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Books About Life on a Farm Written Especially for People Who Like to Read! "Highly recommended reading." The Midwest Book Review Reviews & Readers' Comments |
LeAnn R. Ralph Rural Route 2 Author E6689 970th Ave. Colfax, WI 54730 (715) 308-6336 |
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by LeAnn R. Ralph "Mom? Can I make some cookies?" I asked. It was a Saturday afternoon and seeing as there were no other children who lived near our rural Wisconsin farm for me to play with, I figured baking cookies would be the next best thing. Besides, baking allowed me to use a brand new skill I was just getting good at - reading. "You may," Mom said, "if you remember the rules - ?" "I have to clean up the kitchen when I'm done, and that includes washing the dishes." "Right. What kind of cookies are you going to make?" Now THERE was an excellent question. Which cookbook SHOULD I use? I quickly narrowed it down to two choices - one very old, yellow plaid hardcover published by the Calumet baking powder company that had been around for as long as I could remember - or the brand new copy of the Dunn County Homemakers book. Because anything that was unchartered territory held a special fascination for me, I selected the brand new book. Over the years, I knew my mother and sister had probably used just about every recipe in the old Calumet book, but the other one was so new, it hadn't hardly even been opened. Part of the fun of baking, I had discovered, was reading through the recipes, and I thoughtfully paged through the cookie section of the homemaker's book. . .Rolled sugar cookies? No, those seemed like too much work. . . Gingersnaps? Those were Mom's favorites, but when I checked in the cupboard, I found we didn't have very much molasses. . . Then I came across one that looked good. And it was short, too. No complicated directions for creaming sugar and shortening and beating in eggs before adding the flour - just "mix and roll into balls." "Does the recipe say to grease the cookie sheet?" my mother asked, after I had measured all the ingredients and was mixing the dough. "If it says to grease the cookie sheet, you'd better do it, otherwise the cookies will stick when you take them out of the oven." I glanced at my mother. "I don't need to do anything with the cookie sheet. This is a 'no-bake' recipe." I'd only heard of "no bake" recipes, so I was eager to try one out for myself. "What's that?" she asked. "The directions say 'mix the ingredients and roll into balls.' It's a no-bake recipe." "Let me see it," my mother replied. She put on her glasses. "This is not," she said, "a no-bake recipe. You have to bake these cookies." I stared at her in disbelief. "You do NOT have to bake them," I retorted, "the recipe doesn't SAY to bake them." "You have to bake them," Mom insisted. "You do not," I said. We could have, I think, gone on like this for a long time. Until my older sister stepped in. "May I see it?" Loretta asked. I handed the book over to her. "Mom's right," she said. "You DO have to bake these cookies." I looked back and forth between my mother and sister, unable to believe what I was hearing. The recipe clearly did NOT say one word about baking the cookies. And if it didn't say to bake them, then it was a " no bake" recipe. Wasn't it? I mean, I ought to know. I could read, for crying out loud, and I had read it very carefully. As I stood there in the kitchen next to my bowl of cookie dough, I felt tears welling up in my eyes "The recipe doesn't even give an oven temperature," I quavered. ('Ah, ha,' I thought, 'they can't argue with THAT.') "I know, Sweetheart," Mom said. "But trust me, you have to bake these cookies." "You do," Loretta said. "These are a sugar cookie. They have to be baked. Unless you want to eat raw cookie dough." However, it wasn't until we took the first cookie sheet out of the oven that I became completely convinced the cookies did, indeed, require baking. "Yummmm!!" Mom said, biting into a warm cookie. "These are delicious!" "Yeah," I mumbled, biting into one myself, "I GUESS they're all right." "Listen, Honey," Mom said. "You've just learned an important lesson." 'And what lesson is that?' I thought bitterly. 'That I don't know enough about baking cookies to spot what seems obvious to everyone else?' "You have learned," Mom said, "that you can't always believe EVERYTHING you read." In the following years I discovered a number of recipes in the homemaker's book that were long on ingredients but very short on directions. My mother said that was because the ladies who submitted them thought everybody who bought the book would be a mind reader and would know automatically what oven temperature to use or how to put the ingredients together. I guess it's a good thing Mom and Loretta knew what they were doing wasn't it? Otherwise, we'd have ended up with an awful lot of raw cookie dough... |
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