Meet LoreLei
Home-taught baker, geek, history buff,
and purveyor of very-small-batch maple syrup.
...
I love the feeling of seeing someone enjoy a treat I've made. It's like spreading happiness one bite at a time. My early baking education came from my Mom, Grandma, and Aunt June, and it's been a sweet adventure ever since.
Below is the story of my inspiration for baking these old recipes, and my realization that I can update them to work with modern ingredients and kitchen tools. And that I can rewrite them, including my modifications and share them with you, with clear steps that even the most inexperienced baker can follow.
Please join me: share in my passion for history, tradition.
And baking and the joy that it brings.
I HAVE LONG BEEN DRAWN TO COOKBOOKS AND RECIPES.
In fact, it seems as though they are drawn to me.
They find me.
My collection is not insubstantial.
A RECIPE REQUEST
Not long ago, a friend put out a plea on Facebook for a recipe for Peanut Butter Bread, explaining that it was apparently a “thing” during The Depression. And so, I searched.
Surprisingly, I found it in only one cookbook, but find it I did.
A MYSTERIOUS COOKBOOK
The last book I pulled off the shelf was a small, tattered tome, its front and back boards no longer attached. Some pages were loose and it had a lot of loose papers peeking out from between the pages. I didn’t recognize it - where did it come from? And when I gently opened the front cover, I was stunned by the handwritten recipe lying there.
mar
2020
I KNEW THAT HANDWRITING
And as I paged through the recipes, I identified two similar, but distinct hands that had penned them. I thought I knew what I was holding, but needed confirmation. I snapped a photo of two recipes and sent them to my mom and a cousin.
“Do you know whose handwriting these are?” I asked. I didn’t want to color their answers with my own guess.
And the answers I got from each confirmed my hunch: one was, indeed, my Grandma’s handwriting. That first recipe I saw.
The second hand was Grandma’s Mom, my Great Grandma, who passed away when I was eleven.
Many times, I have thought that I wanted to explore my collection and make the recipes in it. Finding this small book drove that message home. And yet… it was still not enough. The sheer volume of recipes in my collection is intimidating.
Where would I even start?
But the idea continued to rattle around in my head.
A Christmas Surprise
A few months later, I received a surprising Christmas gift from my Sister-in-Law: a single-drawer card catalog box. It was purchased to help me organize all of my books. A task I had asked my nephew to help me with. When she received it, it was full. She started to take everything out to throw it away before her husband said, “If you throw those away and she finds out, she will NEVER forgive you.”
Thank you, Jim.
That drawer was stuffed with recipes. Many are hand-written. They obviously belonged to a carefully curated collection, and were clearly well-loved.
Did I tell you that recipes find me?
dec
2023
And so, on New Year’s Eve, 2023, I picked an old cookbook, and asked my husband to select a recipe. He chose Apple Custard.
It was a complete fail. It was nasty and curdled and SO not custard. I have made custards before and I’ve never had this result. I almost cried.
I almost gave up.
Fortunately, I don’t like to fail, so I thought long and hard about this failure.
And what I realized is this: while I HAVE made custards before, I am not a custard-maker. They are not my wheelhouse: I don’t know them intimately. That is to say that I do not have the skills and knowledge to take an OLD custard recipe and make it. Because old recipes assume you have the intimate knowledge.
For example, an old cookie recipe will tell you to “cream the first 4 ingredients together” where the new cookie recipe tells you that you must “cream the butter until light and fluffy” before adding the sugar gradually, and then beat in the vanilla and the egg(s), one at a time…
So, while I am not writing custards off, I realized that before I bring them to you, or even my own family, I have a LOT of research to do before I try again.
But cookies! Cookies and I have a long and intimate relationship. Cookies I can definitely tackle.
And so I chose to start with Ginger Crinkels. This was my Great Grandmother’s recipe. Based on its condition, I would say it was a favored recipe, often baked.
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