Jenny assigned me this week to make Anne’s granola for this weekend.  I didn’t have to ask why.  We are driving to DC for Labor Day to visit Allen and Ananya and Jenny will want to leave them a hefty bag of Anne’s granola as well as Jenny’s pimento cheese which she made this evening, as we cooked alongside each other. 

The reason it is Anne’s granola is when Anne was still mostly a child she found the recipe somewhere and we all learned quickly to love it.  But as I assembled the ingredients this evening, the four different kinds of nuts, oat bran, oatmeal, wheat germ etc., reading the recipe like a prayer from the photo of it which I keep on my phone, it is Anne’s annotations of the original recipe that make it Anne’s granola.  As I work down the list of ingredients, I see her neat adolescent hand crossing out 1/2 cup brown sugar.  She reduces that to ¼ cup.  Of course, I think, you don’t want it too sweet.  Same with the honey which she reduces from ¾ cup to ½ cup.  I still have some honey from our bees from summer before last which I use.  

Then she reduces the oil from 1 cup to ⅔ cup, just because she somehow just knew that was enough.  She offers pumpkin seeds as a commonsense alternative to sunflower seeds.  I always go pumpkin seeds. But then, the Granola check-mate, the beautiful insight is Anne replaces the maple syrup with molasses.  If you intimately know these flavors, you will just feel the rightness of this in your bones, the way a certain phrase of music just feels right and makes you smile.

But the thing is we get our molasses from John and Kay who make it from sorghum they grow.  Then they grind it down and squeeze the juice out with their horse powered mill and cook it up in a big metal vat on a cool fall evening.  No offense to maple syrup, and I’m sure there are homes where maple syrup may be the solution to some cooking equations, but here the smoky dark rich sweetness of the molasses makes it Anne’s granola. This is NC, not New Hampshire or someplace.  Of course, molasses.

We had our reunion a couple of weekends ago. Jenny always makes my mother’s falafel recipe for Saturday night.  As I have said before, Mother was a brilliant and innovative cook in her day, a master of southern essentials but she also made some international dishes like falafel with tahini sauce from scratch.  Jenny does the yearly homage as the kitchen fills with the smell of fresh mint and cilantro, completing most of the steps at night after work a week or two ahead of time. Then she freezes the falafel and it’s ready to enjoy when we get to Laurel Springs.  Mother liked to cook the falafel outside on a wood fired grill in a cast iron skillet with a lot of oil in it.  We still do it that way though there is no reason other than fun to cook it over a fire.  Fun is an ingredient Mother would definitely include.  This year we fried up the falafel inside grandmother Mabel’s kitchen, since it was raining outside.  We all look forward to it every year.

Allen is a funny one.  He will go to some trouble to tell you he doesn’t cook and doesn’t know how to cook.  He lies.  He can make biscuits.  I say that with appreciation and envy because I can’t really make a good biscuit.  I can make you the best pancake you will ever eat.  Somewhat like Anne’s granola, I have a pancake recipe that I have worked over for years until I finally brought it to its ultimate expression:  a light but hearty pancake, half hard red whole wheat flour, ground and packaged by the nice folks at Old Mill of Guilford between Winston and Greensboro, and half oatmeal.  I make them with buttermilk.  Except I don’t use buttermilk but half yogurt and half milk which is pretty much the same thing.  Served hot with melted butter, with yogurt, banana or other fruit, and honey(or molasses), it is a fine pancake if I say so myself. I think the original recipe is from the Southern Living cookbook.

And I can make you a biscuit which if you have some country ham and an egg over-easy, and some of John’s molasses or my honey on a cold November morning, you will not turn down. My  biscuit will be a hard misshapen half whole-wheat thing but if it is hot and the butter melts on it and if the coffee is good, you will have two of my biscuits and be ready to chop wood for the woodstove when you are done.  

But Allen, if he chooses to, can take the same ingredients and make you a fluffy light biscuit which will rise round and brown in the oven.  I have watched him work the dough with his hands.  He folds it in some way which I cannot repeat which somehow creates the lightness in the biscuit.  If you could somehow get Allen to make you some biscuits and you could someway find some red-eye gravy made in a cast iron skillet after the country ham had been fried, and you had some fresh butter, and maybe just a spoonful of strawberry preserves, you would know a truly fine thing.

I worked for years to make cornbread that tasted like my Mother’s and I finally got it.  But I’ve mostly given up ever making a well shaped light biscuit. Even Mother couldn’t turn out a consistent biscuit.

Mother was tricky about her recipes.  Once we were nagging her to send us a recipe for some favorite of hers, I forget which one.  She seemed reluctant to give up the secret for some reason.  Finally one day I was so excited when she handed me a copy of the recipe, which I held carefully in my hands.  Then she said with a half smile, But I don’t make it that way anymore.  Some cooking mysteries will just remain mysteries.