by Roberta Lee Small

Created on: March 13, 2009

Learning to Cook

My mind wanders back over the decades and I can once again see the large kitchen with the pale yellow walls, the crisp, starched, white curtains on the windows, the yellow drop leaf round kitchen table, and Grammy bending over the table rolling out piecrust on a large breadboard. I was a ten year old child again and stood next to her watching her as she lined the pie plates and trimmed off the excess dough.

"Can I have the extra dough, Grammy?"

I think Grammy always made a little extra dough so I could have some, and even before I asked I knew the answer was yes. After she put the top crust on the apple pies she would let me help and I would seal the edges of the crusts pressing around the edges with a fork. She would make a few slits in the top and always sprinkle a little sugar on the center.

To the left of the kitchen stood a highly polished, black cast iron coal stove and she opened the oven door, letting out a burst of heat and placed the pies inside.

I rolled out the left over dough, making it as thin as I could, sometimes a little too thin, and I would have to patch it. Next I would spread butter over the flattened dough and then sprinkle a mixture of cinnamon and sugar over it. Carefully I rolled it up into a long cylinder shape and then sliced it into one inch pieces which I placed on a greased pan, and Grammy placed them in the oven.

My mouth waters at the thought of these delicious cinnamon pastries that were my first cooking lessons and still a favorite.

I grew up in the depression years and life was far different in the early 1930s than it is today. There was never any waste. The apple cores and the apple peelings from the pies were not discarded. They were simmered in little water on the stove and with a few things added were then strained through a cloth bag and magically turned into apple jelly. I can still hear my Grandmother and my mother saying,

"Waste not, want not, for you might see the day, you wish you had that piece of bread that once you threw away."

My mother and Grandmother baked all of our bread, made cakes, cookies, pies and doughnuts and living near Boston, which is known as "Bean Town," on Saturday there was always a pot of beans in the oven, along with large pan of gingerbread.

I would sometime wash the beans on Friday night as they needed to soak overnight, and would beat the eggs with the hand egg beater for the gingerbread or other cakes, and all of us children would stand around waiting to lick the bowls.

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