Connecting generations

“Grandma, can we bake a cake when I come over?”

I was flabbergasted.

My oldest grandson wanted to make a cake with me. Just maybe I might be able to become something of the grandmother that mine was to me.

Having two grandsons, I had mostly discarded the idea that I could pass on what had been shared between females for generations.

But now? Maybe I could connect the generations through baking.

My grandmother would begin her stories about her grandmother teaching her to cook,“She would stand me up on a stool so that I could reach the table…” as she carefully guided my little hands.

The first lesson I learned was how to “rub in the fat.” My grandmother was from England, Cornwall to be specific, and the terms that she used for things varied from those we used to today.

She was showing me how to use my hands to evenly distribute the shortening, whether it was Crisco or butter, margarine or even chicken fat into flour.

From that might come scones, biscuits, saffron buns, the topping for a pot pie or the crust for a rhubarb gooseberry pie, her specialty, so many flaky, delicious pastries.

We baked bread. I still can recall how she showed me how knead the dough, how to test whether the dough had reached it correct degree of rising before putting it into the oven.

She never had an electric mixer.

We mixed everything with a fork which she thought did a better job than a metal spoon when you were making a cake or a very big wooden spoon when you were making jam.

Out of her summer kitchen where we cooked on a kerosene stove, we made stuffed peppers, chocolate cake, fried chicken and biscuits, sumptuous stews, untold numbers of luscious pies, canned vegetables and jams from berries that we picked.  It was all fun for me and a gift beyond price.

I had chores. Each day it was my job to sweep the rugs and dust the furniture.

We washed clothes in a galvanized tub using a washboard and hung them out on a line supported by forked sticks that held the burgeoning line up under the weight of the wet clothing.

I walked beside her in the vegetable garden, helping hoe up the beans, catch Japanese beetles, and harvest when it was time.

We went to the spring to collect drinking water in gallon jugs.

I stood by her side at the butchers when she bought the right kind of lard; watched from a distance as she mixed it with lye to make soap that could clean a soot covered pot or cure poison ivy.

I felt proud and satisfied that I was so trusted.

I can knit and crochet because of her patience. She taught me how to sew by hand. Not that I ever excelled in that skill, but last week, I found three little doll’s outfits that I, at maybe 9 or so years old had made.

The power of her love just washed over me. Of course, I was in tears, tears for the time she gave me, tears for all the years since, tears that I could never repay her, that I haven’t been able to be as good a grandmother as she.

Even with her skills, I cannot replicate, cannot pass on all that she gave me, but maybe helping Tommy to make that cake can be a beginning, modified to meet the needs of little boys.

A second phone call from my grandson brought a request for me to buy some fondant.

Fondant? Now where did he get that idea?

I asked his mother. “Oh,” she said. “He’s been watching the Kids Baking Championships and he wants to learn how to bake so that he can win $25,000.”

Well, you take it as it is and move on from there. He’ll have to learn how to bake other things and I will be ready.