'It Was The Sweetest Of Times': Food, Family & Memories

'They were the sweetest of times. A time when food was love. And love was a dish—seasoned with the memories of those who baked or boiled, smoked, grilled or fried. Forever stamped upon our palates.'

A German chocolate cake made by “Miss Mary” reminds John W. Fountain of childhood sweet times growing up on Chicago’s West Side where food prepared by relatives helped create a lifetime of memories with family.

By John W. Fountain

The butter cookies disintegrated into sweet nothingness inside my mouth, opening the door to yesterday’s scents and savory foods that filled my childhood with ingredients that time and seasons perhaps have lost. They were the sweetest of times.

I ordered the cookies—three trays full (enough for my college students)—from a lady I know. Miss Mary, I’ll call her, unwilling to divulge the full identity of my sweet supplier for completely selfish reasons.

 The cookies—a specialty of the plump cafeteria ladies at Roswell B. Mason Elementary School on Chicago’s West Side—take me back. Back to when I was poor and seldom able to afford the 5-cent cookie to go with my free lunch.

Back to the concrete playground and basketball court, where the scent of the palm-sized morsels baking wafted in the school-day morning air. Back to K-Town and the cacophony of excited children’s voices as my cousins and I rounded the corner onto 16^th Street and Komensky Avenue on those days when we came home for lunch.

We sniffed at the air, like Mr. Newell’s hound dog “Spot,” to see if we could guess what Aunt Mary had cooked.

“Sloppy Joes!” we yelled sometimes as we dashed up the stairs and to Aunt Mary’s kitchen table but not before washing our hands and not a until the dozen or more of us had said grace in unison. 

“Amen...” We lifted the homemade Joes, which oozed with barbecue juiciness. We gulped them down as if they were oxygen. We rinsed mouthfuls of Sloppy Joes and fries with red Kool-Aid, licking our fingers in between.

I miss Aunt Mary’s cooking, her sugary Kool-Aid. I miss her sweet dinner rolls and German chocolate cake adorned with perfect caramel-complected coconut-filled frosting and topped with fresh pecan halves. I miss her white coconut cake that stood gloriously to the last bite. I miss Grandmother’s cornbread dressing, peach cobbler and her coconut and pineapple mold. I Miss Aunt Scopee’s 7-Up cake, and even the scent of Mama’s pineapple upside-down cake.

A family photo circa 1960’s shows John Fountains mother Gwen Clincy (second from left in blue dress) with his aunts and uncles at his grandparent’s house, where the entire family gathered on holidays.

They were the sweetest of times… Times when our poverty could be vanquished instantly by a mother’s—or father’s—abilities to transform the simplest or most meager ingredients into culinary delights that seemed to touch the soul.

It was a time when troubles or tears could be soothed by good home cooking birthed and perfected over seasons past with family recipes in loving hands that nourished, comforted and sustained generations.

A time when food was love. And love was a dish—eternally seasoned with the memories of those who baked or boiled, smoked or grilled or fried. Forever stamped upon our palates. Upon our souls and minds, even as time and life evaporate like wisps of water in a saucepan.

Memories: Like Mama’s garlic fried chicken, its scent flowing like a river through our apartment and down the stairs, spilling out into the street and teasing the whole block. Or my stepfather’s tantalizing barbecue—saturated in smoke and sanctified by fire baptism upon a garbage barrel-converted grill.

Like Grandmother’s peach cobbler, which I watched her knead and roll, sprinkling in flour, until it was perfect. Then Grandmother cut some of the dough into strips and carefully laid them crisscross style upon her cinnamon sauce, filled with fresh peaches on a doughy bed.

Grandmother was surgeon-like in layering her cobbler and as watchful as a lioness over her cubs while it baked. She was the same about her Thanksgiving dressing, stirring a mix of cornbread, sage, chicken broth and seasonings. A spoonful, even before it was cooked, was a treat for me as a little boy.

My family’s cooking was never a laborious endeavor from what I could see. Even as Mama sometimes managed a meager dinner of fried potato patties seasoned with salt and pepper and laden with chopped onions. The scent of frying potatoes and onions still takes me back.

Just like Miss Mary’s homemade butter cookies. And my Aunt Mary’s German chocolate cake.

Sweet butter cookies like these Fountain ordered for his class of university students were favorites at Roswell B. Mason School, which Fountain attended and where he said he was seldom able to afford a cookie that costed 5 cents.

Memories of Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Pineapple upside-down cake was Mama’s specialty. I can still smell the brown sugar wafting through our apartment on Thanksgiving. I see Mama, wearing that contented, half-smile of hers, moving gracefully, with a sense of purpose and pride, laying the finishing touches on dinner.

I hated pineapple upside down cake. But I loved Mama. So I sometimes tried to eat her syrupy cake, which she always mixed with love, even if it was not tantalizing to my taste buds.

Happy times.

My memories are mixed with the cold of those Thanksgivings when the wind sometimes whirred outside our window while the warm scents of chicken and dressing and all the trimmings made me salivate with anticipation. Like a gust mixing a pile of leaves, memories today stir in my mind.

And I remember. Those times when Mama was happy and beaming—more fully present. I remember.

