Dear Readers,
The Marcil family reunion was a week ago, held by my father’s cousins. Our grandmothers were sisters, Georgiana and Juliette Cole. (See this week’s cast list below.1 )
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Juliette was my great aunt, and married to George Marcil, a professional baker. Thanks to his grandchildren, I keep a small museum of his career: his Little Pocket Baker, A Treatise on Baking from Fleischmann’s Yeast, one of his rolling pins, and a notebook of handwritten recipes. I also have a recipe scrapbook of Juliette’s, stuffed with promotions and newspaper clippings. She kept a lot of molasses recipes, for gingerbread, molasses and oatmeal cookies, and even johnnycakes! I made her coleslaw for my husband’s gigantic birthday party last month.
Using family recipes is a mind-bender. I want the experience to work like rubbing a magic lantern, so I can stand beside an adult from my past, revived. The expectation is silly, especially since when I knew Juliette, she was not baking, and I never met her husband. I did bake with my grandmother, Eva Zaleska Sweeney, aka Grandma. I can remember standing in the kitchen of her ranch house, whacking cannisters of refrigerator rolls on the metal edge of the counter, peeling the dough apart like pages, and rolling crescent rolls. My sisters and I got separate sleepovers to learn how to make pie! If I could buy back one day from the Time Lords, I’d grab that one.
When I try Grandma’s recipes, I get breathless. Following the steady curls of her penmanship across an index card, I worry that I’m doing something wrong. Chances are, I am because I’m impatient. A list of ingredients, a recipe’s methods – they’re just suggestions to me, and it’s a real struggle to study and stay with the map. The stakes are high with this grandmother, who died 48 years ago in a horrible car crash with my grandfather. Handling her recipes puts – presses, pushes – a thunderous love to my fingertips, all the hugs I want to give her, all the times I didn’t get the shine of her loving gaze, all these feelings make me fumble.
Baking from Marcil family recipes is not as fraught, but still heavy. I want to do justice to these people and their ephemeral remnants. It took me forever to use George’s notebook, as if it were an archival piece I’d damage, if not physically by staining the paper, then by wounding the recipe with my inattention. A few years ago, I asked Abe Faber of Timber Baking to help me scale down and understand a bread recipe. I chose the white bread and am putting the breakdown below2 for the breadheads.
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Once I had the formula, I had to hem and haw about flour. The flour I use is stoneground and lightly sifted or whole grain. George worked as a baker from 1910 through the mid-1950s and would have used roller-milled flour. By the time he started baking, wheat farming was mostly concentrated in the bread baskets of the arid Southern Plains and the West; flour milling happened closer to home, in places like Buffalo, but flour from further away, like Pillsbury-Washburn in Minneapolis, was popular, and may have been what he used. Enriching flours with vitamins came after World War II, which is when changes in wheat varieties also started to happen, such as breeding for shorter wheat stalks to allow crops to withstand high fertilizer inputs and still keep standing, and different protein and starch characteristics to suit the needs of the industrializing baking system.
How could I get a flour close to what he’d use in the 1920s, when he had a bakery with his brothers? For a while, I planned to use organic roller milled wheat flour from Le Moulin de Cedres in Quebec. But the closest place I could get that flour was at Red Hen Baking in Montpelier Vermont, so finally, I decided to use King Arthur bread flour.
I was hoping to give the loaf to George and Juliette’s last living daughter, Helen. But she was 1023, and not eating regular foods so her kids told me to enjoy it myself, and tell them all about it. Her father’s bread sprang up in the pan, BOING! Was it tasty? You bet. We devoured it. Did I make it more than once? No, because we’ve grown used to whole grain sourdough.
When George and Juliette’s descendants asked me to bake a cake for the reunion, I returned to their recipes. They requested a carrot cake, but I couldn’t find a family recipe, so I decided to make a cake from George’s notebook. His white cake – for layers, cups and sheets – is where I began, and I decided to make it chocolate using a paste on the next page.4
I made a third of the white cake recipe, added the chocolate paste, and as it baked, decided I needed to make another cake. The only one I could make fast enough was War Surplus Cake, which I’ve been making since I was a kid. This was my dad’s favorite cake, and, he said, the only thing his mother liked to make. You may know it as Wacky Cake, or Mix-in-the-Pan cake. It has only flour, cocoa powder, sugar, soda, salt, water, oil, vinegar and vanilla. The cake got its family name because my dad brought such hunks of it to school in the late forties that his friends said, ‘What’s that Halloran, war surplus?’5
Although I didn’t plan it, I ended up making cakes tied to the Cole sisters. The two chocolate sheet cakes sat side by side, at the end of the hall, near plates of cookies. Grimly, I thought they looked like tombstones, but I didn’t say it!
When (another) George Marcil announced the cakes and their lineage, everyone was wowed. Having something from the bakery, even my interpreted stab, was great, and people recognized the taste and texture of the War Surplus Cake as something their Nana, my great aunt Juliette made. Of course, the sisters would have made the same cake!
