Almost four years after I moved to the coast, I have finally unpacked a dozen or more boxes of books. I still don’t have enough shelves for all of them, but at least I can locate one if I want it. It’s not a fancy collection of first editions or expensive tomes. Rather, it’s an eclectic selection of books from my childhood, college texts, novels, nonfiction, many of which were gifts, and volumes that had belonged to my parents. They loved books as much as I.
As always after something has been stored away for years, I made many delightful discoveries of items long forgotten. It was hard for me not to sit down and read as I was trying to stack the books in some type of order. Among these rediscoveries is a small, brown notebook, called “The Spiral, Composition Book, number 761-M,” belonging to my grandmother.
She began this notebook with a few handwritten recipes, only one of which I recognize her ever making. She pasted several clipped cookie recipes behind the handwritten ones. Also, there is a magazine picture of mounds of mashed potatoes brushed with butter and broiled, then each topped with a crown of English peas. She skipped a number of pages, then pasted in copies of Christmas carols. At the back are handwritten copies of songs from her childhood, including “Hunting for Santa,” “Sing to the Holly,” “Alabama,” and “All Birds Look Like Chickens to Me.”
I was three years old when my grandfather died and my grandmother moved in with us. For years, we shared a room. Although we became best friends, I never remember her singing any of these songs. I know that I, as a child, would have remembered the song about the man who likes to eat chicken. It’s funny.
The chorus repeats, “All birds look like chickens to me. You see, some birds are raised up for a prize, but knife and fork smoke them all one size. People say quails ain’t chickens. You see, they look like lilliputian hens to me. There’s eagles and owls and other kinds of fowls. But they look like chickens to me.” How incongruous to find allusion to Jonathan Swift’s satire, Gulliver’s Travels, in such a silly song!
Shortly after Grandmother’s move, she and my mother split the household chores. Grandmother took over the kitchen. Although my mother continued to prepare my dad’s breakfast, Grandmother cooked lunch and supper every day, baked goodies weekly and washed the dishes. Reluctantly, she would let my mother work in the kitchen whenever she wanted to have a party. Otherwise, the kitchen became Grandmother’s territory and we all stayed out except when we were invited in to eat a meal.
Rarely, did Grandmother ever use a recipe. If she ever made Liver Loaf or Date Pie by her handwritten recipes, I never ate them. But I remember one recipe. Although it’s named Applesauce Cake, she added other fruit to the applesauce she had made and called it a Fruit Cake. I especially remember it because she baked it on occasion for my uncle, her only son, a sailor who served in the Pacific during World War II. After the cake had cooled, she wrapped it in layers and layers of waxed paper and placed it in a box. My dad, a grocer, supplied her with small wrapped candies to pack around it to keep it secure in the box. I never asked my uncle if he and his buddies really ate that cake that probably took days, if not weeks, to reach him. But he always wrote her touching letters about how good the cake and the cookies, that she sent on a regular basis, were and how much he appreciated being remembered.
With all the war coverage of late, we hear the stories about many boxes being shipped to the military now and the problems in screening such gifts during heightened security. Mothers and spouses left behind still remember with homebaked gifts. What a concrete connection between generations at war time. However, this war is different in so many ways, including the fact that many mothers are on the battlefield today.
So, Grandmother’s Applesauce Cake, which she called a Fruit Cake, will always be a Wartime Cake for me. As we observe Mother’s Day, let us not only remember our own mothers and grandmothers, let us pray for all mothers everywhere.
Grandmother’s Applesauce Cake/Fruit Cake/ Wartime Cake
1 cup hot applesauce mashed with 2 teaspoons soda
1 cup sugar
3/4 shortening
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3 eggs
1/2 lb. chopped pecans
2 pkgs (7-1/2 oz.) dates
1/2 lb. candied cherries
small glass peach preserves
1/2 small glass pineapple preserves
3 cups flour
Cream shortening and sugar. Add eggs. Add remaining ingredients in order, blend well. Add flour last. Pour into greased and floured tube pan. Bake at 325 degrees for about two hours or until done.
2003
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