Those Thanksgivings and Christmases—when our poverty and hardship seemed to take a holiday—and Mama somehow always found a way to make the sun shine, no matter how dark our storm.

Despite our poverty, Mama would be filled with a lightness that made her dance, and smile and sometimes sing and sashay through our apartment like a schoolgirl. Seeing Mama happy made my heart glad.

And we ate and ate then ate some more. And Mama and my stepfather played Bid Whist, slapping cards into a night filled with laughter and drinking a few cold ones. We kids played games or sat on the sofa, watching the sometimes fuzzy, black-and-white TV flicker way past midnight until we fell asleep. And even the mice seemed to comply by staying inside their holes.

Happier times.

Funny, back then, I thought we had it bad. That everybody else had it good—at least better. I dreamed of suburban Thanksgivings, of a big house, of no poverty and no pain. Of a life filled less with disconnection notices, more with certainty. Of a life more like the Jefferson’s than the Evans’.

I used to think money could solve our problems. But Mama would always say, “John, if money is your biggest problem, you don’t have any problems…”

I can still hear Mama. Her words pop and crackle in my mind like wood in my fireplace. Here lately, I am reminded of how the once seemingly insignificant can become the treasures we someday long for. How precious is a little thing like memories.

Memories. They escape Mama today. They are elusive. They ebb and flow sometimes, come and go, sometimes drift gently—or suddenly—far, far away.

Memories. Alzheimer’s kept stealing them and promised to eventually take Mama whom I lost in 2014. An unforgiving disease, it promises to take too many other mothers, fathers, loved ones—away from us as more than 5 million Americans today live with the disease. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death and the number of Americans with it projected to reach as high as 13.8 million by 2050—unless we find more effective prevention or treatment.

Alzheimer’s hurts. It is cruel. Debilitating. Merciless. A thief. And yet, no match for a mother’s love.  Or a son’s.

I remember this, with the scent of pineapple upside-down cake, with tears in my eyes, as I embrace memories of Mama.

John Fountain's grandparents George and Florence Hagler pose with their grandchildren circa 1970s

Memories of German Chocolate Cake

Aunt Mary’s cake was to die for. I have made it myself successfully over the years, Aunt Mary having revealed in full detail to me the secret ingredients and the process to making her homemade triple-decker German chocolate cake, which, with her sweet blessing, I shall unveil at essay’s end.

Aunt Mary, my mother’s eldest of five sisters, and a licensed practical nurse, who was at one time the babysitter for all 15 grandchildren, was about 30 when she made her first GCC.

It was sometime around 1970 or '71, she told me, after she moved from the family compound on the city’s West Side to the Garfield Park area, where she lived for the next 47 years.

How she learned was simple: “I just decided I wanted to make one. Nobody ever made one that I know of. My mother never made one... I got up and got myself together,” Aunt Mary told me.

I asked if her German chocolate cake baking got better over the years, perhaps evolved.

Nope.

“My first one was very good. It just takes time,” Aunt Mary said matter of factly without a hint of boastfulness. “You can’t whip it up like you do other cakes... It’s something to put that cake together. But once you do it, it’s a snap.”

John Fountain lays out the ingredients of Aunt Mary’s triple-decker German chocolate cake in preparation to try his hand at baking it himself.

I have to admit that even with Aunt Mary’s blessing, I am still a little reluctant to share my aunt’s cake recipe by which she made our Christmases sweeter with memories sealed forever with the scents of bakery heaven.

Perhaps I am selfish, guarded of a family heirloom that might mean nothing in the hands of others but that means everything to us, to me.

I am fully aware that there is no shortage of recipes on the internet or stored in family cookbooks and memories—special recipes for German chocolate and other cakes. But there are none that I have tasted in my life better than Aunt Mary’s. Hers, in my humble estimation, is the standard bearer.

Whether it was the delight and love with which she baked, attentive to flour sifting, to teaspoons of this and teaspoons of that, and the precision, passion and intent to bake those cakes for her family the way Michelangelo painted and that made her German chocolate cake touch our palates and our souls, I cannot say.

Or perhaps it was that Aunt Mary was sanctified, among a lineage of powerful praying church women in my family who loved the Lord and helped build the church with their blood, sweat and tears on umpteen Saturdays spent in the church’s kitchen—from sunup to sundown.

Saturday after Saturday frying chicken and fish, and making macaroni, greens, spaghetti and peach cobbler and pound cake for church dinner sales at my grandparents’ True Vine Church that went toward the building fund.

I can still see Aunt Mary, Grandmother, Mama, Aunt Scope and the other women, smiling, the scents of heaven spilling from the kitchen of my grandparents’ church.

And I can still see Aunt Mary’s German chocolate cake, glistening on the dining room table. Still feel the sense of anticipation and delight. Still taste the delectableness in every bite of every slice.

And it is clear to me that her most special ingredient was, L. O. V. E.

These were the sweetest of times.

#JusticeforJelaniDay

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com

John Fountain successfully executes Aunt Mary’s recipe and produced a tantalizing triple-decker German chocolate cake shown here. (Photos: John W. Fountain)