Kitchen Saints: The Gordons at Christmastime

           I have called on the Gordon kitchen saints once again.

Gordon Rocks have been made (double batch) and shared. Christmas would be incomplete, however, without another traditional favorite of the Gordon clan: boiled custard. If the South is not your home, if your stomping grounds are not from around these parts, you may be unfamiliar with this traditional delicacy.

            Custards are often baked into pies or refrigerated and eaten with a spoon like a pudding. Not so for boiled custard. Taken either sip-by-sip from a small fancy-shaped glass or used as the base for egg nog, boiled custard is always served at Christmas gatherings of the Gordon family. The gentle thickness of boiled custard is just right for putting a little milk-like mustache on a toddler’s lip; boiled custard initiated a babe into the folds of Gordondom.

Ella Gordon and family lived across the street from the Methodist Church where she occupied a front pew and had a women’s missionary society circle named in her honor. Ella Gordon was a “t-totaler,” a duty and obligation lady, but at Christmastime, all bets were off. Ella sent for “good whiskey.” 

Mind you, she never bought it herself. She sent a man to the liquor store and listened for the secret knock at the door so Aunt Bessie might retrieve the hooch. The whiskey or brandy was not for drinking, but for cooking. That's altogether a different situation, don't ya' know. The liquor would “cook out,” and the finished product would be all the more moist or flavorful due to the addition of the booze.

Lifting the lid to the cookie tins filled with Rocks could set a sober person into a spin with one whiff. Egg nog shared with little Gordons on Christmas Eve sent them to their beds earlier than they had planned – about passed out from the nog’s not-so-secret ingredient. Thomas would literally stagger to bed, all the while begging for more.

Ella Gordon, also known as Banmama, carried on the tradition of Rocks, Boiled Custard, a multitude of confections, and batch upon batch of salted pecans kept in a Mrs. Seay’s Candy Box. She and her girls also made fondant, shaping colored fondant balls into ovals and pressing pecan halves on either side. Pam and I have tried to replicate a caramel candy known as “Tattee’s Candy,” but we grew impatient and let it remain Tattee’s Soup, still delicious, filled with goo-gobs of chopped pecans, and laden with sugar.

            Banmama also made a Nut Cake during the holidays. The Nut Cake made with lots of eggs, a bit of flour, a healthy cup of pecans, plenty of sugar (a Gordon absolute), also called for a tumbler of “good brandy.” Upon first reading the recipe shared by Mrs. W.W. Brown, Mrs. Chas. Gordon, and Mrs. S.B. Lide, I thought the notation indicated a “thimble” of brandy.  

In re-reading the list of ingredients, it appears this is a fruit cake without the fruit, but plenty of nuts and quite a bit of brandy. I modified the recipe to bake a cake similar to one that a writer friend’s mother made and it is cooling on a wire rack in my refrigerator, waiting to be served with a dollop of whipped cream (or Cool-Whip).

            Baking with recipes gathered from family recipe books brings a warmth to me as real as if my great grandmother, grandmother, her sisters, and my mother are all in the same kitchen. I am in tune with these women and their laughter, their enjoyment of the Christmas season, their unbounded generosity never more present than at Christmastime.

            And, dear cousins, for the record, I also made several batches of palted secans.