Some time back I was making a honey walnut pie, and of course I used my Metric Wonder Cup to measure out the honey. I bought the Wonder Cup at one of those parties where kitchen items are demonstrated and sold. It is a plain thing, but its brash name and elegant simplicity elevate it to a true wonder. As seen in the photo from Etsy (where it’s no longer available, but where at one time it was presented very beautifully with lace and linen), the cup has a solid yellow plastic cylinder that slides into a clear plastic measuring cup to form a moveable bottom. The idea is to push the yellow core down from the top until the proper measure shows on the upper, clear part of the cup. Then you fill the open part with something sticky (peanut butter, honey, molasses) and push the yellow sliding cylinder up. As it slides, it scrapes the sides clean and pushes every molecule of honey into your mixing bowl.
I know that in the grand scheme of things this is of little consequence. But I will take my wonders where I can get them, and lately I find myself needing them to counterbalance the unwonderful, non-delightful, far-from-enchanting issues that dominate world news. If only I could spread around some of the homey, comforting things that make life tolerable, surely the world would be a slightly better place.
Here are a few random wonders that make me cheerful:
Honey Walnut Pie
Not only is the Wonder Cup itself a wonder, the honey walnut pie that it helped me bake is fairly wonderful, too. It contains no refined sugar; it’s just honey, eggs, butter, nuts, and a little vanilla and nutmeg. Here is the recipe, which I found back in 2012 on a pretty blog called Romancing the Bee.
What makes this pie a wonder is the Miracle of the Eggs that takes place during the making of it. Once you bring the honey to a boil, you pour in the beaten eggs. This immediately causes a reaction similar to combining baking soda and vinegar (though not as violent). But the eggs don’t scramble, which to me qualifies as miraculous. A couple of times some white strands of egg remain ropy and won’t go away. When that happened I took care to strain them out before adding the other ingredients. I lost enough of the filling that my pie ended up a bit shallow.
Still, the pie was popular in my family, so I shared the recipe with a friend who wanted less sugar in her diet, too. She told me afterward that she really enjoyed it. Only then did I confess. “Sometimes I get white strands of egg that won’t incorporate into the honey,” I told her. “Did you have that problem?”
“Yeah,” she said, quite matter-of-factly, “I had a couple of ghosts.”
Now that I think of the white streaks as ghosts, I’m no longer haunted by them.
Family Recipes
My friend Kathy recently sent me a photo of an old recipe for chocolate cake that was her mother’s. We were laughing (via e-mail) about the fact that so many of the old recipes that get handed down don’t have anything like complete instructions. This one was really just a list of ingredients, and the rest she had to muddle through and figure out. She told me that her grandmother used to make a topping for angel food cake, and the recipe called for a “big tub of whipped topping” and a “39-cent Hershey bar with almonds.”
I love this description from another friend, Frieda, who wrote me about her grandmother’s miraculous biscuits: “…the best biscuits in the whole world. She used no recipe and never ever used a measuring spoon or cup. She knew just the right height for flour piles, just the right size for lard globs, and just the right number of buttermilk glugs; voila— perfect biscuits every time.”
I guess we’re all muddling through, most of the time, with only a dim idea of what we should be doing, and in what order, and what size pan we need.
The wonder is that things often do come out perfectly fine in the end. So find an old family recipe and see if you can work through its mysteries.
Eastern North Carolina Barbecue
I had two servings of Hursey’s barbecue this week—always a good thing. About the only barbecue that compares to it is Eddie’s. Eddie has in the past made barbecue as a fundraiser for my parents’ church, and his was so delicious that I begged a copy of the sauce recipe from him.
“When are you going to make another batch?” I asked him, since I would rather eat his barbecue than go to the trouble of making my own.
“Never,” he vowed. He then described how, after building a roaring fire in a 250-gallon drum, the flames leaped 20 feet into the air, and could be seen by cars as they turned off of Highway 49 some miles away. The heat caused the drum to turn cherry red, and the rebar Eddie had positioned inside to hold up the wood disintegrated. He also blistered his own face.
As my father would say, “Anything worthwhile is hard.”
