Father's Day Baking

Father's Day has always been a baking day for me, and that makes me think about the women of my family as well as my Dad.

I come from two families of women who have always pursued the traditional female roles with some unique differences along the way. Both of my great-grandmothers were very strong-willed farm women who ran their homes with a great deal of authority.  My father's grand-mother, Lela Brandenburg, was a tremendous quilter.  She and my great-grandfather had a basic rule for their married life:  what's inside is hers and what's outside is his.  Whatever she put on the table, he ate.  If he had wanted to paint the barn lime green, so be it.  The only exception to that was the kitchen garden -- that was hers and it was planted and tended as she specified. Produce from the gardens and orchard were preserved by canning, drying and storing in the root cellar.  The quilting frame went up in one of the front parlors in October, when the garden was done, and came down in April, when it was time for the garden again.

My mother's grandmother was Lucinda Reaver (the first Cindy - I am named after her).  Married young to a widower, she had step-children almost her own age, and then my grandmother and two other children.  Widowed by middle-age, she continued to farm until her death in her 80's.  She didn't have much time for needlework, but she did sew of course, and cook.  This was her mixing bowl, and when I first started to bake, my grandmother gave it to me.  I set rolls to rise in it for years, but now I keep it for the memories.

Like her mother, my maternal grandmother married an older man and had her first child at 17.  Several years later, when an eye injury kept my grandfather from working on the railroad any longer, my grandmother, Elsie Reaver Dixon,  walked to Springfield State Hospital to look for work, probably in housekeeping.  She found herself (now a mother of four with an eighth grade education, no less) in a nurses training program.  By the time my mother was born in the midst of the Depression, she was a general practice nurse who provided the majority of the family income --- not the usual situation in those days.

I learned to cook and bake from both my mother and my grandmother, whom we lived near and saw often.  We picked apples, pears, peaches and damsons in her orchard and grapes from her arbor.  She taught me how to weed a flower bed to her satisfaction and to pick a chicken (that's "picking" as in removing feathers after butchering, not "picking" as in choosing!)  She could look at you and cut out a dress to fit you without using a pattern.  She and I sat together in front of her TV the night of the moon landing and watched with amazement:  she could remember the first time she had seen an automobile, and here was man on the moon!  She kept a black-and-white school composition book of recipes that she copied from many places, as well as those given to her by others.  It is a keepsake, written in her hand (along with my scribbles from childhood) that I use often.

My father's mother also led a working life that was different for the women of her time.  Jeanette Brandenburg Powell left the farm for the city - Hagerstown was a busy industrial city in the first half of the last century - and worked outside the home all of her life.  She raised two sons alone and sewed for a living, remaking furs professionally, and as a seamstress as well.  She didn't quilt, perhaps because her mother did, but she did exceptional handwork of different kinds.  She died young, and I often wonder what I could learned from her had the circumstances been much different.

When I was about 8, my parents gave me my first very own cookbook for Christmas.  It was Let's Start To Cook from the Farm Journal, and to this day, I use the brownie recipe very Sunday night during the school year in preparation for my Monday night reading group at the Police Activity League.  (Note the cover art: who said cupcakes were the new trend?  Obviously we are have a renaissance!)

While my father spoke of the meals he knew at my great-grandmother's table, and my grandmother Dixon played a role in my learning to cook and bake, it was my mother who had the greatest impact, of course.  Her cookbooks - the Betty Crocker Cook Book and the Farm Journal Freezing and Canning Cookbook you see here - are still important to me.  Her notes on everything from pickles and peaches to pepper slaw and grape jelly are here.  We canned barbecue sauce and froze mincemeat; cut umpteen dozens of quarts of corn from the cob and snapped green beans until I could do it my sleep -- and milked cows around it all.

So, to get back to Father's Day, where all of this started.  For Dad, the usual sour cherry pie, which doesn't have much sugar in it at all because, as Dad would tell you: If the good Lord has wanted those cherries to be sweet, he would have made them that way.  And then a lemon meringue especially for my sister, who wants something sweeter.  And most importantly, Mom's pie crust, which was Elsie's pie crust, and Lucinda's pie crust.  Because that's what a family is all about.