When I was a little girl, and well into high school, my mother and I would make gingerbread people every year for Christmas. And not just any gingerbread people. We would make a list of everyone we knew, and make portraits of them in gingerbread. I carry in my head a memory of every surface in our kitchen covered with gingerbread people.
Every year we would open up the cookbooks and search for the really good gingerbread recipe since we could never remember which one it was. Finally, in a moment of facepalming, I remember my mother writing “this is the one!” on the proper recipe.
After my mother died, I can’t remember if I kept this up, although I have a vague memory of trying to revive it with my own children. However, for whatever reason, “kids these days” or my ambivalence about baking, or a sense that people didn’t really appreciate the gesture, the tradition fell off. I revived it a couple of years ago, making some for Wei’s church ladies, and my office mates.
When you lose someone you love, you hold tight to little things like notes and their personal belongings. My mother’s cookbooks are among my most treasured belongings, and her notes, in her precious hand, make me feel like she’s still here. I want to restart this tradition, maybe with my borrowed grandchild Tete, maybe with my daughter (or both of them).
So I started writing this and I pulled out the book with the gingerbread recipe, but…
No note.
No “this is the one.”
In my mind’s eye I can see the writing on that page. I have all my mother’s cookbooks, and yet it isn’t there.
So the tradition, in its entirety will continue. My daughter and I will see if we can identify the “good” recipe, just as my mother and I searched for it every year. I can see where this will become a family story, of the search for the best gingerbread recipe. It’s one of those things that makes holidays real.
Do you have a recipe for gingerbread men? Link it in the comments! Maybe I’ll use yours!
Our recipe is from the Toronto Star in December 1992, so I guess I’ve been using it for 20 years!
Gingerbread People:
3 cups all purpose flour (or substitute 4 cups light spelt flour)
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cloves
3/4 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg
It’s your standard sift dry together; cream butter, sugar, egg, molasses; add flour mixture technique. Shape the dough into two discs, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
Roll dough to about 1/4 inch thick, cut, space 1 inch apart, and bake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes. If I ice them, I use royal icing and pipe on buttons, faces, etc.
What an awesome tradition. I’m in search of a good gingerbread recipe this year, too. Post the one you use?
I’m thinking about this one that I found on reddit, of all places (and it comes with a great story: http://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/1454u2/happy_holidays_everyone_i_thought_id_share_my/
Mothers give us our first taste of what it possible in the world and my own mum died early this year just after visiting us for Christmas. She had given me a jar of her strawberry jam grown from her own home grown strawberries in her little garden that I had never been to. I had kept most of the jar after she died…I guess I just wanted to hold onto her for a bit longer and yesterrday I used the last of the jam to make a celebratory spongecake. Mum would have liked to have been part of our celebration. It was for our final Diploma completion and she was very proud of our efforts. She can come with us to our final lecture, and she can make Nick, our lecturer, swoon with delight (she liked Nick who invited her to his home when she came over last year for a meal with us) and that would have tickled her pink
. My sister is the keeper of mum’s cookbooks but I got the family gardening bible and I guess that is where mum’s true abilities lay. She could make a garden from nothing and was able to be the master of her small little plot when life seemed hell bent on taking just about everything else from her. Its amazing how food ties us all together isn’t it? Traditions and recipes and never forgetting someone through their special recipes. I will miss mum’s fruit mince that she faithfully sent to us every year and smuggled through customs last year to bring to us. Her final act of motherly love 