Grady Comes Home
Don’t think that every wonder is food-related (though many certainly are). Last winter we lost a dear friend and co-worker, Frances. Her cat, Grady, was an outside cat and it took a little while for Frances’ daughters to find him a good local home. Or really any home at all. Ultimately, Jeanne and Bill accepted Grady into their household, already stocked with two daughters, a dog, and a house cat. When I asked how Grady was settling in, Jeanne told me that he spent a lot of time being nervous, running into their basement when startled. He also crept underneath the house in general, and because he has a large, bushy tail he often emerged with things stuck in it, like moths and cobwebs and dust bunnies.
“Do you know what’s funny?” Jeanne said. “Bill’s grandfather’s name was Grady. Our house once belonged to him.”
Ice Formations in the Bird Bath
In 2016, we had a small wonder crop up overnight in our bird bath.
As I wrote at the time:
One Sunday morning this winter I glanced outside and saw a bright flash in the birdbath, like a bit of mirror reflecting the first fragments of sunlight, even while the rest of the landscape lay steeped in gloom. I stood at the back door in my pajamas, trying to figure out what the gleam meant. I looked at it through our binoculars, then Ernesto looked.
“It’s ice,” he said.
“It isn’t,” I replied.
It was. I read about these formations (ours was what some people call an “ice vase”), which are similar and somewhat related to the crystals of ice that sometimes form in the soil. Evidently they require a certain freeze-thaw cycle and specific temperature fluctuations and soft water.
Imagine my delight when, this winter, our bird bath came through a second time, and an ice candle appeared in it one morning. I could hardly believe our great good luck. Unlike the ice vase, the ice candle was solid, but it was wonderful even so and from certain angles resembled a penguin.
Brenda and Frieda
Good neighbors are the 7th wonder of my collection, and possibly the 7th wonder of the world in general. Brenda lives a quarter-mile up Redbud Lane from us, and I’ve spoken of her before, noting her nearly magical tendency to stop by the house and leave something I needed (or didn’t know I wanted) each time. Persimmon pulp, black-eyed Susans of unusual size and beauty, fried apple pies—Brenda is an inexhaustible fountain of wonders. She gave us a rose bush not long after we moved in, and it is thriving. This year she appears to have taken our front yard under her wing entirely. She has lavished us with another rose bush, two large hostas, one of her black-eyed Susans, a lavender bush, six or either blackberry plants that are just beginning to produce, and various day lilies. Twice she has come over and just planted things while we were at work, including a mystery flower that she placed in the large and sterile pot beside the garage (the squirrels kept removing my plantings from that pot and replacing them with hickory nuts). Brenda doesn’t remember the name of that one, but says it will have a purple flower. I wouldn’t be surprised if it bloomed extravagantly, opening to reveal a tiny image of Brenda’s face in the center.
Frieda is exactly like Brenda, only she lives farther away and conducts some of her magic more remotely. Knowing that Ernesto and I are without a kitchen as it undergoes a major renovation, she has been tireless in the provision of delicious things to keep us fed: poppy seed chicken casserole, squash casserole, and an aptly named Paradise Salad. Since her husband visits my parents’ house once a week for a church singing group practice, she often sends things to me via Don. I’ll get an e-mail letting me know to expect it, and all I have to do is pass by my parents’ house on my way home from work. (Don’t ask me how I got to be so richly blessed. It’s obviously not deserved, unless the level of my gratitude counts as a virtue. Maybe it does.) Frieda also shared with me this week a copy of a book called Friends at Holly Spring, about the early Quakers in North Carolina and specifically in Randolph County. It includes this tidbit of information about the early Quaker settlers: “For a hundred years and more in many communities, the living room was called “the house” to distinguish it from the kitchen area….” I felt a happy shock when I read that, because my Quaker grandparents in Perquimans County always referred to the living room as “the house.” Probably Grandma just wanted to get us all out of her kitchen when we sat too long around the table after a big meal. “Come on in the house,” she’d say, and we’d walk the six or eight steps from the table to the living room. But what perfect delight to have that memory awakened so unexpectedly.
Homework
I know you must have at least seven things of your own that qualify as wonders. Do this for me: Write them down, and see if you don’t feel miraculously uplifted. Then, while you’re still feeling uplifted, think of something special that you can share with someone else. It will help make the world a more wonderful place.
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