The Recipe Card at the Bake Sale
Janet Hoyle held the cookbook up over her head with both hands, the way you hold up a baby at a baptism so the back pews can see.
“Six hundred copies,” she said. “Sold out in three weeks. Ladies, that is twelve thousand dollars in sales, and most of it goes straight to the roof.”
The fellowship hall broke into applause. Somebody in the back said amen. I clapped too, because that is what you do at a circle meeting, and because the roof really did need it.
The cover was white, spiral bound, with a color photograph of a pan of cinnamon rolls. Across the top, in plain brown letters, it said: 125 Years of Recipes. And under that, in smaller gold letters, it said: Featuring Janet Hoyle’s Famous Cinnamon Rolls.
I had seen it already. My copy had come in the mail on a Tuesday in September, and I had read the cover standing at our mailbox at the end of the drive, with the wind pulling at the envelope.
Now Janet was turning the book so everybody could see the photo on the back. It was a pan of rolls on a blue checked cloth, frosting running down the sides. They were pretty rolls. They were my grandmother’s rolls.
“The committee voted on the cover recipe,” Janet said, and she put a hand on her chest. “I will be honest with you girls. I about cried.”
Linda Petersen, who sits on my left at every meeting and has since we were both in our thirties, leaned over and whispered, “Missy, those look just like yours.”
She did not whisper as quietly as she thought she did.
Janet heard it. I saw her hear it. Her eyes came across the room and landed on me, and for one second something moved behind them. Then she smiled.
“Well,” Janet said, “good recipes get around.”
A few women laughed politely. Linda looked at her lap. I folded my hands on top of my purse and looked at the cookbook, and I did not say anything at all.
The Card in the Recipe Box
My name is Missy Kurtz. I am forty-eight years old, and I have been the secretary at our elementary school for nineteen years. I know every child’s allergy and every parent’s cell phone number by heart.
And for thirty years, since I was eighteen, I have made my grandmother Hazel’s cinnamon rolls for every funeral dinner and every church supper our little Methodist church has put on.
That is not bragging. It is just the job I ended up with. When somebody passes, the phone tree starts, and by the second call somebody says, “Is Missy doing the rolls?” and the answer has always been yes.
Grandma Hazel taught me when I was eleven. She stood me on a kitchen chair at her counter, in the farmhouse south of town, and put her hands over mine in the dough.
“You don’t punch it,” she told me. “You push it away and fold it back. Like you are tucking in a child.”
She scalded the milk in a dented saucepan until a skin came up on top. She used a pinch of cardamom, which nobody else in town used, because her own mother had come from a Swedish family up near Lindsborg and that was how they did it.
She let the dough rise twice. Always twice. If I got impatient and asked if it was ready, she would tap the bowl with one finger and say, “Don’t rush good things.”
She wrote that line on the card, too.
The card lived in a tin recipe box on my kitchen counter. It was a three-by-five index card, gone the color of weak tea, and the ink had faded from black to a kind of brown.
Across the top, in her slanted hand, it said: Cinnamon Rolls for the 60th, Oct. 1961. Makes 3 doz. And at the bottom, after the frosting: Let them rise twice. Don’t rush good things. H.L.
In the upper right corner there was a ring where her coffee cup had sat. I had looked at that ring a thousand times. I always pictured her setting the cup down, picking up her pen, and getting to work.
Grandma died when I was thirty-one. She left me the farmhouse furniture my mother did not want, a quilt, and that recipe box. Of the three, the box is the one I would grab in a fire.