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Love For Baking, Cooking Started Young

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By IRENE MAHER, News Channel 8 Medical Editor

Published: December 15, 2007

My favorite childhood Christmas gifts were china tea sets and child-sized pots and pans. It's no wonder I grew up loving to cook and bake.

I remember preparing my first meal as part of the requirements to earn a Girl Scout badge for cooking. My mom sat at the small table in our small kitchen, watching as I warmed a piece of steak from the previous night's dinner together with a can of spinach. It was her lunch and she loved it.

Cooking became my favorite hobby. By the time I was in seventh grade, I was baking cookies, a cake or bread every week. When my mom wasn't around to supervise, I went across the street to Jean Emond's house for conversation, coffee and, ultimately, fresh-baked cookies.

Like my mom, Jean watched while I measured and mixed. She was my first mentor, and afternoons at her house were always delicious.

But Jean taught me to love more than baking. She taught me to drink coffee. Black, no sugar. The electric percolator at her house was always brewing a fresh pot. We would sit at her long kitchen table, each with a cup and saucer, Jean with a long skinny cigarette, talking and baking for hours. My mother didn't mind that I was probably the only kid in the neighborhood who drank coffee. After all, she was raised on the stuff. Mom said her parents often flavored the milk in her baby bottle with a few drops of coffee.

One summer, Jean helped me bake a big white coconut cake for my mother's birthday. I remember the recipe came from our Betty Crocker cookbook and was called Silver Moon cake. I don't remember what it tasted like, but my mom was still talking about that cake decades later. I couldn't have done it without Jean.

It wasn't until recently that I realized how important those early experiences in the kitchen were. Unlike my teachers at school, Jean and my mom knew how to let me learn. Cooking was challenging, but there was no competition, and no exam at the end that I had to fear failing. Recipes were an adventure. Nothing that came from a cookbook seemed difficult or impossible.

Everyone needs to have at least one thing in their life that makes them feel successful. I am so grateful that I found mine at an early age in a hobby that never went out of style or was terribly expensive.

At Christmastime, my mother had to have butter cookies. We usually baked rich Spritz cookies that came out of a cookie press in the shape of Christmas trees. Mom also enjoyed making a small batch of eggnog for the holidays. It was a complicated process that involved heating eggs, sugar and milk to just below the boiling point.

One year, my mother was standing at the stove stirring this concoction and somehow got tangled up in the handle of the saucepan. The steaming milk spilled all over her hand. She was so badly burned that my dad had to pile all three kids in the car and take her to the hospital. I'll never forget how unsettling it was to see my mother injured and out of commission. When we got home from the hospital that night, my mother's hand was covered in a thick ointment and heavily bandaged. I could tell she was in terrible pain. My dad gave her a small glass of rum to help her sleep. The rum usually went in the eggnog.

Maybe it's the bad memories, but to this day I have never tried to make eggnog, even though I love it and always buy a quart during the holidays, despite the calories. Nevertheless, during most evenings in December, you'll find me in my kitchen, making Christmas cookies. Nowadays, the cookie press is electric, the pots and pans are professional grade All-Clad, and the coffee is decaf. But it's still black, with no sugar.

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