Me and Nancy Drew and the Kitchen Saint
By Cathy Colton
My bangs are sweat-shellacked to my forehead on this Tuesday. The Pippi Longstocking braids Mom insists on at least keep my hair off my neck. I chew on the tip of one of them while sitting sideways in the over-stuffed chair, my sunburned legs dangling off the side, so I can face the screen door while I read. And wait. At least a whisper of a hot breeze finds its way in while Nancy, Bess, and George speed down the country road in Nancy’s convertible coupe, their long hair whipping around their faces as they hash over the clues they discovered in the barn. I’m not sure exactly what a coupe is, but I want one when I’m old enough to drive. And I want hair that can whip around freely, not hang in submissive braids that droop next to my arms.
The shrill alarm shreds the air. The Wait is over. I shove my book mark between the pages and sprint to the kitchen to shut up the timer. Grandma pants a bit as she pulls her aproned self up the stairs and in through the wide-open back door. “Why the Good Lord sees fit to make it so hot this early in the morning already I’m sure I don’t know,” she complains. But the Good Lord isn’t the one who set the oven in the cramped kitchen to 375 degrees an hour ago. The buttery aroma, though, is the subtly more powerful force that accosts me as I pull down the oven door, and my mittened hands present the counter with a sheet of cream-colored thick triangles of perfection. I step onto the stool to reach for the container of powdered sugar. My job is to sift just the right amount of powder onto each piece of shortbread. “Wash your hands first,” she tells me, pouring sugar into the metal sifter.
The scents from that long-ago kitchen live on in my memory years after Grandma is gone. My sisters and I have tried to re-create her shortbread. Many people bake the Scottish pastry; it even sits in boxes on shelves of grocery stores, but none melts in the mouth in just the way Grandma’s did. Her recipe—best as I can recall—was to cream the butter and keep adding in flour until “it feels right.” But only decades of holding to the sacred ritual of Baking Tuesdays—no matter the level of heat and humidity of those Tuesdays in a Midwestern July--could grant one the instinct for something born in a Scottish coal mining town, later to be passed down to the wives of sons born in Illinois mining country.
My husband, I suspect, married me in part to secure an “until death do us part” spot in the family of this old woman who sent the visitors she especially liked home with a hefty care package of her baked goods. And she liked Steve, who made her laugh with his off-beat stories. “Here, I’ll add a few more to the tin. You give this to that young man of yours,” she’d say as I readied to drive back to Chicago.
I never did get that coupe; my hair is short; it’s been going on thirty years since I’ve eaten Grandma’s shortbread. But, I still enjoy sitting in a summer breeze reading a mystery novel. And I can still feel the powdered sugary butteriness melt in my mouth. It was that good.
