LIBBY KLEIN: I wanted to bake as far back as I can remember. I believe the spirit of Julia Child was alive and well in my five-year-old self. She too wanted to cook things because she wanted to eat them. My favorite present was an EZ Bake oven which I quickly outgrew. Then I graduated to the big oven and a world of box mixes. If my parents had unexpected company I was assigned blueberry muffin duty. This is my earliest baking memory and the first time I made chocolate chip cookies. The first of a thousand times.
I would read my Peanut Lunch Bag Cook Book every night before going to bed. It's full of food-related comic strips along with lunch recipes. In a way, it was a little like having recipes at the end of a cozy mystery. I have made several of the recipes from this book including Full of Baloney Sandwiches.
When I got to Junior High, it was a dream come true to finally have Home-Ec class where we got to bake something every week. I even remember the first thing we made in Home-Ec. Jelly Muffins. Plain dry muffins with a glop of grape jelly baked in the middle. They were kind of disappointing for someone who was a seasoned chef with baloney sandwiches under her belt.
What is the first thing you can remember making?
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MADDIE DAY: That picture is the cutest, ever, Libby. I have pix of my sons like that, but not of me.
I don't remember ever NOT baking with my mom and two older sisters, especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas. We were always included. Mommy was an expert baker, but she always included us in the production of three kinds of Thanksgiving pies, all manner of cakes and candies year-round, and eight kinds of Christmas cookies.
I was the youngest of the Maxwell girls and had one younger sibling - the Only Boy. We're in age order in this studio photograph.
I was also always the youngest and shortest in my class at school. Think I developed a strong need to be noticed? You bet.
So the first meal I remember making solo was hamburgers for the family, ala McDonalds ("18,000 served"). I was probably about seven, an age when I was still too short to be safely flipping high-fat meat patties in a cast iron skillet on the stove, but my parents were lenient by the third child. I found a white chef's hat in the rag drawer (my adult self wonders, why?...) and donned it, pinning a white dishtowel around my waist. I insisted on lining up all the kitchen chairs in a row and making my family file along the other side and put in their order for hamburgers (which I had already formed and fried). I assembled the buns, ketchup, cross-sliced pickles, lettuce, and tomato, except my mom and I were the only two who wanted the works. My older sisters rolled their eyes. We all had dinner. I got to, briefly, be the star chef. With nary a photo to document any of it!
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LUCY BURDETTE: I LOVE these stories. You ladies were born to cook. Two things I remember making and I'll describe both since I can't remember what came first! I spent a summer in the nurses' dorm with my sister in Wilmington, Delaware. We had summer jobs as aides in the hospital. It was very spooky as there was absolutely NO ONE ELSE living in this huge building. We moved the two single beds into one room and had our kitchen/sitting area in the other. The main dinner I remember making was creamed chipped beef on toast. (Ugh!) My second memory was preparing homemade spaghetti sauce from the Joy of Cooking for a boy I liked in college. Sheesh, nothing in those memories predicted an obsession with good food and a life writing culinary themed mysteries!
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PEG COCHRAN/MARGARET LOUDON: What fun stories! Such fun stories! The first thing I cooked was something we called Girl Scout stew, which is also known as Campfire Stew. It consisted of ground beef, a can of tomato sauce and elbow macaroni. I think I was in sixth grade and I was so proud when my mother would let me make it for dinner--but only when my father had a late appointment and wasn't eating at home. His standards were a lot higher! By seventh grade, I decided to try my hand at baking. Along with a girlfriend we found a recipe in my mother's Good Housekeeping cookbook for a "simple" cake. For some reason we had the brilliant idea of using food coloring to dye it a sickly green so not only was the cake inedible (it was hard as a rock!) it was hideous to look at.
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TINA KASHIAN: What wonderful and fun stories! I enjoyed reading each one. The first thing I remember making was also hamburgers. I was about five or six years old and our school class was putting together a cookbook of our shared recipes to send home to the families. My recipe had to be the funniest. We rarely went to the supermarket because we had a family restaurant. My dad would bring home a large cut of chuck steak/shoulder and we had a meat grinder. My school recipe called for first taking meat into the basement to grind it. Who knows what families thought when they read my recipe? Other than that, the burgers came out pretty good.
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LESLIE BUDEWITZ: I honestly don’t remember what was the first thing I cooked All By Myself, but I do remember climbing up on the kitchen counter to toast Saltines. Do not try this at home. Happily, the cabinets were only scorched, and a coat of paint on the underside covered my mistake nicely.
I have a strong memory of making Christmas cookies with my father when my mother was away. My guess is I was about 8. He was so not a cook that it’s hilarious. He loved rolled sugar cookies and found a recipe in the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook that used powdered sugar – even then, I knew that was not the norm or what my mom, who was an excellent baker, used, but they turned out beautifully! (That’s her rolling pin, which now lives in my kitchen.) We used lots of cookie cutters and colored sprinkles and had a lovely time. Plus, they were delish, and a memory I cherish.
