vintage recipes
Made Scratch Fond memories of learning how to bake. By Kirsten Hudson from
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white bread and rolls to eat throughout the week. And she’d let me work with her.” During those times they’d spend in the kitchen, her grandmother taught her an important lesson about baking—and life. “I’d always be trying so hard because I wanted to please her,” Neta said. “I was
eta Griffith remembers the first cake she ever baked. She was eight years old. Her cousin, who was in her early
20s, helped her bake an old-fashioned yellow butter cake from scratch. From as- sembling the ingredients to taking a bite of the finished cake, Neta’s favorite part of the whole process was getting to break the eggs. “That was a big deal to get to break the eggs,” Neta said. “When you’re little, I just remember it being so much fun.” After the cake had baked and cooled, they topped it off with chocolate icing. “It was the kind of icing you cook,” she said. “There wasn’t icing from the can back then. We cooked the icing and poured it over the top of the cake.” Lessons learned Although her cousin helped her bake that day, Neta’s grandmother was the first to let her into the kitchen. “She baked two or three times a week,” Neta said. “I remember, she’d make biscuits in the morning and she’d bake
Always homemade Her kitchen skills didn’t stop at baking. When she was young, Neta remembers her grandmother let her do simple tasks, like mashing the potatoes for dinner. “I just thought that was so neat,” she said. “As the years went on, things were chang- ing for women in the 1950s and my mother started working outside the home. It became my responsibility to get supper cooked every night,” she said. “I’d rush home from school and I’d start whatever we had.” “Back then we made everything from scratch,” she said. “If you wanted waffles or pancakes, it would be from scratch. If you
worried about doing something wrong. And she told me, ‘If you don’t make mistakes, then you won’t learn anything. Just get in here and try it.’” That stuck with her. And she kept trying, even when she made a mistake or two. Like the time she mixed up her egg yolks and egg whites. “I was maybe 10 or 11 and I decided to make a lemon meringue pie,” she said. “It called for egg yolks and I read it wrong. So, I poured egg whites into the hot pudding and it fried them. It looked like little white particles floating in the pudding. So that was a disaster,” she said.
VintageKC / Winter 2014 44
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