Kitchen Memories and a New Specialty From the Oven

Winter arrives, and the kitchen beckons. Holidays approach, upping the ante. Holidays increase both a slightly anxious pressure and the happy or bittersweet weight of memories. The other morning, the first text of the day from the younger of my two younger sisters was this: “It’s been three months, sisters.” Three months since our mother died, that is. That loss, still sharp, is now accompanied for us by all our family memories of holiday kitchen projects: cookies we helped make and decorate from the time we were little girls; our mother’s amazing marzipan; her special coffee cakes; those intricate, magical sugar cube houses that sat on the sideboard, nested in a bed of cotton “snow” and surrounded by candles in the shape of pine trees; her inimitable peanut brittle; and so much more. I get out her old, old cookbook and turn the pages, where the most meaningful recipes to me are not those cut from magazines and taped in but the ones she copied out in here own hand. Handwriting on paper! How could anything “digital” hold so much of a person’s essence?

My only actual baking this year, however, came from a recipe on the inside of a box as, for only the second time, I set out to make peanut butter cheesecake brownies. On the first trial, a few months back, I had baked the brownies in muffin tins and was happy enough with the results that I wanted to experiment further in that direction. Hence the mini-muffin tins, with individual cups the perfect size to duplicate bite-sized cheesecake brownie treats (well, more like three bites each) that I’d discovered in a grocery store bakery in the Southwest.

(Measuring spoons for scale)

The recipe on the box was clearly written for people in a hurry, because it told me to melt the chocolate and butter in a microwave oven. Call me old-fashioned (you won’t be the first), but I prefer to use a double boiler, especially with the other changes I was making to the process. While chocolate and butter were melting, you see, I had time to grease my muffin tins. Of course, the recipe people had not foreseen the use of muffin tins so cannot be faulted, I suppose, for trying to rush the process. 

*** Excuse me, though, because here I have a thought that is a complete digression from memories and brownies but important enough that I want to interrupt myself to get it in. All these “quick” recipes that call for “instant” mashed potatoes and “instant” oatmeal? Please, please, please don’t do that! You might as well just sit down and eat a bowl of sugar! You think “it’s good for them in a casserole or a cookie”? No, not that pre-digested stuff: it leaves your digestive system nothing to do and does nothing for you but prime your system for more sugar. End of lecture. ***

Baker’s Chocolate instructions were at first somewhat confusing to me when it came to the eggs. They called for five eggs, “divided.” I never heard of “divided” eggs. Did they mean separated? Well, clearly not, because further along the eggs, not egg yolks and egg whites, were to be added — but not all at once to the same bowl. What the recipe had intended to forecast was that four eggs would be added to the chocolate mixture and one to the cream cheese and peanut butter mixture. Okay, that's settled!

Then there was the matter of swirling the peanut butter and cream cheese and sugar mixture (2-1/2 cups of sugar were also “divided,” 2 cups going into the chocolate/butter mix and 1/2 cup into peanut butter and cream cheese) into the chocolate mixture that also had flour added last. In a pan, swirling can be done with a knife, but in the tiny muffin tins only a toothpick would do the job. 

Do they look messy in the pans? I had moments of doubt at this stage.

Time in the oven for the different variations had to be adjusted by guess and by gosh, since brownies in the large muffin tin did not need to bake as long as those in a traditional cake pan, and those in the mini-muffin tins baked fastest of all. A watchful eye, initial short baking period, and an additional five minutes here and there seemed the recipe for success. It would depend on your ovens and your pans. 

In the end, all variations produced acceptable results, and though my mother never used this basic recipe, as far as I can recall, I could easily imagine her sitting at the table nearby, following the entire procedure, getting up to examine the brownies as they came out of the oven, and eventually giving them the taste test and pronouncing them “Very good, sweetheart!” 

My sisters and I returned to our morning text-fest, remembering a year when our grandmother was with us for the holidays and we had an old-fashioned taffy pull in my mother’s little kitchen. Small, that is, but not as small as the one I call my “Paris” kitchen. Still, my mother’s kitchen was probably good training for not letting lack of space get in the way of cooking and baking. 

My mother and grandmother are with me still when baking season comes around, as they are with my sisters, and we are fortunate to have memories to share.

A New Year 1, 2, 3

A small kitchen is necessarily kept simple. There is no room for a dishwasher, for instance, and nowhere to stack all the bowls and utensils for one big wash-up later on. Instead the cook is motivated to keep dishes washed up, a few at a time, by hand, during the food preparation and cooking process. Washing dishes by hand can be meditative. For me it’s often time to begin planning out a blog post, writing and rewriting in my head before sitting down to look at words in sentences.

Limited counter and storage space keep electric appliances to a minimum. Having dishcloths, towels, spices, and utensils close at hand is a higher priority, and often, from years of simple habits, I reach automatically for a hand whisk rather than hunt up the electric mixer.