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LESLIE KARST: I’m sure I cooked before this, but what I most remember from childhood is my best friend and I cooking together when we were in junior high school. The Time-Life Foods of the World cookbook series was just being released, and when a new volume would arrive in the mail we’d lie next to each other on her living room floor listening to Mamas and Papas and Beatles LPs, flipping through the pages of glossy color photographs until we found a dish that seemed intriguing, and then consult the smaller spiral-bound book to see how difficult the recipe looked.
Nancy was studying Russian at the time, so we spent long
hours perusing that volume (the one with those intricately-painted red
and orange Easter eggs on the cover). In particular, I remember making
the crispy pirozhki (meat and egg pastries spiked with dill—a new flavor
for me), and also the sweet, yeasty Russian Easter bread (kulich),
which I found especially fascinating as it was baked in a coffee can,
and because it contained saffron—also new to me—dissolved in rum.
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MOLLY MACRAE: One of my favorite Christmas presents, when I was quite young, was a set of miniature cake and pie pans along with miniature mixes. I loved those little boxes and the tiny baked goods they produced (although the results didn't go far in a family of eight). One of my first cookbooks was more of a pamphlet that included a recipe for Prune Whip - and no one complained when I made it. They ate it, too. Bless the parents and families who encourage young cooks! Here's my first hardback cookbook. It was another Christmas present, given to my in 1963.
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MAYA CORRIGAN: I'm definitely the late bloomer in this group. When I was growing up, the only kitchen duty I had, besides scrubbing pots and pans after dinner, was making chocolate pudding for dessert. This was before instant pudding was invented. I warmed the milk in a pot on the stove, added the powdered pudding, and simmered and stirred . . . and stirred . . . and stirred until the pudding thickened. That seemed to take forever when I wanted to be outside playing. Scarred by this early experience, I don't make or eat anything that resembles chocolate pudding as an adult, not even chocolate mousse, though I otherwise love chocolate. I didn't learn to cook until I shared an apartment in grad school with a friend. I brought Joy of Cooking with me. She brought the Fanny Farmer Cookbook, and the two of us taught ourselves by trying new recipes from those books. My Joy of Cooking fell apart after decades of heavy use, and I went out and bought a new version. The first one I bought didn't have some recipes I cherished most from my old Joy, so I haunted thrift stores until I found a used one that did. And breaking with tradition, I always made cookies with my children. My daughter refuses to make chocolate chip cookies with any recipe except the one in Joy of Cooking.
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| My first cookbook with its loose binding |
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CLEO COYLE: Fun
topic, Libby! Like you, I have great early memories of baking up tiny treats with
a light bulb courtesy of my beloved Easy Bake Oven. Check out the vintage
versions below. I had the oven on the left, and my favorite mix was the little chocolate cake...
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Photo credit: By Bradross63 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38602686
Vintage Easy Bake Ovens
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And do you all
remember Jiffy Pop? I loved popping up the corn with my sister, except for the
burnt kernels, the inevitable result of a gas stove and too-thin aluminum pan. And how about the Pillsbury chocolate chip cookies from the refrigerator dough
tube? It was just as good to eat uncooked, as many of you, no doubt,
agree.
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Cleo's Aunt Mary
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My earliest memory of real, big-girl cooking was acting as the helper to my beloved Aunt Mary, who was born in Italy and lived with our family. She was more of a
grandmother to me, really, and my favorite memories of those years were making
Italian cookies for the Christmas holidays and rolling tiny meatballs for her
Italian Wedding Soup, which she made nearly every Sunday for the family (no
wedding necessary).
Aunt Mary is gone now, but I still have her soup pot and the crinkle dough
cutter she brought with her from Italy. I’m already looking forward to
Christmas cookie season when I’ll be making cookies from those days, including
my version of my aunt’s Glazed Italian Lemon Cookies (Anginetti) and her
Italian Bow Tie Cookies (aka Angel Wings), picture below.
Click the photo below
for the recipe…
GIVEAWAY!
To be entered in this week's drawing
for the 6 terrific mysteries below,
join us in the comments.
What is the first thing
you can remember making?
Join the
conversation!
Include your email address,
so we can contact the winner!
> MISCHIEF NIGHTS ARE MURDER by Libby Klein
> MURDER AT A CAPE BOOKSTORE by Maddie Day
> A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS by Lucy Burdette
> BREWED AWAKENING by Cleo Coyle
> MISTLETOE, MOUSAKKA, AND MURDER by Tina Kashian
> A PARFAIT CRIME (ARC) by Maya Corrigan
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