Page Two of Quick Bakes
My favorite of Mom’s quick-bake recipes represents the quintessential Midwestern coffee cake. She often made it for the family or guests on weekends. This recipe was added to her collection long before I can remember. It came from a friend named Mary Christensen, who was of Danish ancestry.
Coffee Cake
½ cup butter
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
3 cups cake flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 grated lemon rind
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ cup sugar
1 cup chopped nuts
Cream butter and sugar, add slightly beaten eggs. In a separate bowl, mix salt, baking powder and lemon rind with flour. Add dry ingredients to the butter, sugar and egg mixture alternately with milk. Mix separately the topping of cinnamon, sugar and nuts.
Pour batter into a greased 9 by 11-inch pan and cover top with cinnamon, sugar and nuts. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
Mom’s Note: Serve warm but delicious cold too!
Just as I value my mother’s recipes, she cherished the ones she’d learned from her own mother. Even as a child, Mom loved home life and had started cooking by the time she was 15. She often told me how she couldn’t wait to get home from school in the afternoon to make homemade potato chips. She kept the old wooden mandoline that resembled a small-scale instrument of torture in a remote corner of a kitchen cupboard. I knew she had used it to make potato chip slices, but by then she’d succumbed to the ease of buying commercially-made chips, for which she never lost her taste.
In her later years, my grandmother also compiled a cookbook of her favorite recipes. The only copy of this handwritten collection of recipes ended up with my cousin, Gretchen, who gave it to me after I started writing about family recipes. Meemock, as my brothers and I called her, liked to eat more than she liked to cook, so many pages of the composition book remain blank. But she made a conscientious start by numbering all 118 pages and composing an index of food categories with pages assigned to them. Now browned, brittle and coming loose from the binding, the book reveals hints of her culinary preferences.
She liked sweet things, so no wonder the index starts with sweet breads, cake and cookies, pies fall in the middle and candy comes last. She got some of the recipes from friends in Red Oak, Iowa, where she raised her three children, women named Birdie, Nannie and Hannah. She included several recipes from her two daughters after they became homemakers themselves. Later recipes she attributes to her Christian Science friends in Omaha, where she moved to start another chapter of her life as a widow.
Several of these recipes also appear in my mother’s cookbook, having become our family favorites too. The recipes for nut and raisin breads are written identically, except Mom added a few mixing directions. Her versions appear below, with my own added details in parentheses.
Mother’s Nut Bread
1 egg
1 scant cup sugar
Pinch of salt
1 cup milk
4 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup chopped nuts
Beat egg. Add sugar, salt and milk, then sifted dry ingredients. Add the nuts. (Pour batter in greased loaf pan.) Place in warm place (to rise) for 30 minutes. Bake 45 minutes in slow oven (325 degrees, until browned on top and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Hannah, whatever her friendship with my grandmother might have been in those days long gone, did know how to make good raisin bread. Children like toasted raisin bread from commercial bakeries today, and parents might want to surprise them with slices of this homemade version, without preservatives, still warm from the oven and spread with butter.
Hannah’s Raisin Bread
1 cup graham flour
1 cup white flour
1 cup sour milk
1 cup raisins
½ cup sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon butter
1teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch of nutmeg
Combine ingredients. (Beat egg, add sugar, salt and sour cream, then two flours and spices. Pour batter in two greased loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 45 minutes, until browned on top and toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.)
My mother liked tea and often had a pot next to her place at dinner to sip on cold winter evenings, while Dad drank his coffee. In summer, she drank iced tea flavored with mint that grew outside a kitchen window. I don’t know the origin or age of that mint patch. My parents weren’t gardeners, so it may well have been planted by my father’s mother. Once established, mint thrives without much human help, and that little patch produced more than enough mint for our needs. Minted tea with sugar, a slice of lemon and ice in those nubby Fostoria glasses became my favorite beverage at both lunch and dinner when I was a teenager.
I still make tea with mint in summertime from my own patch near the kitchen. Each time I pick mint for my iced tea, I think of Mom’s instructions to me when I did it at her house. “Just get the top leaves,” she’d say. “They’re the best.”
She and I developed the habit of having tea together every afternoon around 4 p.m. when I was in high school. It was a good break for both of us, a time to relax and talk over the day’s events before I did my homework and she started dinner. Our shared tea time continued whenever I came home for a break from college and through all the years I returned for visits as an adult. Often we had a few cookies or perhaps a slice of nut or raisin bread with our tea.
We observed the ritual of tea time the last day of my mother’s life. My brother Alan made the tea, and we served it in the library where Mom rested in her recliner. I still drink a mug or glass of tea each afternoon, because somehow the day doesn’t seem complete without it.
Recipes are from the collection of Anna May Cullison.