But there is no substitute for a waffle iron.

My mother, my earliest teacher of kitchen wisdom, knows this well, and it was she who gave me my waffle iron. Most of the time, it’s hidden away in the back of a cupboard, but a couple times a year, on special occasions, out it comes, and New Year’s Day morning was one of those special occasions. A holiday, of course, meant a relaxed morning at home, but besides that, I’d fallen behind in my bread baking over a stretch of unusual holiday scheduling at the bookstore. No eggs without toast for David! But he loves waffles.

For some home cooks, simplicity means mixes and frozen entrees. For me it usually means cooking slowly, from scratch, with fresh and organic ingredients, but I have to admit that on New Year’s Day I had a box of pancake mix in my cupboard -- pancake mix, not pancake and waffle mix, though. So out came my oldest and most trusted cookbook, because I was going to be improvising and needed to check several recipes, both for pancakes and for waffles, to see what I would need to add to the mix. And if not for that need to improvise, I would never be writing about my New Year’s Day waffles at all. From a mix? Please!

The most basic difference between pancakes and waffles is that the eggs are separated in the making of waffles, the egg whites beaten stiff and gently folded into the other ingredients at the very end. A bit of shortening is also called for in waffle batter. So I melted a couple tablespoons of butter and separated three eggs (I was flying by the seat of my pants, but two just didn’t feel like enough), and also substituted whole milk for the water called for on the pancake mix box. It all seemed reasonable, but would it work?

The moment of truth is opening the waffle iron to take out the first waffle. It is an anxious moment! Will the hoped-for waffle stick to the iron? Will it tear apart? Or will it retain its integrity but be disappointing in texture or taste?

Practically perfect! The kitchen new year is off to a good start!

Number 2 kitchen project of the day was hoppin’ john. Good ham, chopped finely, cooked up with chopped onions. (How can any dish fail when it begins with an onion?) Chicken broth from the freezer. White and wild rice. Organic (yes, canned) black-eyed peas from a company right here in Leelanau Township.

Black-eyed peas always make me think of my mother’s stepfather, who grew up in northern Florida. Wild rice carries my mind up to the Upper Peninsula, the birthplace also of the maple syrup on the morning’s waffles, gift of a writer friend. And of course I’d already been thinking of my mother, who gave me the waffle iron. So you can see, what with all those memories, it was pretty crowded in my tiny kitchen on New Year’s morning. Fragrant, too.

We were invited to a neighborhood party in the late afternoon, inspiring me to undertake NYD kitchen project #3, sour cream pumpkin cake, made entirely from scratch, with no canned ingredients or mixes. I had frozen the excess cooked, mashed pumpkin from my Thanksgiving Day pie and had everything else in the refrigerator or cupboards.

I rarely bake cakes. Pies, yes. Cakes, seldom. Consequently, every cake project is a learning experience for me, and one lesson I learned the last time around was that mixing cake batter by hand with a whisk or wooden spoon is more than I can successfully manage. My arm would fall out of its socket before the batter achieved desired smoothness, the necessary prelude to a light finished cake. 

Out came that electric hand mixer, after all. Oh, my god, the roar! I felt as if I were standing on a helicopter pad, in a war zone, surrounded by menacing airborne machines! The front of the mixer even looks menacing, doesn’t it? 

But the batter grew smoother by the minute.

I love the moment, not captured here on camera, where cake batter is poured into a pan, falling from bowl to pan in a series of graceful folds. That is a moment of grace, full of promise. And then the pan goes into the oven. A twist of the timer. (Simple, in the Paris kitchen!) [photo of timer] And gradually a spicy aroma emanates from the tiny kitchen and fills the old farmhouse. Waiting, writing....

The toothpick (test for doneness) comes out clean. The cake smells delicious. It looks a bit pale and plain, but I don’t feel like making streusel topping. Perhaps a dusting of brown sugar? Or cinnamon sugar? Let is cool and sift on powdered sugar? How about sifted powder sugar and cinnamon. I think I’ll go that last route.

Well, it’s been a good morning in the kitchen. Now it’s early afternoon and time for tea.

Postscript: Was that cake not strangely pale? Oddly flat? When it was cut into at the party (luckily, I had also taken my hoppin’ john), the peculiar texture was not at all what I’d hoped or expected. People liked it anyway, most for being “not too sweet.” But what went wrong? Baking powder too old? Around 5 a.m. the answer came to me. I remembered photographs, in that oldest of my cookbooks, of popovers at different oven temperatures. I must have bumped into the dial on one of my passes through the doorway. Oven temperature too low would give exactly the result I got.

Which goes to show that no kitchen is so small that it will not yield failures as well as successes. In that the kitchen is a microcosm of life. And in the kitchen, as in life beyond it, failure usually has something to teach. Good reminder for the first day of a new year, which will no doubt bring new challenges on many fronts.