Sweet stories
We all have stories about food and family.
Cookbook authors Kimberly “Momma” Reiner and Jenna Sanz-Agero understand that. They understand that while a good story won’t turn a bad recipe into a good one, it will make a good recipe live on.
They understand that food connects us because of the stories connected to it. What is tradition, but a story handed down — like a recipe — from one generation to another?
Reiner and Sanz-Agero have collected a pile of sweet recipes, and even sweeter stories, in their new book, “Sugar, Sugar: Every Recipe Has a Story” (Andrews McMeel, $29.99). Here is one of the stories I like best.
Back in the 1930s, Essie Mae Smith Ellis of Claxon Ridge, Ky., prepared a cake — full of then-hard-to-get ingredients such as raisins and pineapple — each Christmas. She baked it in a wood-burning stove, which was also the only heat source in the house, and the smell of it drove her children wild.
But Ellis was considered to be “stingy” with the cake. “She didn’t care to share any leftovers. Some relatives admitted to sneaking out with pieces stashed in their purses,” the authors write.
She wasn’t, however, stingy with her love. When her son Jerry moved to San Francisco, Ellis mailed him a Kentucky Jam Cake each Christmas, and she always included the recipe for the caramel icing so he could finish the cake “with exactly the presentation as she would have wanted.”
Sadly, the authors write, Jerry was among the first wave of gay men afflicted with AIDS; he died in 1983. While sorting through his possessions, Jerry’s sister found the icing recipe and a note in her mother’s handwriting. The sister kept the note, write Reiner and Sanz-Agero, “because the family knew how much it meant to Jerry that, no matter what, his mother accepted and loved him, never judging him.”
Acceptance and love, not judgment — that’s about as good as it gets in life. And Essie Mae Smith Ellis’ famous Kentucky Jam Cake is about as good as it gets in baking. Don’t wait for Christmas. Pass it on.
Ÿ Marialisa Calta is the author of “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family” (Perigee, 2005). More at marialisacalta.com.