Ghosts in the Kitchen

Aside from my bedroom, there isn’t a room in the old family house in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts that I spent more time in than the kitchen. There was something about the kitchen that drew me in, reminded me of family, and gave me the feeling of what life should be like at home. We ate breakfast and lunch in the kitchen, never dinner. Dinner was always eaten in the dining room. The kitchen seemed large to me as a young child, an almost barren space that didn’t have much filling it. That wing of the house that housed the kitchen was divided into three spaces. The actual kitchen, the large walk-in pantry, and the backroom behind the pantry. There was a magic in leaving the open kitchen to get dishes in the pantry, or search for food in the 1940s vintage refrigerator in the backroom.

The kitchen was a separate one-story wing jutting out of the side of the main house, as were most kitchens back in the day when fear of fire from the hearth threatened a home. Entering the kitchen, I always found to my left, just inside the doorway, a small telephone stand, the downstairs telephone on top, an ancient white jam jar acting as a pen and pencil holder, and scraps of paper for messages. The small stand, which measured about a foot square, had a shelf below on which a wooden recipe card drawer sat. It was the recipes contained in this small drawer that introduced me to my extended family of women and even one male cousin.

Often it was the smell of bacon wafting through the dining room and up the stairs to my far off bedroom that would entice me out of bed and into the creaky kitchen on those summer mornings we spent in Massachusetts. As my mother cooked, my sister and I would often sift through the cards in that single wooden drawer under the telephone and choose something to bake. It was always baking we did, even though there were recipes for Escalloped Salmon, Boiled Onions, and Clam Chowder, we ALWAYS drifted towards the desserts. The small cabinet holding the recipes resembled a single library card catalog drawer and revealed the kitchen secrets of a family long gone. Mary taught me how to make her small cake: 1½ cups, sugar, 2T butter, ¼ cup milk, ¾ cup flour, 1t Baking Powder, 1 beaten egg added last. No instructions.

“How am I supposed to know what to do?” I asked Ma.

“They just knew then. Everyone did, so no need writing it down,” Ma replied

“Okay, so what do I do?” Ma was also in the know. She must have been taught by not only her mother, Alice, but by her grandmother Emma, Mary’s sister-in-law. “Cream the butter and sugar together. Add the milk slowly, mixing a bit at a time. Sift the dry ingredients together, then slowly add to the wet a bit at a time, mixing well as you add.”

“Who was Mary?” I asked.

“My grandfather George’s sister,” she would tell me.

There were photos of the other sisters around—Rosabella and Maria. And a large painted portrait of a young Aunt Olive circa 1840 in the upstairs hallway, but no evidence of an Aunt Mary, except her Small Cake. She had married and moved to Illinois in 1870, had a stillborn baby, lost her husband, and returned to Shelburne Falls where she was the first of the Merrill aunties to pass away in 1901. 

A friend with my grandmother Alice 
just outside the kitchen with
Aunt Maria, Aunt Olive, and mother Emma

Aunt Olive had recipes, too. Her Ginger Cookies were very popular in our house: 1 cup molasses, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup buttermilk, 1 cup shortening, 2 teaspoons soda, 1 of ginger, 1 of cinnamon.

Again, no instructions. But I knew what to do now.

“ Wait. Soda? Like Coke?”

“No. Baking soda,” Ma patiently replied with a small smile.

“Oh, why don’t they say that?”

Crispy and rich is how I remember Aunt Olive and her cookies. Ma’s namesake, Olive Nichols Merrill Guild Spellman. Married twice. Three children. George, 5, and Katie, 8, both died of scarlet fever. Katie never knew her brother, born four years after she had died. Middle child Alice suffered through both of these losses with her mother, then died herself of inflammation of the brain at the age of twenty. Maybe baking soothed Aunt Olive, helping her through those difficult times.

Past the telephone stand, the kitchen doorway to the front yard, and a window beside it was the doorway to the pantry. The magical pantry—a portal to a world of a hundred years earlier. It was as if my great-grandmother Emma had placed a bowl on the shelf only for me to be the next one to pick it up. About four feet wide, with shelving from floor to ceiling, it held all kitchen utensils: two sets of dishes (dinner and dessert), baking pans, mixing bowls, and the waffle maker my grandmother had received as a wedding present in 1915. The waffle maker. Its fabric covered wire and large round plug marked it as a relic of the past.

