The More Things Change…

Unless you are a really good friend of mine, or a relative, or maybe a relative who is also a really good friend of mine (I believe there are some of those), you probably never knew my Auntie Fanny z”l. Which is a shame. Because if you had known her, you would have loved her as much as we all loved her, There are lots of things I could tell you about my Auntie Fanny but for now, let me just say that unlike me, she was a baker. A real baker. One who knew how to put things together without reading a recipe. Or wondering what goes with what. Or batting an eyelash when one day, after mixing and putting her very famous coffee cake in the oven, she found two eggs still sitting on the counter. Nonplussed she grabbed that cake pan right out of the heat, threw in the two eggs, mixed the whole thing up again and without a flinch or a shrug put it back in to bake, knowing that whether you add the “dry to the wet” or the “wet to the dry”, or whether the eggs and the butter are room temperature or cold out of the fridge, or whether you mix things up more or less, it really doesn’t matter. Because if you are a real baker, like my Auntie Fanny was, everything just works out all of the time. And while I’ve told that story a time or two before (it’s on its way to legendary status in my books) you really had to watch my Auntie Fanny in action to understand how great a baker she really was. Lucky for me I had the chance to do just that many times. 

“Fanny Cocoa” (as we liked to call her) would often make us a hot chocolate (with marshmallows of course) as we sat at the counter in her little kitchen and watched her at her craft. And she was no one-trick pony. Coffee cake aside, there were lots of delectable treats that made their way from her oven to our little hands. But perhaps I should digress here for a moment to explain why going to Auntie Fanny’s house was such a big deal for me. This might not come as a surprise but one of the reasons I am not a baker is that no one else in my house was a baker either. Nope. In my house cookies came from a bag, bread from the bakery down the street and cakes, well apparently bakeries make those too. What magic was employed to bring any of these creations to fruition was left only to our imaginations. Just so you know, those of us who lived in our home had no complaints with our lot in life as there always seemed to be some little black and white discs (you know which ones I mean) in the pantry when we needed them. Enough said. You get the picture. It is however, why Auntie Fanny’s house was an oasis in our lives otherwise devoid of flour, salt, yeast and cocoa powder. And why, while watching Mary Berg and her “Good Stuff” the other day do what only Mary Berg does (Yes, I know. “Oh my gosh, it’s perfect deliciousness” can get a tad annoying after the hundredth time but she too is a baker), I was taken back to my Auntie Fanny’s kitchen. 

You see, Mary Berg was making biscotti. Those fancy, schmancy little cookies you shell out $3.95/each for at your fav cafe to go with your “Espresso Con Panna”, or your “Brown Sugar Oat Americano” or perhaps your “Iced Sugar Cookie Almond Milk Latte”. Now you know I love a good baking show and I’ve always enjoyed how much joy Mary B. brings to the baking table. But this time as I watched her measure, chop, mix and bake (twice no less) my mind drifted to those days I spent in my Auntie Fanny’s kitchen. I remembered watching my aunt make the most marvellous little hard, dry cookies, laced with almonds and chocolate chips, that pretty much begged to be dipped in milk or tea or that hot cocoa she managed to sneak to me before my Mother came to pick me up. And so it was that while I watched Mary bake and re-bake her biscotti I thought “Oh my! Those look just like the cookies Fanny used to make. Biscotti? Unh uh! That’s my Auntie Fanny’s mandelbrot” (also known as mandel bread in some circles). I can’t explain to you why I never thought about this sooner (although it might have something to do with not being a baker) but at that moment it finally dawned on me that mandelbrot and biscotti are, in fact, pretty much one in the same. One’s Italian, one’s Jewish but who’s counting? If you want to know more, and I’m honestly not sure that you do, you can check it out for yourself. And now here I am, all these years later putting these little almond cookies in my own oven. As usual, it took me eons longer than it took Mary but, if I do say so myself, they were very, very good. And as I dipped my mandelbrot/biscotti into my oh so regular coffee that afternoon I thought of my Auntie Fanny, her little kitchen and how it really does seem that the more things change, the more they stay the same.