I REMEMBER IT LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY. I called my dad to shoot the breeze, but he couldn’t talk. “Where are you, Dad?” I asked.
“I am under my mother’s house.”
“Dad, is that some Southern saying that I haven’t heard yet? You aren’t really under your mother’s house.”
We love a good euphemism in the South: Under your mother’s house could just as easily mean in trouble with your mother, busy running errands for your mother, full from your mother’s cooking—any of these would make more sense than my dad actually being under her house.
“I wish it was, but I’m actually under my mother’s house.” The tone in his voice let me know that he was none too happy to be under his mother’s house.
“It seems my mother made the mistake of teaching my aunt Lena how to make her caramel cake, and since no good deed goes unpunished, Aunt Lena entered her caramel cake in the county fair. In a crazy twist of fate, she took the blue ribbon, which means my mother took whatever is not blue for the first time in her life.”
“Ok, but how does that put you under the house?”
“Well, my mother didn’t take the snub lightly, so she asked the judges to explain how they came to their decision, and the judges explained that both of the icings were perfect with the ONLY difference being that Aunt Lena’s layers were more even than my mother’s. So, here I lie, in the Mississippi heat, making sure that the floor under her oven is level.”
“All because of caramel cake,” I said, laughing.
He moaned back, “All because of caramel cake.”
Every church in every town has at least one Caramel Cake Lady. You are blessed and cursed if your church has two, and heaven help you if you have three. There’s an unspoken rivalry that happens between Caramel Cake Ladies that you may only notice if you are directly related to a Caramel Cake Lady. Those on the outside live in a world of bliss where there are always two or three caramel cakes on hand at church functions so there is plenty to go around, but we insiders have had conversations like this:
“Did you get a piece of my cake?”
“You know, yours was already gone so I had to try someone else’s—I’m not sure whose it was.” (I knew exactly whose it was—it was Ms. Mary Claire’s, and hers was amazing and tasted just as good as my grandmother’s, if not better, but I wasn’t crazy, and I wanted to remain among the living.)
“You poor thing. I knew I should have brought two. You know she starts with brown sugar? Or at least that’s what I think she does—I haven’t had enough of hers to be able to tell EXACTLY what she does.”
Those few words, when pieced together, said nothing bad and everything hateful all at once. To be fair, a better granddaughter would have said, “Your cake was all gone, and I’d rather chew glass than eat anyone else’s caramel cake.”
While there were a number of Caramel Cake Ladies in our church, I do believe my grandmother was the most famous. It was probably because she was so willing to share her talent at every church function, and she hardly let a person’s birthday pass without bringing them their own special caramel cake.
One day, I got the dreaded “Grandmaw’s Not Doin’ Too Good” phone call. Tests were run, and for a moment we thought it was her gallbladder. Take it out and get our ageless granny home. We weren’t so lucky. Grandma had survived two bouts of breast cancer. She had a mastectomy with each one, which removed the cancer, and no further treatment was needed. The cancer had returned, but this time in her bones. It would have been easier for the doctors to tell us where the cancer wasn’t rather than where it was.
My dad was tasked with telling his mother the news. Her response to her son was what I think any child would need to hear in the moment they have to start saying goodbye to their mother. She said, “There are things in life we cannot change and that we must accept, and that goes for both of us.”
Now, before you think I’m letting this story get too sad and dark, let me assure you—the last two weeks of my grandmother’s life were two of the best she had known. She was moved to comfort care at the hospital and was still very much in her right mind. Friends and relatives from all over came to visit. She got to tell everyone how much she loved them, and they got to tell her the same in return.
Meg was just a baby when we made the trip from Jackson to Tupelo to visit. As soon as we arrived, Meg was surrounded by cousins who played with her while we went into Grandma’s room. The first thing out of my grandmother’s mouth when she saw the both of us was, “Where’s the boss?” and we knew she meant our Meg. We had a great last visit, and I did ask one final burning question: “What about your caramel cake? I’m not sure I remember.”
“You are fine,” she assured me. “The recipe is at my house, and you’ll get it. Remember, it took me seventeen tries to get it right.” I had always heard that. Years ago, I spent an afternoon with my grandmother, and she showed me every step involved in making her caramel icing. I even went home that night and made a batch to make sure that I remembered my teaching. I did, but I never made it again, because I didn’t have to. My grandmother was the Caramel Cake Lady!
Her funeral was exactly what you would expect after a life well lived. There were four preachers, and each mentioned being blessed by her caramel cake. The photo carousel of her family and friends featured caramel-cake photos, and, as you can imagine, there were questions.
“Can anyone make her caramel cake?”
“Who’s gonna make her cakes?”
I heard my dad say, “Ellen says she knows how.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I just need to get the recipe from her house.”
We went to her house after the funeral, and I found her red notebook that held the caramel cake recipe. To my surprise, inside the notebook was more than one recipe for caramel cake. There were many of them—written on yellow legal-pad paper, recipe cards, and scratch paper. The ONLY thing the recipes had in common was that each was different.
That Sunday at church, people came up to my mom and gave her the recipe my grandmother had given them. Each with the same explanation: “This is the recipe that Ms. Goolsby gave me for her caramel cake. I never could get it to work, but maybe you can.” My grandmother had given each person a different reason as to why their caramel might not have worked. “Cheap sugar is cheap for a reason” was my personal favorite, followed by “You’re supposed to stir the mixture until your arm wants to fall off, then give it seventeen more stirs.”
So many recipes, and I knew that none of them were right. Had we misjudged my grandmother? Had she been running around passing out the wrong recipe to keep everyone off her trail?
My grandmother wouldn’t have passed out the wrong recipe to keep her Caramel Cake Queen status intact. Would she?
That didn’t sit right. She showed me how to make her cake. Yes, I’m her granddaughter, but I have a BIG mouth! I had the potential to tell the world about her caramel cake, put it in a book even. She had also shown Aunt Lena how to do it and still loved her after she took the blue ribbon in the county fair. Then one day, we got a letter from a friend from church.
Martha,
I’m so sorry for the loss of Ms. Jennie Mae. She was always such a sweet lady and someone I loved seeing at church. I’m sure you all have her caramel cake recipe, but I want to share with you my experience making caramel cake with her. I had asked her if she would teach me how to make her caramel cake, so she invited me over to her house where she showed me every single step, and I made sure to write everything down. I have included the steps below.
After we made the cake, we had a nice visit and she insisted that I take the cake we made home to Jack and my family. I told her that her time had been present enough, but she insisted. I so enjoyed our visit and will miss her.
Love,
Bonnie
And then it all made sense. My grandmother wasn’t giving out the wrong recipe to be deceptive. Her recipe only made sense when you were at the stove making caramel icing with her. Grandmother would have happily given her recipe to anyone—her sister-in-law, her granddaughter, or a friend from church. All she needed was your time.