Dear Mrs. Smith of Rome,

I suspect you are long dead and will not receive this letter, but last weekend I found my grandmother’s book of dessert recipes. I was hoping to find some notes about the summer pudding she used to make with blueberries and bread, but there were none. Faced with a nearly empty ice box and a need to produce a comestible contribution for our monthly book club tonight, I leafed through the handwritten or typewritten or clipped-and-glued pages of sweets. Your “Dropped Molasses Cookies” were faintly dubious in title, but I had nearly all the  ingredients in the pantry.

I did not have “cold lard or drippings,” but your recommendation of them has caused me to reconsider the flavors cookies may have had in the past. As far as I am able to recollect without searching the family genealogies, my relations last resided in Rome, NY in the era of my great-grandparents. It had never occurred to me that their experience of a molasses cookie might have included “drippings.” Anyway, I am a vegetarian, so I hope butter was an acceptable substitute.

I also wasn’t sure what sort of molasses you had in mind. Would the default molasses have been blackstrap or sweetened seventy years ago (or more)? At any rate, I only had blackstrap and there wasn’t a full cup left in the bottle, so I topped it off with some Lyle’s Golden Syrup. I’m not sure if this would have been familiar to you or not, but my half-English grandmother certainly knew about it, so I felt I was still proceeding in the right spirit.

At this point I made perhaps my most controversial innovation. I didn’t have any ground cloves; in fact, I remember trying to buy them recently and their being either unavailable or absurdly expensive. So I used garam masala instead. I believe you won’t have heard of garam masala, as I don’t think Indian cookery had yet attained much popularity in the Northeast United States when you were living there. It is a blend of various peppers and spices, including cloves, and upon sniffing the bottle I was able to imagine it lending a piquant note to the cookies. In it went, although I didn’t dare add quite so much as the half teaspoon you had stipulated for the cloves.

I appreciated your instruction about the more-or-less 3 1/4 cups of flour. “Use your judgement” is positively Zimmermannesque. I think this time I may have judged on the side of a little too much flour, but I will remember this and make adjustments at next baking.

You left me entirely in the dark as to the optimal temperature and time for baking, my good woman. So I have guessed at 375 degrees and eleven minutes. I hope the cookies will come out well. I have licked the spatula and the batter certainly holds promise.

Yours sincerely,

Mary Theresa Soper’s great-granddaughter Sarah

Update: The cookies were pretty good! They’d be even better with chunks of crystallized ginger. I think molasses was probably sweetened back in the day, because these were not very sweet — I actually rolled the second batch in brown sugar before dropping them onto the cookie sheet. And ten minutes is enough baking time.

My kid isn’t even born yet and I’m afraid he or she is probably spoiled already. Plenty of babies are given lovely handknit blankets at birth, but I don’t think very many can boast of anything like this:

Thanks, Auntie Katrin!

I’m promising that this gorgeous shawl will see actual use — I’ll be that incredibly stylish mama feeding my infant in public, and I’ll just dare anybody to look down his nose at a baby getting a meal from nature’s intended source under all this lettuce-green beauty — but I’m also hoping a photographer friend will take some wonderful pictures of baby Minnow lounging upon it. Not that there’s much hope of the baby being as good looking at the shawl…

Let’s wallow in some handcrafted goodness, shall we? I need to show you some of the beautiful things my dear friends have been making for Minnow, and I thought you might like to know how the snail romper is coming along:

Since taking this photo yesterday evening, I’ve finished leg #1 and added half another leg. This project should be finished in just a few more days… dare I say by the end of the weekend? (This might depend how well fought the final World Cup matches prove to be. Paul says Germany is going to take the consolation match tomorrow and has picked Spain to win it all, in case you’re wondering. This is, at the very least, sound diplomacy on Paul’s part. After his semifinal predictions he was getting death threats from his angry countrymen and offers of asylum from the Spanish government.) Anyway, I kind of miscalculated where to place the snail, and as a result this romper is a bit longer in the body than it was meant to be and also the lower portion is slightly larger than the top portion. But I figure this might actually be a boon, since it has to fit over a cloth diaper.

Now I want to show you two quilts made by friends on the island who have watched me grow since I was not much bigger than Minnow is now.

Mary B. hand-quilted around every detail of the animal pictures on this sweet alphabet quilt. Mary made it sound like it ain’t no thang, but having practiced my hand quilting last summer, I know how much time all those tiny stitches require! In this picture you can just see how even her work is:

(Ideally, this kangaroo would be knitting, but I guess that might be confusing to small students of phonics who are only just learning their letters. At least the fabric designer didn’t try to add knitting but actually illustrate crochet, which really would have confused poor Minnow, who ought to be able to learn both of those skills by the time he or she is grown enough to be contemplating the alphabet.)

And this beauty was made by our friend Krispi. Krispi is a Really Good Quilter. See her perfect corners? Mine will never look this good.

It makes me feel all gooey inside to think about wrapping my baby in all this handmade love. And wait till I show you the handknits from my Portland posse! I’ll be taking pictures of those this weekend.