needs five eggs and yeast and sixteen ounces of cream cheese. The dough must be mixed and then chilled for at least 2 hours. The eggs must be separated. The cream cheese has to be softened. The dough is split and rolled thin; then the filling is spread, the second layer rolled and carefully laid atop and the two crusts crimped together and trimmed. Then the cake has to rise. Maybe I’ll raise it on the range top with the oven warming, but often I put a dish towel over the pan and set it on the radiator in the kitchen. The last little bit of dough I flatten into a cross….for Easter...or a star for Christmas. And then wash the top with a bit of egg white and bake. Through the years, baking cream cheese coffeecakes for the family..or Easter breakfast at church...has tended to be a late night task, lending a peaceful and prayerful atmosphere to the warm kitchen. As offerings go, it is small, but it is cooking for the very best reason: as a gift.
