There couldn't be a better title than "Sweets" for a cookbook and memoir to enjoy at this holiday season
Sweets - Soul food desserts & memories (by Patty Pinner, Ten Speed Press, 2006), is a great example of how a piece of a family’s story can be brought to life, and remembered, in a food memoir. Sweets is so enjoyable to read for its stories of family, that you might neglect its varied recipes. Please don’t do that.
Of course it is difficult to neglect the recipes in this book when you look at the enticing cover. The bottom half is devoted to a Strawberry Layer Cake so pink and pretty that it’s almost a shame to make and eat it; almost but not quite a shame.
Grandmother’s Specialty Was Cakes
Patty Pinner, the author of Sweets, grew up in an African-American family filled with women who could cook and bake. In her introduction to the section on “Cakes”, Pinner writes of her grandmother: “Cakes were My My’s specialty … Sometimes, from a distance, her beautifully iced cakes resembled the spring hats that were on display at her favorite hat shop downtown.”
One of her grandmother’s specialties is also one of my favourite recipes. “My My’s Strawberry Layer Cake”, so appealing on the cover, is also easy to make and delicious to eat. About this cake, Pinner tells readers, “When My My brought this cake to the picnic table … you could hear our “oohs” and “aahs” echoing throughout the neighborhood”.
She lovingly describes the baker of the second cake I liked – “Miss Essie Brazil’s Three-Layer Coconut Cake” - as “a stout little churchwoman”.
All the recipes in Sweets have easy to follow instructions, and many have mouth-watering photographs.
Snow Ice Cream
Near the end of the book, Pinner writes about “My My’s Snow Ice Cream”, and how “My My would send us out back with large mixing bowls and tell us to collect only the whitest snow.”
Pinner’s description of gathering fresh, white snow, reminded me of being likewise instructed, when my mother sent my cousins and me outside after a new snow, to make snow taffy with the pot of caramelized sugar she placed on the back step.
Sweets is filled with such memories (that evoke a reader’s own), family photographs, and, of course, recipes. It’s terrific for anyone who loves to read about other families’ food traditions, and is inspiration for any writer thinking of writing his or her own family’s history through food (read more about this topic in Writing a Family Cookbook).
