A week or two before Christmas, Aunt Mary emails me for my grandmother’s chocolate roll recipe. I love to look at Oma’s blue cursive; the efficiency in which ingredients and directions fit neatly on the 3x5 card. I am transported to her kitchen with its cool 1970s design. Completely instep with Julia Child’s gourmet revolution, Oma was lauded in St. Louis for her elegant dinner parties. I would watch her move about that kitchen, sifting cocoa and whipping egg whites. She sipped water from a little handled measuring cup made of tin that she kept on the kitchen sink’s windowsill. I question if she ever really needed those instructions — she moved with such confidence. The handwriting, the memory of that chocolate covered confection, all of it draws the past front of mind.
Stressla Lynn Johnson “Feasting on Memories” captures his childhood through the expectation of a Sunday sermon followed by the pure heaven of his grandmother’s banana pudding. “You see as a kid, Sundays were the day I knew that after sitting on those hard-unpadded church pews, listening to the Reverend preaching about heaven and hell, that I’d be off to Grandma’s house for our Sunday meal.” When we speak of his Grandmother’s house, I catch the glint of that little boy in Stressla’s eye as he describes her cooking. Fifty years later, he can still taste the two-layer chocolate cake that Grandma Jo Berta Jones would bake and display on the pedestal cake stand. Sitting together in our prison classroom, we share the alchemy of our grandmothers’ artistry.
In Phillip Luna’s “Because Waffles are More Interesting Than Pancakes” we now shift the view to that of a parent, far from his weekend ritual of making waffles with his son. Monday’s prison pancakes are a weekly reminder of the distance from those happier days. “Before I came to prison, I often made waffles with my son. He was little then, and making waffles was our weekend ritual. We would top the waffles with strawberries and whipped creme, or I’d let him fill the batter with chocolate chips. I remember my son’s delightfully shy, but sneaky personality. Waffles with chocolate chips felt like dessert for breakfast. We were breaking the rules and this was our mischief.” On Mother’s Day, Danny’s family will be cooking waffles with his mother. They will fire up waffle irons and fill their plates with the steaming waffles covered in butter and syrup or a smear of peanut butter.
Of my mother’s many achievements (hi Mom), mastering Oma’s chocolate roll was a hard-won victory — there is a lot of finesse getting a chocolate sponge cake to release neatly from a jelly roll pan and onto a tea towel. There is the rolling of the warm cake before it can be cooled, unrolled and filled with cream, and then rerolled — plated, and glazed in chocolate. It’s a simple concept but pulling off an elegant chocolate roll requires patience and just the right timing. Each Christmas when Aunt Mary asks, I look at the yellowed card and think that this will be the year that I whisk egg whites and fold them into the batter, sift cocoa on a tea towel, and release the perfectly cooked sponge. And year after year, the memories flood in. New ones are created. The season pasts and I refile the card. | TDS
Hey, let’s replay Mother, the radio show we made with our writers at Oregon State Penitentiary.