Everyone thought Grandma Cookie was the nicest lady ever.
Everyone was wrong.
Lizzie knew this. It made her love her Grandmother even more. As family legend had it, Grandma Cookie Marshall was born on the dirt floor of a farmhouse in Appalachia. According to lore, she learned how to bake biscuits when she was only four years old. This wasn’t easy. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store was six miles away, and that’s only when a fallen tree didn’t block the roads or someone’s cattle got loose or the Bonneville was out of gas - you get the idea. Grabbing a last-minute item wasn’t an option.
So Cookie learned early on how to improvise.
Preschool-aged Cookie poured over recipes in old housekeeping magazines borrowed from her Aunt Tilda’s beauty parlor and figured out, through trial, error, and the frequent kitchen fire, how to make them come together into something (usually) delicious. Her parents would open the porch door, pulling off boots, hats, and gloves that had seen better days, After twelve hours of working a range of low-paying jobs, they’d walk into their wonderful-smelling house and find the kitchen table full of biscuits, casseroles, and, always, a pie. The food was almost enough to make her mother ignore the mess it took to create the meal. It didn’t take long for the whole town to start calling the young culinary prodigy “Cookie,” and for her services to be in demand from hill to hill.
Twenty years later, the publishers at Penguin fawned over this rags-to-risotto story and published her first cookbook. It did well. She wrote a second one. It did even better. But Cookie had more plans than culinary fame.
She left Appalachia, raised a family of her own, and made sure that each one of her children was more educated than the next. Always awake before the metaphorical rooster, she’d spend her pre-dawn hours in the kitchen, trying out this recipe or that. One time in the 80s, she was even invited to be on a television cooking show. Everyone thought she was great. Only her husband knew that she didn’t like it.
“Too much smiling,” she told him.
Lizzie hadn’t planned on spending so much time with her Grandma Cookie. But, she’d gotten into UVA on an academic scholarship and liked to go to her house to study. She was too easily distracted by the noise in her dorm and the crowds at the library. So she started going over to her grandmother’s home. First, it was just for a visit and a piece of pie. Soon it was to write a term paper. By her junior year, they spent half the week together. She enjoyed the twenty-minute drive from campus to Rustling Oaks. That’s where her grandparents had bought the property and built the house long before it was considered an enviable address.
The house hadn’t changed much in the last 50 years. The kitchen screamed a cherry red, and the knotty pine cabinets shone, shellacked within an inch of their lives. The oven was the original appliance, a white General Electric four-burner with a warming plate. And it worked just fine. The electric coils took a while to burn a glowing red and the oven didn’t have a glass window to peek in and check on your pie crust, but none of this bothered Grandma Cookie. She couldn’t count the number of meals she’d prepared in this space. It was where she felt the most at home.
She’d wipe the formica countertops with a homemade cleaning concoction that could blind the person spraying it in the wrong direction, and mumble to herself about trying a new oil or method. Sometimes, Lizzie would look up from her laptop and watch her grandmother hold a pencil in her mouth, hunched over the countertop with a calculator. “Cooking is art,” she would say. “But baking is math.”
On their weekly Sunday afternoon phone call, Lizzie’s mother would remark on her daughter’s relationship with the septuagenarian.
“For such a sweet lady, she’s being so secretive,” her mother would muse, “See if she’ll give you the pie recipe. She won’t give anyone the pie recipe.’”
Lizzie smiled. She’d only just learned about the pie.
Per family legend, a meager list of results on a Google Search, but fully documented in Cookie’s blue leather scrapbook, that pie was, in fact, something to write home about.
The pie started out like all pies do in the Southern United States: at a fair. The first year Cookie made it, she hadn’t even entered it in the contest, she simply brought it for the 4H tent where her oldest son was showing his sheep. It was devoured and immediately considered legendary. Every year after, Cookie’s Pie won, garnering praise from all who tasted her magical culinary skills and disdain from the other contestants who could never say that the competition was rigged. Because no one would believe them. The pie was that good. And every year it was just the tiniest bit different. She never wrote anything down, just stored all the information in her Golden Girls coiffed head. It’s like Cookie had some sort of in with the farmers who grew the fruit and knew which variety would yield her the perfect sweetness for the 4th of July fair. But Cookie didn’t stop there.
Soon, it was a state fair. A Blue ribbon. And then it was an East Coast competition sponsored by the one and only Betty Crocker brand. Another blue. Eventually, Cookie was traveling all over the country, scooping up more and more prizes than anyone not in the field of competitive pie baking could imagine. It was a very niche world. The ribbons coincided with the success of Cookie’s first cookbook. The publishers at Penguin, with their brown polyester suits, oversized shirt collars, and neatly trimmed mustache pleaded- no - begged Cookie to write down her recipe.
