A cinnamon twist on past, present and presence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/07/2024 (750 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My granddaughter is interested in cuisine. She is the composer of juices and compotes, a keen attendant to her other baba, expert baker, the maker of jams and pickles, pies and sweet buns, author of perfectly designed Sunday dinners, a brilliant baba of culinary — and all other — distinctions.

Though my own interest in cooking has been intermittent (as my grown children consistently remind me), there were moments of inspiration in my past that led to an apple strudel of epic proportions; an adaptation of challah shaped as a broomed witch for Halloween; an elaborate vegetable biryani accompanied by a lively assortment of condiments that startled us all.

I enjoy the memory of such triumphs and the recipes shared as legacy, experiences handed down through generations. My son-in-law’s Nona, at 102, is legendary within his family. Her handmade pasta astonishes. A recipe spoken at gatherings may call for the “idea of butter,” her phrasing as poetic as any cooking instruction I’ve encountered.

My own Grandma Dave enjoys her immortality in her roast-chicken stuffing, a concoction of flour, oatmeal, raw onion, salt, shmaltz and Crisco, so tantalizing my husband and I downed it in one sitting, relegating the chicken itself to another day.

I have often consulted the golden-brown manila envelope I titled “recipes that can kill”: a series of stained file cards and well-worn papers representing the more lethal of my mother’s favourites. Their distinguishing feature — butter and butter and more butter — or their equivalent in sugar. Condensed milk, coconut and chocolate chips spread on a graham cracker crusts, sometimes iced for further effect. Dream cakes made of brown sugar and butter, raisins and chopped, glazed fruit on shortbread bottoms. A Perfection Salad featuring pineapple tidbits, whipped cream, custard and marshmallows. My mother’s version of Aunt Sylvia’s Brazilian Chocolate Cake, a dessert dense enough to sink a medium-sized riverboat.

I think of my mother’s cooking hands. Powerful, animated, adept, spinning the dough, crafting the rectangle, spreading butter, cinnamon, sugar, a sprinkling of raisins, rolled into a log, sliced each into one-inch pieces, twisted to establish the figure eights, brushed with melted butter. Each step appears in my heart’s eye.

Trays in the oven. Cooling on racks. Icing sugar and milk, a thick syrup drizzled. My own child fingers slipping under the cooling racks, raking the extra icing, almost sick with sweetness, but never sick enough to stop, until my mother offered up the runt twist on the tray, still warm, impossibly alluring.

I have promised my granddaughter we can make my mother’s famous cinnamon twists together. I cannot imagine approximating my mother’s expertise and I feel I ought to practise first.

But then I think, my granddaughter and I will figure things out together. My mother and I did not “collaborate” while she baked. A perfectionist, she remained reluctant to allow my active participation. I watched, marvelled, enthused.

Times change. I am made differently, less a perfectionist, more of an experimentalist, though as so many daughters before me, I carry the blight that comes with feeling I cannot measure up, never yield the bake “as my mother used to.”

I recall, however, that when my granddaughter and I have made innovative “juices” together, we are as interested in our mistakes as in our successes. Errors find their way into the freezer; we feel that transforming them into solids might redeem their taste. It does not, but my granddaughter is funny and smart — ingenious — and we can make each other laugh.

She is an expert at rolling her eyes, forgiving my limited culinary know-how, encouraging my attempts — even those essayed in relation to the intricate jewelry-making projects she undertakes, her own fingers sure, mine enthusiastic but flummoxed by tiny beads and even tinier elastic bands.

We encourage each other.

How remarkable to have this reciprocity, this mutuality.

I recall my sticky childhood fingers, the blossoming aroma of my mother’s kitchen, the spring of expectation between us, the runt cinnamon twist my mother placed on a Pink Vista plate with honeyed, milky tea. I am devoted to this memory, glad of its capacity to recall my mother to me, her expertise.

Though in retrospect, I would have liked to have learned by doing, the watching and waiting for the miracle of the cinnamon twists my mother perfected in her time is enough. My granddaughter and I will “perfect” their making in ours, inspired by the way in which enough and perfect inform one another.

In this way, as best we can, we will write some of the stories she might carry into the worlds she co-creates with others long after I am gone.

fparts@freepress.mb.ca