“Ma, can we have waffles today?”

“Oh, sure. Go get the waffle maker.”

Off I would go to grab the cherished appliance from the third shelf from the bottom along the back wall—right at my height for easy access. We didn’t have a waffle maker in our Yonkers, NY house—where we lived during the school year—so it was a treat in the summer to make homemade waffles, mixing the batter up on the wooden table, the only furniture in the large kitchen, along with its four maple wood chairs, aside from the telephone stand. All through the 1970s and well into the 80s, the little waffle maker would churn out waffles to piping hot crispy perfection that we would then drench in local maple syrup from Davenport's Maple Farm.

One day I was sifting through the little drawer looking for something, anything, I hadn’t made before. Of course, it had to be sweet. I came across Neale’s Coffee Cake. A man wrote a recipe? What?

“Ma, who is Neale and why does he have a coffee cake recipe?”

“Oh, Neale was Aunt Rosie’s son. He went to Dartmouth with Croy.” Croy was Uncle Roy, my grandmother’s brother.

I pressed Ma on why he had a recipe—the only one in the drawer authored by a man. She didn’t know, but assured me it was a very tasty cake. That was enough for me: 1 cup of sugar, 2 eggs, 2 tsp. melted butter, ½ cup milk, 2 cups flour less 2 Tbsps., ½ tsp. salt, 1½ tsp. baking powder. And INSTRUCTIONS! Hooray...perfect moist and sweet was Neale’s coffee cake that summer morning in the large airy kitchen. Neale taught in Chicago at the Francis W. Parker School for many years before retiring home to Shelburne Falls with his wife Pearle. They never had children, but Neale remained close with his cousins in Shelburne Falls: my grandmother Alice and Croy. My mother knew Neale well and spoke of him sweetly.

Walking into the pantry again one day when I was maybe nine or ten I asked why there was a table there. It wasn’t really a table, but an elegant wood counter of sorts that jutted out from the lone window in the room, with two short pairs of white curtains, one for the upper window and one pair for the lower. The piece of butcher block was about an inch thick, three feet wide and maybe 18 inches deep, and made of a light unfinished wood.

“Why is there a counter in the pantry?” I asked one day out of the blue.

“That’s for making pie crusts and letting pies cool on,” Ma replied

Pie crust. My arch nemesis. My mother, Olive Merrill Ware, was taught to make pie crust by her mother Alice Frances Merrill, who was taught by her mother Emma Frances Field: 1 double handful flour, great spoonful lard, ½ teaspoon baking powder + salt. No instructions again. Ok, here I go.

“Lard? What’s that?”

“Just use Crisco.” It was the seventies, the age of Crisco. Lard had long been forgotten.

“I can’t roll it. It keeps breaking apart.”

“Okay, I’ll do it for you.”

Magically Ma always rolled a perfect pie crust, round and moist enough to stay together. It was a ritual. I always tried making it. She always came to my rescue and made it work. Since she died in 1985—I don’t make pie crust anymore. I will just buy it rolled out and perfect from the store.

Rosabella Merrill Carley gave me Ginger Puffs. She had Ira Merrill Carley in addition to Neale. His only daughter had four children. Roxana Giles, my great-great-grandmother gave me Brown Bread (no instructions of course) and a love for her name. Aunt Lena Ware, my grandmother’s sister-in-law, provided Corn Chowder: 2 cups sweet onion, 4 cups milk, 4 cups diced potatoes, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 onion, 1 carrot. Instructions again, thankfully. Lena was from Rockford, Illinois, very close to where I now live. I wonder how Uncle Henry met her. They never had children of their own and so my mother, the only child in her family, was also doted on by Aunt Lena and Uncle Henry. Henry took my mother to the 1942 World’s Fair in New York City, a trip she fondly recounted to me many times. I think I’ll make the corn chowder recipe this weekend and feel a little Aunt Lena from Rockford love.

I can sense the essences of these women (and Neale) through their recipes, their cooking they so lovingly wrote down for each other. The care that went into each card. They weren’t called Spice Cookies, but were most often labeled by who created them: Rosabella’s Cookies. Neale’s Coffee Cake, Mother’s Pie Crust, and of course Mary’s Small Cake. I had no aunts and uncles nearby when growing up. No cousins to play with. I mingled with the ghosts in the summer kitchen to learn what I was supposed to learn about them through the recipes they left.