Cloverdale Reporter Old Fashioned Christmas Magazine 2010 9
Stirring up memories By Ev Bishop This time of year, I’m often found paging through my cookbooks, daydreaming about what I’ll make for Christmas. A lot of my favourites are found in the grease spotted, almost translucent pages of my Purity Flour Cookbook – so old that it has linen threads in the cloth of its hardcover. It’s the cookbook I first learned to follow a recipe from, when I was around eight. My mom passed it on to me when I moved out, as her mother had when she did. I don’t love the book because it has recipes for anything you can imagine (from Oyster Vichyssoise to pancakes!), along with cooking times and temperature charts for every type of meat, plus substitution and conversion lists – though those things are handy. No, I love it because my mother’s hand scrawled notes in its margins about how to double, triple, or even quadruple some recipes, along with other occasional comments, like “Mmm, good.” There’s even one foreboding “X” through a recipe with impatient capital letters announcing, “Doesn’t work!!!” Just looking at this book invokes the scent of oatmeal cookies baking and home made chicken soup simmering, and memories of sitting on the long wooden bench, feet dangling, in my Grandma Ruby’s noisy kitchen. Snuggled
between my favourite playmates, an aunt and uncle who were my age, I’d chatter and laugh, busily buttering crackers to go with my soup. The sauce-stained pages are a record of childhood events – like how at church or wedding potlucks, my brother and I would stand in line for food, bouncing foot to foot in anxious panic. What if we got to the table too late and the lasagna our mom made was gone? When finished with Purity Flour, I turn to another present from my mom: a journal called The Cook’s Notebook. With deliciously heavy pages, quotes about cooking, and wonderful brown-ink illustrations, it is both beautiful and besmirched with remnants of further cooking adventures – butter stains, sugary finger smears, the odd splash of soya sauce. Its pages contain my favourite recipes, plus special ones I get from friends or family, usually named after them. Flipping pages stirs up memories that make my mouth water: My Grandma Ruby’s potato salad, a savoury experience unrivaled by any other potato concoction. My Grandma Nora’s trifle – a fluffy, jewel-coloured, fruit delight. My Great-Grandma Peggy’s shortbread and what it was like to bite into it – the rich, lightly crisp outside, the CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
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