the wisdom of butter and sugar
/Aunt Wanda’s latest advice to us all -- and I am her proxy -- is this: At some point in your life, you have to stop doing things that frustrate you and start doing things that make you happy.
She’s 97, so maybe she knows a thing or two. Or maybe not.
Because she suddenly slides her rolling walker to her yawning bookshelf and hoists her hips with grunts and groans to extract a skinny volume from where it’s rested for half a century.
She can’t remember my name sometimes, or whether anyone calls or comes to fill her fridge though somehow it’s always full. But she manages to reach inside her memory for an idea when I complain I need a brand new challenge.
At first she pooh-poohs the whole idea. “Why do you want to do something new?” she questions. “Don’t you know what you love?”
“Yes,” I reply, a bit shamefaced and dull. “But isn’t there more? Shouldn’t I take a pottery class or maybe origami?”
I’m searching for wisdom -- trying to squeeze every bit of juice from her centennial brow before it’s too late.
She has a different idea. She slips the tattered book across her kitchen table and smiles. I pick it up and stare: “All About Home Baking,” written in 1933, before the big war she escaped in Europe, before flour was pre-sifted or people used agave in pies or heaven forbid tofu. The first chapter is titled, “It’s a wise woman who knows her baking rules.”
I don’t even know my boiling water rules.
Darn. Most everything in her life today is a blur, but my crummy cook reputation, somehow, Aunt Wanda has not forgotten.
“This is the book that taught me how to be a great baker,” she says, and she releases it with a wink to my husband nearby. She thinks I still need to get to his heart through his stomach.
Covered in timeless black-and-tan plaid, yellowed as custard, stained with oil and gook, the book sits between us.
I’m stunned. Wanda speaks 7 languages -- she still remembers much of them -- and even has a Ph.D. Yet when it comes to wisdom, she turns to butter and sugar.
“To sweet Donna” she writes on the inside front panel. I’ve been had.
With my husband’s birthday upcoming, and a cake in his future, I grab a cup of tea, roll my legs under my hips and cozy up on the couch for a forced education.
“Progressive homemaker” jumps off the page, a cringe-y expression I haven’t heard in decades. Some things do change. And this: “Here is the way to beat the world at baking.” Now I’m in. Who doesn’t want to beat the world at something?
I quickly learn to always have the right tools for the job, always use the freshest ingredients, always measure exactly perfectly, none of this heaping stuff. And “know your pans and oven,” maybe as well as I know my husband who is clearly more excited than I am.
“A baker in the house,” I hear him croon to himself as he pats his belly. Some things don’t change.
I know lots of things that are at least a hundred years old that have stood the test of time. Jane Austin books, for example. Oak trees. The Parthenon.
But a baking book from 1933?
“Try it,” says Wanda, “you just might like it. Baking is very relaxing.” Then she adds, reversing her initial advice the slightest, “If you’re frustrated, at least you’ll make someone else happy.”
And I do. When his big day comes, I measure exactly to make the perfect key lime pie, his favorite. But first I make him squeeze every tiny fruit we need, one sticky squirt at a time, because I’m way too busy communing with my pans and oven.
Progressive homemakers -- both of us -- indeed!