Childhood Peanut Butter Cookies For Saint Lucia Day

Provenance:  I do not have my mother’s cookbook with the peanut butter cookies.  I found a copy at a hallway table of things building residents were giving away.  Others told me whose it was, and I checked with her to make sure she intended to give it away.  So the previous owner of the copy I have was a lady who had lived at the building.  During a Black History Month project an African-American  librarian told me African-Americans want their presence mentioned.  At four of the six buildings in Tacoma where I have lived, residents have appeared to me to be African-Americans, and among them was the lady who  gave away the cookbook.  After I acquired my copy I saw another copy at the Goodwill or at a yard sale.  A cousin has her mother’s copy of the cookbook. 

The Cookbook, from Martha Meade, is from the Sperry Flour Mill Company.  Marie Malm, who was my grandmother’s sister, worked as a baker at the Sperry Flour Mill Company for years.  They tested the flour and I suppose they tested it with different recipes.   The book had an index based on Types of Recipes and an Index based on Types of Foods. 
  

So Peanut Butter Cookies, here appearing with Cookies in the Types of Recipes Index, also appears with Peanut Butter in the Types of Foods Index.   The publication date is 1939, which was the year my grandmother’s sister died.  She worked as a baker at the Sperry Flour Mill Company for many years, and her first job was at a candy factory.   

Pandering has been a question currently on Facebook.  Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins  wrote in her essay, “On Pandering”.  “Myself, I have been writing to impress old white men. Countless decisions I’ve made about what to write and how to write it have been in acquiescence to the opinions of the white male literati.”  Each Month the Martha Meade cookbook had another beautiful piece of appropriate poetry.  The quote from Shakespeare, according to the internet, is from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1, Marcellus, to Horatio and Bernardo, after seeing the Ghost.  Horatio prays as light is appearing and day begins. 

The Martha Meade Cookbook had a Menu for a Day on each page, and for the third week of December I find a day when all the recipes appear to be vegetarian.  I have been a vegetarian since 1987.