Bertha Connyers was a lovely soul, tiny and opinionated. She'd call "bullshit" on things what needed callin', but she was kind to animals, and was known to feed anyone or anything that showed up on her doorstep. This included stray cats, stray dogs, stray skunks, and stray grandkids.
Bertha had lived through the Great Depression, and it forever altered the way she regarded food: there was no such thing as a leftover at Bertha's house, it was just somebody else's next meal. If she invited you to eat you never really knew what you were getting--but you could be sure someone had got there before you. And if you left anything on your plate, you knew it would be carefully scraped into one of many aluminum foil tv dinner trays she'd saved over the years, frozen, and reheated another day.
Waste nothing, Grandma Bertha said, and waste nothing she did. If the Chee-Tos in the candy dish she set out for guests didn't get eaten at Christmas, you knew you'd have another crack at them come Fourth of July.
One day Grandma Bertha declared she'd make us kids a rhubarb pie. Rhubarb pie! "Hot diggety!" we said, heading off for a hiking trail with the promise of sweet-sour golden pie goodness awaiting us on our return. And there was indeed pie, of a sort.
"I didn't have any flour for pie crust so I made a crumble instead, " said Grandma. "And that called for oatmeal, but I didn't have any oatmeal so I used Malt-O-Meal." While the resulting concoction probably tasted suitably rhubarbish, the color, texture, and fresh-from-the-oven warmth all added up to an overwhelming and undeniable resemblance to, er, vomit.
Grandma Bertha is gone, but her thrifty legacy lives on: any time we find ourselves short of an ingredient and making dodgy substitutions, we append the dish title with "á là Bertha". And so today's dish is Favorite Gingerbread á là Bertha.
A simple, standard gingerbread recipe, but I ran out of molasses halfway through and had to substitute dark Karo syrup: similar color, texture, and mass, but none of that lovely molassesy taste. Part of the boiling water called for in the recipe got swished around in the molasses jar to free up what residue possible, and then dumped into the mixing bowl. I threw in an extra teaspoon of powdered ginger (the Cupids often find gingery recipes underspiced) and popped the mess in the oven.
Hot out of the the oven, the gingerbread was pronounced, "Okay." "Not the modern super-sweet or ultra flavored or fusion anything." The real surprise was the next day: the texture changed from bready to slightly sticky, and the ginger flavor really bloomed. Wow, much tastier. I'll make this again with the full complement of molasses and see what happens.
Posted by Nukegirl at January 29, 2008 08:55 PM