“We can run with this,” one of the men with a mop of red hair and an unwinnable battle with perspiration, cajoled. “It’s huge. The marketing opportunities are endless. Endless.” he repeated, in a vain attempt to get Cookie’s attention. He didn’t know Cookie very well. You never had to tell her anything twice. A man who looked half her age and like he was wearing his father’s suit, popped up, clearly trying to pitch a new angle or was looking for directions to the candy store. Cookie looked at him over her oversized, horn-rimmed glasses.
“We could even have a contest. People could try to guess your recipe and then win it. Eventually, sure, the secret sauce will get out, but think of the free advertising dollars.”
Cookie didn’t care about the advertising dollars. This is not to say that she wasn’t interested in making money. She was very interested in making money. But she wasn’t willing to compromise. She’d done quite well for herself. She’d invested all of her fair circuit winnings in the stock market. She was good at that. Really good. Had she been born a few decades later, she would have been a shoo-in for an Ivy League MBA.
As if on cue, each of the five suited men and two suited women stood up at the round table in their Boston office, offering Cookie all kinds of angles, reasons, and arguments as to why she should share her recipe.
Cookie didn’t stop smiling. She also didn’t budge. There was a twinkle in her eye that few people saw. She always had a plan. Cookie spent her mornings on the phone with her stockbroker, buying, selling, and sometimes holding when everyone else was getting out. Her afternoons were spent tutoring her children, drilling their spelling, quizzing their multiplication tables, and timing them for their upcoming track meets. They were all good kids. Cookie was someone you wanted to please.
Lizzie saw this. Grandma Cookie would work in the kitchen, measuring, stirring, scribbling, and always bring a plate to her granddaughter. Lizzie would look up, and see her grandmother straining, boiling, and separating something with a large chunk of butter. There was always so much butter. She couldn’t help but smile and make eye contact with Cookie, who would admonish her to get back to her studies, always in a voice sweeter than the honey she added by measured teaspoon.
Lizzie graduated from the University Of Virginia Cum Laude. She moved up North and stayed in touch with her grandmother through lengthy, hand-written letters. Lizzie too, had absorbed some of her grandmother’s baking bug, maybe through some kind of recipe osmosis, and spent her evenings after her office job tinkering in the kitchen. She’d write to Cookie about substituting coconut oil and trying almond flour or opinions on store-bought vanilla extract. Cookie would always write back immediately. Her life was full. Her brain worked until the end. And when she died, it was the end of an era.
In the aftermath of her passing, the entire extended family plane-ed, train-ed and automobile-ed down to the Virginia farmhouse to go through her things. It was hard on everyone who remembered her kindness. It was extra hard on Lizzie. She didn’t just miss her sweet and loving grandmother, she missed the twinkle, the ever so slight devilish streak, and was heartbroken that she would never see that again.
Lizzie sat at the kitchen table like she’d done a hundred times throughout her undergraduate career, watching her family sift through cabinets and drawers, her older cousins consulting the will. When a shrill scream escaped from her Aunt Tilda, it was as if both the people and the farmhouse itself froze in shock.
“I found it! She left us the recipe!!!” Lizzie looked up from one of her Grandmother’s letters that she’d stuffed into her pocket before she’d left for the airport. Her eyes were pink and watery, like the liquid in a berry sauce long before Cookie turned it into compote. Lizzie was just as surprised as the other dozen people. Some were incredulous, others relieved. Cousin Tilda thought it was a foregone conclusion.
“She wasn’t going to die without passing it down. That would have been insane.”
“But, she was. At least a little,” Lizzie’s mother ventured, somewhat under her breath.
The recipe itself, written on, of course, yellow legal paper in her grandmother’s perfect cursive, didn’t look all that different from anyone else’s grandmother’s pie recipe. By the time Lizzie got to hold it, the aunts were in the car, driving to the ShopRite which had bought up most of the Piggly Wigglies in the state, to get all of the necessary ingredients.
First, Lizzie looked at the recipe with devastation. She missed Cookie so damn much. But after a few moments, her brain began to read it through the eyes of a baker. Lizzie shook her head. Nothing on the folded paper looked remarkable. It didn’t even look like Grandma Cookie had ever consulted it. No stains or spills or whited-out creases indicated the aftermath of folding and refolding a page. She pushed it across the table and went upstairs to nap. The whole grieving process had exhausted her. But a nap was not in the cards for Lizzie.
She tossed and turned on the worn-to-perfect soft bedspread that she knew someone in her grandmother’s lineage had made from hand when there were no other options. The old house creaked as an afternoon breeze swept through the property, sneaking its way through the open windows and rustling the leaves up against the grey siding. But those weren’t the noises that stopped Lizzie from getting some rest. Nor was it the muffled voices of her mothers and aunts in the lanai or the gentle whining of someone’s lap dog, begging to be let out and explore the wooded yard. Nope. What kept Lizzie up was the deafening cacophony of pots and pans and spoons and the opening and closing of the old oven.
