Johnston - Flapper pie and a blue prairie sky: a modern bakers guide to old-fashioned desserts

T heres not a day that goes by that I wouldnt give up chocolate to reach across the table and clasp my Grandma Marions farm workworn hand one more time. To sit and feel her soft, papery-thin skin under the pad of my thumb, her fragile skin belying the strong-as-steel hands of a woman who survived the Depression years, raised two kids, and lived on a farm for her entire life, canning, cooking, beekeeping, and gardening until her last few years. What I wouldnt give for one more day spent in her farmhouse kitchen baking saskatoon pies, the heat blazing so hard from the oven that I would have to step outside into the sweltering summertime air just to cool down. Just one more day spent with her making freezer jam, the steam from the pots of strawberries infusing the kitchen with a scent that, to this day, I equate with happiness.

What I wouldnt give for one more day spent with my Grandma Kay. To sit in her apartment kitchen together and add more notes to the first cookbook she ever gave me, when I turned 18the 1980 Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook. That book is one of my most cherished possessions, and what makes it so special are the newspaper clippings of recipes she taped into the back. Those yellowed, tattered papers flutter from the book and warm my heart every time I open it, usually to bake peanut butter cookies, the recipe for which she taped in there for me. Those cookies are the base dough for my . Those precious papers have been taped and retaped so many times to ensure they are in their proper place at all times and that I never lose them. Widowed early, Grandma Kay raised four young boys on her own, nurturing them into four successful men (my dad being one of them), a feat I cant even comprehend. What I wouldnt give for just one more day collecting recipes from her side of the family, of which I have so few.

But the fleeting times that life gave me with these two strong women are now gone; the lessons that I had left to learn from them now impossible to know. So I want to ask you to take some of those one-more-days for me. I want you to take time out of your day to sit and enjoy a coffee and a slice of pie with your mom, dad, or any other beloved relative. I want you to take this book along and talk about your family memories and your culinary history, and make notes beside the recipes that mean the most to you. Maybe its the fact that your grandma made flapper pie with the fluffiest meringue in the west (winning every pie contest going and keeping the whole farming community guessing her secret); or maybe its a reminder about where you used to pick saskatoon berries as a kid (and a note that a slice of saskatoon pie makes the best breakfast there is, because it is berries, after all); or maybe its your moms closely guarded secret recipe for her coveted chocolate chip cookies.

If you are gifting this book to someone, I want you to write notes on the inside cover and tape recipe cards with your family dessert recipes into the back pages, just like my Grandma Kay did for me with Good Housekeeping Illustrated. Even if its just a note saying you know they love the whipped shortbread that you make every Christmas, and heres a book with the classic recipe inside.

If youre gifting this book to yourself, I hope you do just the same: add to it with recipe cards and clippings in the back. I want you to read it, enjoy it, love it, and more than anything else, I want you to use it. I want the ears of your cookbook to be grease-stained with butter, and your favorite pages wrinkled from cookie-dough-covered thumbs.

The best cookbooks are meant to be used, loved, and added to. The magic that turns a cookbook from a nice gift into a family treasure will have nothing to do with what Ive written or photographed on these pages, and everything to do with the words you choose to add. Choose wisely and from your heart, because the love and meaning in the words you write can be everlasting.

Most importantly, I want you to make sure that those one-more-days really happen.

Love,

Karlynn