Not Quite The Same

About a month ago, I compiled the handwritten recipes of my Nana (my mother's mother) into a booklet, which I then sent to my uncle, siblings, and cousins.  

The compilation was a bit painstaking. At times, I couldn't understand my Nana's handwriting. My Uncle George helped me with deciphering letters and numbers. More challenging was the oft-absent directions for what to do with the ingredients. Again, I relied on my Uncle George, as well as my own memories of watching my Nana make these various desserts, to provide some sensible instruction for what to do. 

My Nana was known for her desserts -- cakes, candy, cookies, pies, and puddings -- which all of us loved. Indeed, her entire collection of recipes is limited to desserts, except, perhaps, the one for mincemeat. I never could figure out what that stuff is, and I never tried. It's like fruitcake. I just don't want to know! 

Last night, TSO and I decided to make a few things from Nan's Recipes: AB Cake and chocolate chip cookies. AB Cake is a very simple coffee cake comprised of the basics: flour, sugar, shortening, an egg, milk, and baking powder. The chocolate chip cookies were just about more of the same, except that brown sugar also was included and, of course, chocolate chips.

We made the AB Cake first. As we mixed the ingredients, I noticed that the batter looked just like it did when I was a child. It also tasted just like it did when I was a child. Silently, I entertained the memories of "licking the bowl" after my Nana had poured the batter into the baking pans, followed by eating the cake with "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" slathered on it. (By the way, when I learned what real butter tastes like, I could very much believe that that stuff is not butter.) I recalled the sense of calm and comfort that the infusion of flour, sugar, and fat instantly created with that first bite while the chaos swirled around me. 

While the AB Cake baked, TSO and I turned to the chocolate chip cookies. The experience and the memories were the same as they were with the cake, which now filled the air with its sweet aroma as it baked in the oven. Unlike the cake, which my Nana made randomly throughout the year, the cookies were a Christmastime treat. Yet, as Jim and I stirred and mixed the ingredients until they formed the cookie dough, my memories were not of happy Christmases of yore. Rather, they were of repeated trips to the cookie tin (i.e., empty coffee can) in search of that fleeting calm that was brought on by that first bite but which promptly disappeared when the cookie was gone. 

One of my most specific memories of my Nana's chocolate chip cookies was the tendency for them to burn on the bottom. Without fail. My goal last night was to prevent that from happening. Mission accomplished. 

Unburnt Chocolate Chip Cookies

Here's the interesting part of the experiment. Neither the AB Cake nor the Chocolate Chip Cookies tasted like they did when my Nana baked them. Was that because we baked the cake in one rectangular pan instead of two small round pans? Was it because the cookies were not burned on the bottom? Was it because the oven at the beach house is not the oven my Nana used? Perhaps these factors played some role. I am convinced, however, that the true explanation is that, despite our use of my Nana's own recipes, my Nana didn't bake them. Sure, the difference is subtle, but it's enough to make me uninterested in eating anymore of either. They're just not quite the same.