Licking the Beaters

There is nothing like the smell of a cake baking, especially if it is a chocolate cake.  That butter, sugar, flour and eggs and cocoa can combine into a fluffy confection that causes people to moan with pleasure is always a wonder to me.  Who first discovered the process of making a chocolate cake?  Who first got to taste the wonder of it?  As amazing as the cake is, the greater wonder is the icing.  Pure sugar and butter and perhaps a few nuts become an delight that can cause wars. 

At least when I was a child the icing caused war.  My sisters and I would hang around the kitchen waiting for Mother to finish the beating and the spreading of the icing for the cake.  It didn't really matter what kind of icing it was.  Chocolate was the favorite, but the 7minute white icing that hardened in a matter of minutes was good too.  There were three of us girls and only two beaters, so Mother decided that two girls would get the beaters and the third girl could have the spatula and the pan or bowl.  As the oldest, I quickly figured out that more times than not, there was more icing in the pan and on the spatula than on the beaters.  But my sisters figured it out too, and that was the cause of the icing wars.  Yes, curling your tongue around the wire beater and getting every last particle of icing was fun and good, but running the spatula around the bowl and coming up with a true bite or two of icing was even better.  War.  It got to the point that we had to keep track of who had had the spatula the last time, and we had to take turns.  Of course every girl thought she had been cheated at some point, and the ones who had the beaters to lick always eyed the one with the spatula with a certain amount of disgust.

So today I baked a chocolate cake and made the chocolate icing with a pound of confectioners sugar and nuts in it.  Grandpa was at work, so I was home alone.  The sugary icing was too tempting.  I have to confess, it didn't all get on the cake.  I left just a little too much in the pan.  And since I was alone, I licked the beaters AND scraped the pan and licked the spatula all by myself.  And without a bit of guilt.

Food History

I just read my friend's post about food history.  You know the quirks and traditions that each family has and that we pass down through the generations.  She asked what other's food history or traditions might me, and that got me to thinking about how much food has changed from my grandparents generation to my children's generation. As a matter of fact, I think the food traditions might have taken a sharp turn in our family.

For my maternal grandmother, cooking and canning the fresh vegetables she raised and meat from the farm animals was a part of daily life.  Mother tells how Grandma made sausage but stored it in 9x13 size metal pans.  She would press the sausage into the pan and then seal it with a layer of lard, wrap it in brown paper and store it in the basement.  I remember Grandma wringing the neck of a chicken and then cooking it for supper.  Or sometimes Grandpa accidentally killed rabbits in the field with the farm machinery, and that rabbit would end up on the table for dinner.  At times it was all I could do to swallow a piece of meat if I thought about it.

On the other hand, when Grandpa butchered beef, I found it amazing to push on the lungs of the poor beast as they lay on the flatbed trailer while the carcass hung from a tree.  It didn't bother me a bit to look at the entrails and try to figure out what they were and how they had worked.  Perhaps it didn't bother me because that beef was not on the table that night!

I am afraid those traditions are gone for my children. The closest we get to that is growing and canning our own vegetables and buying free range chicken and organic beef at the farmers market.  We have lost some skills and some closeness to the land and the food chain to be sure. In one sense favorite dishes will continue through the family, but some of the ties to raising our own and feeding ourselves are probably gone for good.