Sifting Through the Numbers

I am making red-velvet cupcakes. It’s Patti’s birthday today, and also mine. Our daughter Helen forecast that her first-born would arrive on my birthday, defying the due date, so as to be my biggest gift ever. Helen’s doctor, the previous day, the 25th, told her, “there was no chance” the birth was imminent. Two Fuddruckers cheeseburgers and a plate of jalapeños later that afternoon sent Helen into labor, and Patti arrived in the early hours of September 26th, 2013. That makes her eleven now—a prime number, as she gleefully noted. I am turned a prime number today, but a bigger one than eleven.

I intend to exploit this “prime number” factor in the coming year. For starters, I ended up with only 23 cupcakes from the batter, not 24 (I never fill them right). It’s good to have a justifying factor.

The other thing is, I hate canned frosting. I’m not fond of cakes (weird, I know) but . . . if you must have a cake, for heaven’s sakes, give us real frosting! In my childhood, frosting came from our mother’s Sunbeam mixers. If time was pressing, frosting came from boxes, the same size as cake-mixes. Either way, frosting tasted better back then. My Internet recipe promises me this butter-cream frosting will be good if I take the time to sift the confectionery sugar, and that means pulling down the gem of my kitchen: my mother’s sifter.

The sifter, white metal with red trim, could predate the Second World War although more likely it’s from the late 40s or early 50s. (Perhaps there is an app to tell me if I point my phone at it.) What I do know, exactly, is that my mother (who had no nostalgic attachment to things) threw this sifter out in the late 60s: she had gotten a new one. Protesting loudly, I retrieved it from the trash. I still hear her voice saying, “What do you want that old thing for?”

Oh, Mama if you thought it was old then, you should see it now! After 50-plus more years of service, it still works, despite being a bit rusty. Yes, I have a newer one which works well. But only this sifter makes me happy.

By using this sifter, I crank back in time to our familial kitchen in Roanoke, Virginia. My grandfather built that house in 1950, with a small kitchen and a truly miniscule breakfast nook (his miscalculation), about which my mother never stopped complaining. As an adult, I understand why she was dismayed. But as a child, I wondered why she brought it up almost daily.

Cakes in my family got baked only for birthdays and holidays. This sifter, therefore, had most of its use during December, when my mother made Swedish Heirlooms, a crescent shaped, hard cookie consisting of tons of butter, shaved almonds, confectioner’s sugar, and a little sifted flour. Once baked, the cookie is submerged for days in a bath of confectioner’s sugar and reemerges as an utterly messy, delicious treasure. Everyone knew my mother’s Swedish Heirlooms. She made tons of them to give away each year, and it fell to my brother or me to grind the almonds. That was seriously hard work.

Nostalgia is a big part of my life. Sometimes it incapacitates me. Maybe that’s why I became an historian, who knows? For sure, I’ve passed my penchant for personal nostalgia down to my children and grandchildren, and that is not necessarily a good thing.

As to the sifter, it has the potential to go for another 50 years if treated right. Helen promises to treat it right, and I suspect she will. I can envision this sifter still being cranked by a grown-woman Patti when she bakes for her own family one day, and tells them where it came from. Or, maybe someone with common sense will toss it out in the dead of night, sending it on its way.

Either way, the sifter got us through the frosting process today. We mixed natural yellow and orange food coloring to approximate the right yellow to combine with “red-velvet” red. Why? To create the colors of Gryffindor, which is where Patti believes she lives these days. Happy Birthday Patti (and, I guess, Happy Birthday to me). Thank you, Helen, for the best present ever. May we forge ahead in a new year of prime adventures.