Unable to sleep again tonight and I started thinking about the past. First, historically, so I started looking up images on flickr and youtube from the early 1900s. I may have mentioned that I am more or less a contemporary history buff, or at least a 20th Century history buff. So, I was scanning through a few old black and white pictures when I saw a picture of people eating. That got me to thinking about the best cook that I ever knew.
My great grandmother was incredible. She raised three daughters and two sons in some of the worst times of American history and she fed them all well, mostly from things grown on the farm. She was the best baker I ever knew. Her (southern, buttermilk) biscuits were the best you could ever imagine eating and I can’t think of but one thing she ever made that I didn’t like, and that was banana pudding. I’ve never been able to stand banana in anything but it’s natural form (with one exception, which is another story for another post). I hate banana gum, ice cream, cookies, cake, pie. You name it, if it’s banana I hate it.
Mind you everyone else who ever ate it said it was the best banana pudding they had ever put in their mouth (and likely it was). But, I digress. There was one thing I cherished above all of the other things she ever cooked and that was her tea cakes.
Oh! My! Heavens! A better food you have never put in your mouth. They were these thick cookies that looked a little like flat biscuits but when you bit into them they just melted on your tongue. They had a texture that I can not describe to you and that you would never know unless you were one of the many, many family members who were able to partake of the many hundreds of them that she must have made over the years.
They had a crumble to them, but a moistness, also and a sweetness that was very sweet but not cloying. Sitting here, just about 30 years since I had my last taste of one, I can almost, but not quite experience the sensation of biting into one. Sadly, I doubt if I will ever taste anything remotely like it. My great grandmother died more that 25 years ago and she took the secrets of her kitchen with her. If there was a recipe it was most likely thrown out long ago, and anyway you’d have had to watch at her elbow to see just how she did every little step in the process.
The sad thing is, and the reason I came to write this entry, I, myself would have had the opportunity to do just that, learn at her elbow. I was ten, before we moved from rural Alabama. If I had just asked her when I was seven or eight, to show me her secrets, I’m sure she would have gladly taught me every step and every recipe. But, when you are seven and eight, and even nine and ten, you think that some things will never change. You think your Mamaw will always be there and that you will always have plates of biscuits and tea cakes and sorghum candy (another unimaginable delicacy).
Five years, or even less, down the line and it’s all gone. The little town drug store where you bought comic books and Coke from the old cooler where you put the money in and had to pull up on the bottle; where you ate hot fudge sundaes with real whipped cream and hot fudge from the same warmer your grandma probably got served from forty years before. All gone. Sold off piece by piece so that the old folks could retire.
The old house, that Native Americans (we used to call them Indians) built and that your great grandpa bought for your Mamaw and five children to live in, the one that never had running water, but you had to go to the well and bring in buckets full. That beautiful old well that had the best water you ever drank and on which grew the sweetest, darkest, most perfect grapes you ever tasted. Gone. Burned to the ground by (I’m told) partying teenagers one day while you were off running around the country trying to find where you wanted to be.
Worst of all, your Mamaw, sick and dying and lost to you forever by the time you’re 13. Too sick to tell the old stories, to sad to think about the good times and pass some of it along to children and grandchildren who were too sad to listen anyway.
I suppose I’ve written all that, in order to write this. If any of you have older people in your life, talk to them and make your kids talk to them. If they do something that you love, make sure that you or your kids learn it, first hand. Now, I know from experience that not everybody has that, my Mamaw was the last person in our family that had anything that I would have wanted to have passed on to me. But for those few of you that still have a family of any kind that hasn’t disintegrated or destroyed itself, find some great, small thing to hold on to, to carry into the future. Why? Because, let me tell you, regret is a terrible thing. Even the small regret of knowing that you’ll never taste the sweetness of a perfect tea cake, again.
