Near to Us Once More

I called my dad the other day to check in. He was preparing for our restaurant's annual Christmas party, and he was cooking. He said to me, "Well, I wish you were here..." I thought Oh, how sweet; he misses me... Then he continued, "I've made all your favorites: key lime cheesecake, pumpkin cake, crab au gratin..." So what he meant was, "I wish you were here...to help eat all this food because I know you wouldn't let any of it go to waste." And I wouldn't have, because my father is the king of food and I am very much his daughter.

This will be our first Christmas in California, just Mark, Ellie, and me. It's made me a little sad. And while the last twelve months have been good to us, overall, many of our friends have lost very dear members of their families, far, far more than in any year of my life. Why we've been lucky, even in the face of serious illness, escapes me, and I am grateful.

One of the ways I've reacted to being away from home is by trying to fill in the gaps in my recipe collection. My 95-year-old grandma Jessie gave each of her grandkids a copy of her best recipes years ago, so I have those. I have the ones I need from my dad, and ones that belonged to my maternal grandmother, Virginia. It's so nice to have those lists and directions and histories, some in the original handwriting.

But every time Christmas comes around, I miss my Aunt Lizzie. She's Ellie's namesake and a woman who seemed, at least in my young little mind, to cook for our whole extended family every day, though in later years, she got a very generous chunk of help from her housekeeper, Peggy.

Aunt Lizzie made the best cornbread in the whole world and in the history of it. It was somewhere between thin cornbread and spoon bread, and I was the luckiest kid in the family because unlike everyone else, I loved the middle. To this day, I pass on edges--of brownies, cakes, bread, anything. Philosophically, I'd rather not eat the corners of Rice Krispie treats, even though they're not baked. That curve in the corner just seems imperfect and potentially unpleasant to me. Everyone else in the family loved the edges and left those soft, dense, and savory middle squares to me.

My great-aunt cooked fried chicken, chocolate chip Bundt cake, sweet potato pie, lima beans, you name it. I don't have a single clear memory of watching her cook, but I did hear that she cooked each and every combination of ingredients, on the stove or in the oven, on HIGH. This seems as reasonable as driving 85 miles an hour everywhere, whether you're on a Montana highway or in a hospital parking structure, since the laws of thermodynamics do indicate that you might want to cook lots of dishes at temperatures other than "Scorch." Whatever she did, it worked. There was always food on her dinner table, it was always very, very good, and there were always people around to eat it.

When Aunt Lizzie passed away 23 years ago, so did her dishes. Whether her recipes and eccentric cooking techniques were never passed down, or if simply no one could safely replicate them with success, what with every appliance in the kitchen being at its highest setting, I don't know. I do know that there are some I have yet to eat since.

One of them is coconut pie.

photo from LucilleKitchen

It's not coconut cream pie, it's this Southern coconut pie that's thin and has no whipped cream or meringue on top. It reminds me of the inside of a Mounds bar. According to food.com, where I found the recipe for a pie that seems hopefully similar, a twelfth of this pie, in spite of its lack of topping, will provide 63% of the daily fat you need to be American. And who eats a twelfth of a pie? A twelfth of pie is what's left stuck on the knife after you've cut a regular slice out. Sigh. Portions.

Another recipe I've been trolling the internet for is coconut cake. Not every dessert in North Carolina is coconut-based, just the ones I miss I guess. Paula Deen calls it coconut poke cake, because you poke a bunch of holes in it and let a sticky, delicious mess of coconut cream and other ingredients soak in, for up to several days.

photo from all recipes.com

That's how Miss Clara Reese did it, I know. She baked a coconut cake and a carrot cake for my wedding, and besides the whole pig my brother and father cooked for our rehearsal dinner, her cakes made the celebration homemade and handmade and lovely and real. I was clumsy in asking her to bake them for us, a fact my mother's cousin made sure I wouldn't forget, but she herself was generous and gracious, and she came to the wedding representing to me the best of Currituck's old guard. When our adorable little "wedding butler" came to the bridal party's table and asked what I wanted for dessert, I told him, "Go hack off a big piece of the coconut cake before somebody else gets it!"

Miss Clara Reese passed away in the spring, and sometime in the summer, my Aunt Madeline relayed her cake recipe, which I've half-forgotten because it seemed simple enough that I didn't write it down. A few recipes (here, particularly) online look about right, though I'm not sure about how much whipped topping to mix into the icing; the icing I love seems too rich to have very much of anything mixed in.

Cooking to me is often therapy for absence. Especially if what I'm making has a history with someone else. My hands become their hands, my dish tries to be their dish, something like that.

To all our friends who will be missing someone this holiday season, we hold you lovingly in the light. Pies and cakes won't fill the hole in your hearts, but in times like these, a little sugar, and 63% of your daily fat, can be a help. I hope you have a recipe, coconutty or not, waiting for you. Happy Everything, everybody. :)