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[insearchoflostfood]

Our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?

M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

[insearchoflostfood]

Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.

Joan Didion, Blue Nights 

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the gold cookie tin, a family heirloom

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Sugar cane being harvested in Louisiana in the late 1800s. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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The history of syrup cookies, like many other recipes on this list, has its roots in what is decidedly an unpleasant history of agriculture in the American South. The success of the sugar cane crop in the Americas can be traced back to the wide availability of slave labor, and syrup cookies, made from cane syrup, followed from this success.

My living family’s memory extends only so far as three generations back to male family members working as share-croppers on sugar cane farms, living in poverty and bringing home syrup on occasion. Though much of the family “history” surrounding syrup cookies has to do with their status as widely-travelled, cherished treat, there are traces of more popular southern myths within our own, especially in regards to their importance as a piece of Southern culture which, along with the production of sugar cane, risks dying out. My grandfather, sugar cane having held a special place in his heart for this very reason,  did what he could to make sure the “art”, as he called it, wasn’t lost to my generation. I think, having grown up working in the fields himself as a young boy, it was part of who he was. And, of course, so were the cookies— they had been an integral part of his culinary life.  

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memories of sugar cane (communicative)

Paternal Grandmother

“Sugar cane had been grown in the area for years and years. I remember Daddy and my cousins working in the fields when I was young. I think the first memory of the syrup cookies I have I was about 3 or 4 years old. My momma would always make them if we had company coming because we almost always had syrup on hand— she’d either make those or open a can of peaches and set them out on the table with some cream. 

When I was a little bit older and my sister, Carlene, was in high school, the home-economics teacher would come around to the house in the summer and work on projects with us. Mostly sewing bed-spreads and gardening, but sometimes we’d cook too. Now that I think about it that’s actually probably where this recipe came from. Momma’s recipe, which is probably a hundred year older, didn’t have ginger in them— I think that was probably added during those summers. 

When your grandfather and I got married, I made them a lot — especially once we moved down to San Antonio while he was in basic [training]. And when he shipped off to Thailand during Vietnam, I sent them to him in that gold fruitcake tin. They were really the only thing I could send over that would transport very well. I once sent a poundcake in it and it was all powder by the time it got to him— there wasn’t even a solid chunk of it left. 

I don’t really know where the tin came from, but I got it from his mother who used to send stuff to your Uncle Eerie when he was living in China at the end of WWII. I just know it’s really old and guess it once had a fruitcake in it. I also used to send it around to your dad when he was at the Naval Academy. That thing has been everywhere.”

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My grandmother, Gwen, and grandfather, Charles, shortly before he shipped off to Vietnam.

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memories of syrup cookies (personal)

One rare winter weekend my brother and I stayed at my grandparents house, they took us early one Saturday morning to watch sugar cane be pressed into juice and boiled into molasses. My grandfather called it a “dying art” and filled up small paper cups with juice and let us drink it by the fire his friend had built for us. His friend’s family had been making the syrup the same way for one hundred and twenty years— and my grandmother had bought their molasses since just after she married my grandfather in the mid-sixties. Several hours later once the process was complete, my grandparents’ friend filled several mason jars with the syrup and sent us on our way. When we got home, my grandmother made cookie dough from the molasses and ginger spice and let my brother and I shape them into stars and bells with plastic cookie cutters. Often, when we would visit around the holidays, she would serve them to us from a gold tin with black coffee and we would sit in her living room by the wood heater. 

I didn’t really like the bitter taste of them when I was young, but I liked helping my grandmother in the kitchen and the way they made the whole house smell like brown sugar. I liked them because because baking them felt like being trusted with a very important secret. 

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my grandmother’s syrup cookie recipe

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syrup cookie recipe

Ingredients

7 cups flour 1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt 1 egg

1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon 2 cups syrup (molasses)

2 tablespoon ginger 

2 tablespoon vinegar

¼ teaspoon nutmeg 

4 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup shortening 

1 cup boiling water

Directions 

Sift 7 cups of the flour with the salt and spices.

Cream shortening and sugar, then add the molasses and vinegar.

Then add the sifted dry ingredients.

Lastly, add baking soda dissolved in the boiling water.

If necessary, add more flour to make softer dough.

Drop by teaspoon on a greased cookie sheet.

Sprinkle with sugar.

Bake 8-10 minutes in moderate head (350F).

Makes about 100 cookies.

For fewer cookies:

 3 cups flour 

½ cup sugar

½ teaspoon salt 

1 egg

1 teaspoon cinnamon 

1 cup syrup

1 tablespoon ginger 

1 tablespoon vinegar

¼ teaspoon nutmeg 

2 teaspoons baking soda

½ cup shortening 

½ cup boiling water

 Same instructions.

[insearchoflostfood]

You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold onto all that? And I said, Where can I put it down?

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony, & God

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Unlike former socialist societies, in which objects of past regimes 'were carefully purged from sight', in the West 'objects of the past are everywhere for sale. The past eagerly cohabits with the present'. While such items as cast-iron skillets and old wooden cutting boards  are indeed typical items found at 'antique' stores, available for purchase and display as representatives of a lost past, we were struck in our research by the continued reliance by some of our informants on these tools, not simply as memory objects that represent the past, but as ongoing elements of their everyday lives, useful tools which, by their continued usefulness, foil the culture of replicability on which capitalism thrives.

David Sutton & Michael Hernandez, Voices in the Kitchen: Cooking Tools as Inalienable Possessions 

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Elvis professed to love banana pudding & this is a well-known and often quoted fact I the south.

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The history and mythology of banana pudding is extensive and complex, but popular accounts of the dish’s origin seem to reflect, at least in part, my grandmother’s notion that it was a dish to be eaten “when company was coming”. 

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memories of banana pudding (communicative)

Paternal Grandmother

“The recipe is old, but I’m not sure how old. At least as old as this Pyrex bow which your great, great grandmother bought a long time before I was born. It’s a great desert because it’s cheap to make, even if you don’t have bananas on hand. When your dad and Uncle Scott were babies I would always have Nilla Wafers around the house for them. If I didn’t have bananas, I’d use a little bit of banana flavoring I kept on the shelf. Your grandfather actually preferred it that way because he didn’t really like the texture of cooked bananas. But these days I mostly make it the way the recipe says. 

When I was hardly even old enough to talk I remember that blue bowl. When I saw it out I knew what we were having. I think your daddy would say the same thing. I don’t cook anything else in it and neither did my mother. 

I do remember one time when I was young, before the highway had been built through, 

me and Momma and my sisters had gone to town after lunch for something. Momma had set lunch in the pie safe under some drop clothes like she did every day. Back in those days there was a garden we all shared up near our house where the road is now. The Smith girl and her little brothers would always play up there and around our house with us while their mother was working in the garden. When we got home that evening the pie safe was open and there were little footprints everywhere— all the food, including the whole dish of banana pudding, was gone. We guessed that the Smith kids had come in and eat it while we were gone. “

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Magnolia Bakery, New York City (Still from Sex & the City)