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Meet Marie
My maternal grandmother, Marie, was a baker. I was very little, but I clearly remember going to the county fair one year and instead of going to the rides, we went right to the venue for the baking competition. My grandmother said, “Well, I’ll be,” at the sight of her name written on a huge piece of butcher paper tacked to the wall.
She’d won the prize for All-Around Best, well, Everything. She won two more times in subsequent years. This happened later in her life when baking was a serious hobby. She’d learned to bake through pure necessity in rural Oregon and California. She had no car, the stores were always a long way off, and you made meals out of what you had. She once told me that in WWII during rationing, with only two kids, she always had shoe coupons to spare, and she would trade them for sugar coupons. That meant she could put up her fruit crop for winter – peaches and apricots if I remember correctly. Even if the main meal was lean there were treats. Read More
