This afternoon I baked gingersnaps for our ward's Christmas party. As I pulled out the recipe from the cupboard, I had to pause and look at it for a minute. The card is yellowed with age, watermarks spread across a corner, and stains from unknown recipe ingredients dot its surface. Anyone who bakes knows that a recipe that looks like this is a keeper. When searching someone else's recipe box, you look for the most stained, bent and otherwise thrashed cards because they are used over and over, their wear a badge of culinary honor.
The beautiful cursive, written in red pen is still familiar to me. How many things have I read in that same careful hand? I can still see Grandma Karlinsey hunched over a table, her pen poised over a piece of paper. When she wrote, she used her whole hand and even her arm. Everything she wrote was beautiful, whether a letter, a check or a simple grocery list. Like so many of her generation, penmanship was a symbol of pride and education. I loved watching her write.
I remember being in the kitchen with Grandma as a little girl. She had a beautiful collection of aprons: fifties floral indulgences, practical forties aprons that cover you from shoulder to knee and around the back, and modern aprons (for that time, anyway) that might not have had as much character as the others, but worked just as hard. My favorites, and the ones I always begged to use, were the sheer cocktail aprons, like pastel clouds trimmed with lace, that she had inherited from Auntie Bea. They were about as practical as a lace kleenex, but I thought they were ever so elegant. Bless her heart for letting me wear them.
Grandma had the neatest cookie jar. It looked like an old black coal stove. She never kept cookies in it--she wasn't a cookie kind of grandma--but recipes. Maybe my recipe once lay there inside that cookie jar among its brothers. She also had old fashioned gadgets that I found utterly fascinating, like the rotary egg beater. What kid wouldn't love that?! I remember making Jello pudding in her kitchen and carrot cookies. And I remember doing lots and lots of dishes in her plastic dishpans. And the Veg-All casserole that, if not for the memories associated with it, might not seem so delicious.
Grandma had a drop leaf kitchen table covered with vinyl tablecloths, a huge drawer of dish towels with crocheted dish rags, cabinet latches turned dark with patina and worn smooth with time, and a tilting flour drawer that I thought was about the coolest thing ever (and still do). The junk drawer had heavy duty flashlights and big, serious looking hammers. It was not a junk drawer for the faint of heart. Above the junk drawer was the cupboard where the sugar bowl sat. And a Tootsie Roll bank--always a Tootsie Roll bank--since that was Grandma's indulgence of choice. And above there, on the very top shelf, tempting my eyes, but forbidden to my hands were a set of old fashioned tin toys.
All this passed through my mind as I held this recipe card in my hand. And I found myself missing Grandma so much it hurt. It was as if I was a little girl again and could run into her kitchen in that two-story yellow house on West 3rd.
Grandma passed away many years ago, but that doesn't mean she isn't still with us. When I was on bed rest with Natalie and really, really struggling to hold it together, I could feel Grandma with me, lifting me and sustaining me. Being lucky enough to have grown up with her as a daily part of my life, I remember what it felt like to have her around. In my time of need, she was a recognizable presence in the room, even though I couldn't see her. And she is still with me every time I pull out that battered old recipe card.
I wonder what Grandma Karlinsey would have thought all those decades ago if she had realized how important that simple recipe she was writing out would be to one of her granddaughters.
Thanks again Grandma. I love you.
Another generation now enjoys Grandma's Molasses Crinkles recipe.
