When I think back, my tendency is also to remember the good things, the happy times. In Southern families like the one of my childhood, happy times often coincided with food. For my parents’ generation, one that had been hungry during the Depression and known rationing during World War II, food was love. My mother and her parenting peers didn’t worry about childhood obesity as we do today, but found ways not just to feed their children, but to feed us abundantly and introduce us to all the flavors their culinary skills might devise.
Recently I wrote about “Depression food,” the dishes my mother used to stretch the meat in our diet further with starches and vegetables. She was quite creative and successful in this endeavor. We loved her vegetable beef soup, not because it was full of beef, but because the minimal amount of meat was augmented with vegetables. In summer months, these were put into the pot fresh from the garden. In the winter, they came from canned produce, some of it put up by relatives.
Sara, however, remembered the Christmas experience with these particular favorites from Mama’s kitchen and suggested that I provide the recipe for them. I rummaged around and found the recipe and have provided it below.
Mama’s Stone Jar Cookies
Ingredients:
1 cup Crisco
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Vanilla
1 tsp Nutmeg
2 cups Brown sugar, packed firmly
3 cups Flour, sifted
2 Eggs
1 tsp Soda
¼ cup Milk
½ cup Pecans, chopped
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine Crisco, salt, vanilla and nutmeg.
Add sugar gradually, making sure to cream thoroughly. Add eggs to mixture. Mix half of flour sifted with soda and mix in. Add remaining flour, milk and chopped pecans. Let the batter stand for about ten minutes (can be covered and refrigerated overnight). Drop from teaspoon onto greased baking sheet and flatten with the bottom of a water glass. Bake for about ten minutes.
Makes about six dozen cookies
In reading this recipe, you might notice the word “about” used a couple of times. That word indicates something about Mama’s cooking (and my own, I admit). She might include specific amounts of ingredients in her written recipes, but she understood cooking to be more art than science. Thus, depending on the weather and the oven and a myriad of other factors that might influence the outcome, these cookies might take ten minutes to bake or maybe twelve. When she was baking, she was in the kitchen from beginning to end of a project. There were no time-outs. In fact, I remember more than once being told to “watch the cookies” if she needed to “excuse herself to attend to personal matters.” If she had an oven full of cookies, more than one family member might be pressed into service to help get cookies off the pans or put them on the racks to cool. At Christmas, the sheer volume of what she produced often demanded this assistance.
Remembering Mama in the kitchen brings back several mental pictures that make me smile. One of them is, of course, the obligatory tasting opportunities that arose. When the cookies emerged from the oven, if any of us kids (or Daddy) were around, we were conscripted to taste the first batch to make sure they were turning out right. Typically the smell of cookies baking drew us like vultures and she rarely had to call out for tasters.
But tasting the baked cookies wasn’t the only gustatory option. If we hadn’t done anything within a couple of hours that she felt deserved either punishment or her disappointment, we were allowed to “lick the bowl and spoon” of any leftover smidgens of batter when all the last of the cookies had been put in the oven. She was economical, so left little batter to be had, but we loved this special treat and were willing to pay the price for it. He or she who “licked” also washed the bowl and spoon and anything else she needed washed.
I have a very fond memory of my mother and aunt in the kitchen together, cooking. Like Beaver Cleaver’s mother, my mother and aunt would go right into the kitchen in the dresses they were wearing rather than change clothes. They would tie an apron around their waists and get to work. What they also did for comfort in a hot kitchen was roll down their hose around their ankles.
In the 50’s women wore hose and would not be bare-legged when wearing dresses. There were no panty hose then, so they would simply unhook the hose from their girdles or garter belts and roll them down into funny-looking concentric tubes just above the ankle. There was a time in my life when I found this somehow embarrassing and unseemly, perhaps when I was in puberty and most of my mother’s life was an embarrassment. Now, however, I remember that practice and can’t help but smile with affection.
Their generation had endured much. Thus, they were thankful for the bounties of post-war America, happy to have children in the house (with no sense that a birth control pill would change everything for the next generation) and managed to share their homes with their parents or their husbands’ parents as that older generation aged and needed to shelter in their children’s homes. My father’s father lived with us for as much as a decade in the last years of his life. My aunt hosted first her own mother and grandmother, then my uncle’s parents in their last years.
As I said at the beginning of this, they weren’t really simpler times, just different times. Those times had their problems and burdens as we have our own today. But there were so many good times and there are so many good memories, many as sweet as Stone Jar cookies. I’m grateful for those memories and hope our generation is providing some good memories for our children and theirs in the years to come.
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