“Splatters of Christmases Past”

By

Gerry Niskern

The rustling sound you hear in our country this time of year is people trading family Christmas recipes. Americans move from house to house and even state to state more than anywhere in the world. No one realizes that more than we do here in Arizona. We have a virtual cornucopia of recent arrivals of every race and nationality. Guess what? They’re all busy sharing Christmas favorites.

I know most smart homemakers have their recipes entered on their PCs. I know I should do the same. There are so many splatters of “Christmases Past” on my recipe cards; I can hardly read them. However, the smears and smudges don’t hide the images I remember of the original cook who shared them with me.

When I was a young bride the lady who lived behind us gave me a recipe for divinity. She showed me the tried and true way of testing candy until it “spun a thread”. She was from New York by way of the copper mining town of Bagdad, Arizona. While my young groom worked long overtime hours that first Christmas, I experimented with candy from all the women’s magazines. Texas Pralines became and still are our family’s favorite. Made with buttermilk, pecans and white sugar, these unique confections melt in your mouth. Our little red brick house in the shadow of the State Capitol was filled with the aroma of candy cooking.

My Mother’s fondant recipe brings a wealth of memories. I was with her the evening Mrs. Iron showed her how to make it. She poured the clear hot liquid onto a platter and then we helped beat it until it turned white and creamy. In West Virginia she folded chopped black walnuts into the fondant and formed it into a long log and sliced it into rounds.

All the relatives used to gather on our little farm on a Sunday in the fall to harvest those black walnuts. We had brown stained hands for a week from the green husks. No amount of Lava soap could get rid of it.

After we moved to Arizona, Mom complained to a neighbor  about having no black walnuts to use in her fondant. This Missouri transplant showed her how to stuff the fondant into dates that could be purchased from a local date farm. She further instructed, “Then top it with a pecan half. You can buy those from one of the pecan groves out west of town.”

One of our early Phoenix friends from Colorado supplied the recipe for date bars. Cut into squares while warm and rolled in powdered they were Ken’s favorite. Every December he would come home with his arms full of date packages.  An old schoolmate who’s family was in the date business, used to pull his pickup along side  my husbands and start tossing packages of dates to him while they cruised along the highway.

A girl friend of mine moved to Kentucky after she was married. She returned with the instructions for “out of this world” peanut brittle. After you stir in the soda and pour, you stretch the mixture with buttered spoons…thinner and thinner, thin as glass. It’s wonderfully tender, if you work fast enough.

Recently I mentioned to a friend that I wished I could remember the name of a type of blond fudge my Mother used to make. She said, “Oh sure, Penuche”. We made that back home in Indiana when I was young.” She gave me the recipe.

It’s not easy to move to another part of the country. It takes time to settle in and feel at home, especially on the first Christmas. Food helps. New friends with different accents from various regions of the United States, indeed the world, are always surprised by the similarities of their favor holiday treats.

I’ll wager, at this very moment, somewhere in our nation two recently transplanted cooks are exchanging Christmas recipes.