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Margaret Chambers Matthews known as “Big Ma,” was my great-grandmother. I spent the first four years of my life in the kitchen of her little A-framed farmhouse at the tip of Candles’ Mountain in Virginia. As a famers’ daughter and a farmers’ wife, she took her time and made everything from scratch. If I close my eyes, even now, years and miles away, I can still smell her spicy gingerbread cookies fresh from the oven. I can still taste the butter crust wrapped around the tart, sweet Lemon Chess Pie that made my eyes water and my mouth smile.
Her Sweet Potato Pound Cake which she “dressed up” with a Brown Sugar Glaze and the Sweet Potato Pie were famous in the community. She claimed to have met my great-grandfather, George Matthews, at a county bake sale where she won first prize. She used to say that “cookies tickle the belly, but pie soothes the soul.” I’ve always baked and shared many of her desserts and a few of my own. Through the years, I’ve changed or added a spice or two, but the basic recipes were passed down from Big Ma, and she got them from her mother, and so it goes. I went to Peter Kumps’ French Cooking School only to find that Big Ma cooked and baked in the same way, always fresh, always natural, without preservatives of any kind, because in her kitchen it never lasted long. I started my specialty baking business in August 2010, selling single serve classic Southern desserts to friends and personal care salons throughout Harlem. At first there was just Big Ma’s Sweet Potato Pie, then Sweet Potato Pound Cake, then my Lemon/ Lime Cheesecake using Big Ma’s gingerbread recipe for the base. I added cookies, only my favorites and then the quick, moist breads: Banana Walnut, Chocolate Zucchini, and Carrot Cake using agave nectar for a sweetener. I’m still spreading my wings, bringing you the best Southern desserts I can…because we’re all just one Sweet Potato Pie from home. I always loved hearing her say, “Cookies tickle the belly, but Pie soothes the soul” |
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THE STOVE in her farmhouse was eons old.
It had been her mothers’ and no one can remember beyond that. Her stove, a cast iron York, that burned coal and wood, warmed us in the winter, sometimes tormenting us in the summer, had been in the family forever.
It was her friend. She had teased and coddled it into submission. Nothing was ever burned or dried. With a steady hand and watchful eye, it did her bidding. Singing with smells and sizzling with bacon, the fat used for flavoring everything from cornbread to mustard greens, “the kitchen stove is where the magic happens” she once told me with a twinkle in her eye. I was too young to understand, too bored to listen, but it was her eyes that I remember. If Big Ma had a lover, it was her stove. She would leave great-granddaddy George in a warm bed on cold winter mornings to stoke the coals, add some wood and make coffee, fresh biscuits, fried green apples, eggs and bacon. The smells woke him, though being a farmer, the rooster would have crowed. At lunch, the big meal, there were pork chops smothered in gravy, boiled or mashed potatoes and collard greens flavored in bacon grease, fresh cornbread and country butter. Dinner was usually lighter, pinto bean soup flavored with bacon poured steaming from a cast iron pot and the rest of the mornings’ bread warmed in the oven, a cup of hot hard cider laced with whiskey. I remember her gleaming black stove and her strong, nut brown hands making me cornmeal pancakes with homemade blueberry syrup, sausage and a small cup of coffee with too much milk. There were lunches of ham sandwiches on homemade white bread, so thick and meaty you could share and not feel slighted. Dinners of fried catfish and red skinned potato salad and a peach cobbler, so deep and fat it spilled over the pan. It all came from that stove and her hands, stirring and kneading and pounding, feeding us, keeping us warm and happy. One day, a few years before she died, we were reminiscing about her life and dreaming of what was to be mine, I asked her “how”, all she said was “love”. “If you share what you have, you always have enough” |
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