The arguing and spilling and discussion of salted or unsalted butter sounded like the local sheriff was going to need to be called to intervene and the whole Marshall clan would end up on the evening news. The slamming of cabinets and, of course, the smoke alarm shaking the farmhouse in a piercing scream was the nail in the nap coffin. Lizzie made her way downstairs, her hair a bit wild and her patience a bit short. Lizzie rubbed her eyes and stepped down into the kitchen that could have now been a production set for a mid-century cooking show competition. All the doors and windows had been opened to let the burning smell escape. And then, Lizzie saw it.
On the table that had once been the site of Lizzie’s studying were three pies. There was a Goldilocks-type feel to the situation. One looked mushy, one was burnt to a crisp, and one looked just right. It was golden brown and a delicate dusting of powdered sugar on top looked like freshly fallen snow. The ripe cherries peeked through the thoughtful lattice-work of the woven pie crust. The gentle steam rising out of the center was a picture that would have made any of the Penguin ad executives drool.
“Lizzie,” called Aunt Tilda. “You spent the most time with Cookie. You try them.” Reading the smug look plastered across Tilda’s face, it was easy to guess which pie was hers.
Lizzie sat down at the table. She knew better than to argue. But she didn’t want to eat the pie. She didn’t want anyone to ‘win.’ She didn’t even know if she wanted her Grandmother’s recipe to be out there in the world. Maybe the pie, the perfect, award-winning, totally secretive pie, was meant to lay peacefully in Our Lady Of Hope Cemetery right with Grandma Cookie?
A chipped plate with faded apples painted around the edges was placed in front of Lizzie, a silver fork more or less shoved into her hand. The family had managed to put a pin in their bickering to huddle into the windy kitchen and stare at Lizzie, eyes glued to her as she cut herself a bite. With the weight of the world, or at least the hopes and dreams and future of the Marshall Family on her salad fork, Lizzie brought the unwanted bite of pie to her lips, closed her eyes, and bit down.
At first, she didn’t know why the flavors didn’t register. Maybe because she was physically and emotionally exhausted. Maybe because she was mad. Maybe because she was coming down with a cold and that always messes with your taste buds. She didn’t know. But she had to consciously tell her brain to talk to her mouth and taste the pie. Eventually, her synapses fired. It tasted like pie. But, it sure as shit wasn’t Cookie’s pie.
Silently, Lizzie opened her eyes, scooted out of the banquette, and walked over to the kitchen counter where it looked like someone had set off a flour bomb. She picked up the recipe, willed her tired eyes to focus, and scanned the ingredients. Then, from somewhere deep in her unconscious, she remembered Cookie fussing with the butter, it was almost three steps. She remembered the honey. She remembered the math with the recipe shaking in her hand, Lizzie dusted off the white powder and read and reread her grandmother’s scratchy cursive. And then she laughed. She couldn’t help it. All of the emotions that had been pushed down and out of her mind for the last week bubbled up to the surface like a potion in a witch’s cauldron. Lizzie laughed, deep, deep guffaws. She could barely hold herself up onto the counter so she sat down on the floor.
It wasn’t Grandma Cookie’s real recipe. It was Cookie being the Cookie that few like Lizzie were lucky enough to know. She left behind the twinkle in her eye. She was fucking with her entire family after her death. Cookie remembered everything. She would have never written down the recipe. No one had strained the butter. No one had weighed any of the ingredients. And there was not a jar of honey in sight. With her family trailing after her, begging Lizzie for an explanation, Cookie’s granddaughter just shook her head, packed her Eastpack duffel bag, slid in a framed, weathered, black and white photo of her grandmother holding a ribbon at her first county fair between two of her sweatshirts, and left.
That night, in her studio apartment with appliances almost as old as the ones in the old farmhouse, Lizzie pulled out one ingredient after the next. She was in a zombie-like daze of grief and sleep deprivation but it felt as if her hands had a mind of their own - sifting, measuring, rolling, separating.
When the pie was done, she restrained herself from taking her fork and digging directly in. Instead, she cut herself a proper slice, placed it on one of her hand-me-down ceramic plates, and sat on her futon.
“Well, Grandma,” she said to the silent, empty apartment, “What do you think?”
And she closed her eyes and took a bite. This time, Lizzie didn’t have to tell her brain anything. The flavors were there, bursting from every direction in her mouth. She chewed and ate some more. It was almost exactly as she remembered. Something was different, but Lizzie was ok with that. She still hasn’t told her family about Cookie’s deception. Letting her Grandma down would put a worse taste in her mouth than bad pie.
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