Stingy with Sugar

 

Daddy’s patients often gifted him with food. Letha Steiner worked at the Stokley-Van Camp canning plant in Celina. Whenever I went with Daddy on a house call to Leitha’s, we came home with at a case of pickles. If we hadn’t been out to her house in a while, Leitha would come knock on our door, and deliver another case. We ate them at lunch every day in order to keep up with her generosity. They were sweet pickle spears and they were delicious.

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Another patient, who worked as a picker at the Grand Lake Mushroom Farm, often brought us fresh mushrooms. Whenever Daddy popped into the house with a box of mushrooms, Mother always changed her dinner menu to somehow include them.  

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Every Easter, the nuns baked us a cake in the shape of a lamb. It had white, sticky frosting, covered in coconut, and a single red hot for its eye. It was a beautiful cake, but since I didn’t like coconut, the candy eye was the only part that tasted good to me. 

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At Christmas time, one lady always brought German Springerle. These were white, anise-flavored cookies, square with stamped designs.  They were so hard that you could chip a tooth if you bit into one, but they excellent for dunking.

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Then there was the lady who baked the gooseberry pies. Daddy was on a house call to her farm when she had been picking gooseberries. Daddy made the remark that he hadn’t eaten a wild gooseberry pie since he was a boy. The next day, she proudly brought him a huge gooseberry pie—enough for a big family. When Daddy carried it into the house from the office, he told Mommy that his mouth was watering and he would be thinking about that pie until office hours were over and we could have dinner. 

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That night for desert, we dug in. It was so sour it could make you cry! Mommy trashed it. When the lady stopped by the office to ask Daddy how he liked his pie, he had no choice, but to say it was delicious, and cross his fingers behind his back. There followed, a series of five gooseberry pies, each one more awful than all the ones before it. Daddy wanted to dump them right off, but his curiosity always got the better of him, and he tasted each one to see if it was an improvement over the last one. It never was. “Hasn’t she ever heard of sugar?” he wondered aloud.

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Margaret Menchhofer was generous with sugar. She baked birthday cakes every year for me and my three cousins. These cakes were very sweet with white icing and decorated with pink frosting rosettes. She had taken it on herself to do this for Dr. Ralph and Dr. Paul’s kids—four times a year.