I loved being near so many relatives. A few of my first cousins were there, and the kinship I have with these people is what made me move home from Seattle when I had my first kid. I grew up knowing a herd of Halloran’s, and that community called me home.
Being with my father's cousins knit me inside another family cloth. I knew some of these people growing up. More significantly, they knew my dad. They are a fabric. I am of this group, and their threads are in me, not just as genes, but blooming in the ways we walk and talk.
On the porch of the community center, as the rain poured down and when it stopped, we sat at picnic tables and looked at pictures of our grandmothers and their children. We looked at each other’s faces to see where our relatives reappear. You look just like Juliette, I said twice, to George and Jane, who are cousins, not siblings. Her smile and welcoming presence are alive in them, too.
One of Juliette’s daughters, Juliana, was hilarious. She told stories a million miles an hour and after a few hours in her kitchen my face would hurt from smiling. I asked her grown children if they thought that their grandmother was like their mother, and they said yes. When I knew Juliette, she was more sedate, mostly sitting in a Cushman chair, listening to me talk a million miles an hour.
We are carrying patterns. Two of Juliana’s sons have voices exactly like their dad’s. I walk like my dad did, carrying a semblance of him forward through each step. I am him and I am me, and my mom and a constellation. We are all more than our singular selves, pulling memories and information through life.
Baking, I get to knock on the door of my family’s experiences. I can make my hands do steps they did, and the ingredients, and methods, don’t need to match theirs. They can’t match theirs, because when we’re baking backwards, we’re estimating ingredients, ovens, socio-economic conditions. Nervously, and with good intentions, we are guessing, but the results cement us in a moment, threading the tastes through another generation.
Stay tuned as I take more guesses, and for the writing I promised last time – I will indeed be digging into What Can a Woman Do? next week.
Yours, Amy
This week’s cast of characters were all born in the Capital District, in upstate New York:
Juliette Cole Marcil, born 1894, was my great aunt, and when I was very young, I planned to have a bakery with her.
George Marcil, born 1894, became a baker. His father was a loomworker in the Harmony Mills and told his sons to apprentice themselves to a baker so they’d have a better chance of controlling their work lives. Bakers could become bakery owners, but mill workers had zero chance of climbing that ladder.
Helen Marcil Brennan, born 1920, was my father’s cousin.
Juliana Marcil Gorski, born 1922, was also my dad’s cousin, and I knew her best.
Georgiana Cole Halloran, born 1902, was Juliette’s baby sister, my father’s mother, and my grandmother. She died when I was seven, and I didn’t know her well.
Eva Zaleska Sweeney, born 1914, was my mother’s mother. I knew her for the first nine years of my life and loved her dearly.
This mixture of cocoa, sugar, baking soda and water didn’t specify using hot water, but I think he might have meant that, because blooming cocoa powder for use in cakes is a common step. Next time I bake this, I will try boiled water, and see if the chocolate flavor intensifies.
My father only liked it with white icing, and this year, I’ve started making the frosting with vegan butter, because the cake is inadvertently vegan, and a friend requested vegan frosting when I baked for her art project. It does not take the heat very well though, this month has taught me! So for the Marcil party I made ermine frosting, cooking dairy or plant-based milk with flour and letting it cool makes a base for a frosting that’s not so sweet and holds up better in the heat. George’s cake got frosting flavored with malted milk powder because I wanted to give it a punch.
War Surplus Cake
1 1/2 cups flour — this year I’m using Farmer Ground Flour rye
2/3 cup sugar
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup cocoa
1 TBSP vinegar
1/3 cup oil — olive, grapeseed or other vegetable oils
1 cup water
1 tsp vanilla (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease an 8x8 inch or 9 inch round cake pan.
Whisk together the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the liquids and stir till mixed.
Pour in pan and bake 30-35 minutes.
Double the recipe for a 13x9 pan and bake for about 40 minutes.
Another wonderful read, Amy! You are so lucky to have such nice family recipes and memories. Had to chuckle at the mention of "War Surplus" cake, which we knew in my family as Crazy Cake. My mom made it often for birthdays since time was short in our family of ten. We loved it and still do. My dad wasn't a big fan of chocolate, so she always made coffee-flavored frosting for it. Decades ago, one of my sisters decided to help out by copying the older recipes onto new recipe cards. She mistook the abbreviation t. for T. and so not knowing better, wrote 2 T. vanilla for our Crazy Cake recipe. And so I've made it that way ever since! It wasn't until a few years ago that I noticed online recipes of this cake never included that much vanilla! So I guess you could say our Crazy Cake would have a unique taste to it.
Loved this, Amy. So much that we can see and, that remains unseen, from the way we walk to the things we bake. Thanks for honoring that with your heart. So good.
M