Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue
Nonfiction by Becky A. Benson
I still have the tiny baking set my mom bought for me from the Tupperware catalog
in the early eighties. The mixing bowls, various and hideous colors of burnt orange, sungold yellow, and dirt brown, (although today I suppose they would call it espresso) were a 1970s left over influence that looked like the color palette had been borrowed from a bag of Reese’s Pieces. The rolling pin is a free spinning wood tool with red painted handles, and of course, the bake ware is metal. Impossibly small sheet pans, muffin tins, loaf pans and even a pie plate.
My stay-at-home-mother made everything from scratch. Everything. And I would
sidle right up next to her in a chair pushed to the edge of the counter and mime along with the baking. My favorite was when she allotted me the extra pie crust to roll out because the extra would always be baked with cinnamon and sugar. It was one of my favorite treats. It still is.
Baking along with my mom was an act of love, one I still practice today. I loved
spending that time with her. Her mother’s recipe for southern chocolate pudding pie is our family’s all-time favorite dessert, and holiday staple. Propelled by both nostalgia and hope for the future, I had the recipe printed on tea towels as a gift for everyone in the family. My eighteen-year-old daughter is now the fourth generation to make this holiday and family gathering staple. Her first job was as a baker at a local bakery and she came home beaming with pride every time she expertly crafted a new treat.
This last Thanksgiving my brother looked on intently as we began making the pie.
Calculating and reprogramming our movements in his mind, filing them into a folder he could open at a later date, and asked my mom and me to describe, in detail every step of the pie making process as we stood at my mom’s stove and did just that.
“You have to temper the eggs,” I told him. “It’s a very important for creating the
custard in your pie and getting it to set up correctly without having scrambled eggs end up throughout the chocolate pudding. Wisk the eggs in a separate bowl, then add some of the chocolate mixture a little at a time, mixing as you go. Next, return the egg mixture to the pot with the rest of the chocolate mixture and stir until it’s nice and bubbly.”
After returning home he promptly and proudly sent us a picture of his very first
homemade pie. It was perfect.
As I knead the dough that has risen in my kitchen next to the warmth of the oven, I
think of the process of creation. Bread making teaches patience with its often, multiple intervals of rising. A science unto itself, baking relies on the correct proportions, of mixing and combining ingredients to create a new chemical compound. A flavorful chemistry experiment. I smell the yeasty scent wafting up to meet my nose as I pull and shape the ball of dough on my counter. I think of the nourishment it will bring my family, the joy over the comfort of it, and the relishing of the taste it provides.
It’s taken many years to become a skilled bread maker, and it’s a skill I’m proud of.
A fresh loaf of warm bread is always a welcomed offering. Creating these devourable masterpieces feels a lot like offering my love. The process is also an act of self-care for me in many ways. It accomplishes the necessary task of providing food, but it’s also a creative outlet where I can dream up new concoctions and combine them in a way to delight the senses.
In the kitchen I can tune out the world. I can focus on the task at hand because it
requires every ounce of my attention to be successful. Here I can leave the worries of my day behind and add a little goodness back into my immediate world. The meals and memories shared in the kitchen have the power to stick with us throughout our lives.
My confident, self-sufficient, enterprising young woman of a daughter once
famously told me, when I sarcastically quipped that she, “apparently didn’t need me for anything,” that she still needed me to make dinner. Then capped it off with, “I’m just a kid. I can’t use the stove.” She was five at the time and happily reports (often) that she’s able to use the stove these days. Moreover, she prefers to do it all on her own now. Sometimes I’ll come home to the most delightful treats I had nothing to do with. I couldn’t be prouder.
I wish I could have spent all these years baking with both my girls, laughing together and dusting their noses with powdered sugar as they tried to sneak a lick off the spoon. The memories we were never afforded the opportunity to make wash over me in a flood. Who would my youngest daughter be had she not died of Tay-Sachs disease at the age of three years old? Would she love chocolate pie as much as the rest of us? Would she, now at should-be-fourteen, also use the stove all on her own? I’ll never know.
My nine-year-old son stands in my doorway as I type and sheepishly asks if maybe
we can make something together today. As a child who spent the entirety of his short life in an unfortunate, harmful, and unstable placement in the foster care system before coming to us just a week shy of his seventh birthday, he relishes in any time we spend simply doing things with and including him. Finding his voice to speak up for even these small requests has been a big step in learning his own agency, as well as connection, and support.
Of course, we can make something together today. I know just the thing. After all,
who doesn’t love chocolate pie?
Becky A. Benson‘s work has appeared in print, online, and various television and podcast outlets. Becky serves as a public speaker, holds a degree in psychology, and works for the National Tay-Sachs & Allied Diseases Association serving families of terminally ill children as the organization’s Family Services Manager.
