Every time I went home to Texas and to visit Rea there would be a cooking lesson. She insisted that at least all the extended children could navigate a kitchen. There had been lessons in making fudge from all the raw materials – even the detail of melting the chocolate with constant stirring.
We had beheaded a chicken, plucked feathers, gutted, cleaned, stuffed with lemons and baked.
In the winter we baked a roast and made cornbread from scratch.
In the summer of 1989, I awoke early one morning before 7 am to find her in the kitchen with a large tub of peaches in scalding water. She was removing the skins and today I was going to learn to make peach cobblers.
First was the process of creating the cobbler dough, rolling it out, lining the pans, and cutting the topping strips.
For an unknown reason, there were to be 9 peach cobblers made in various sizes from round to oblong to square.
While I prepared the glass baking dishes, Rea skinned and sliced the fresh peaches form her trees and added sugar and let them marinate.
The oven was lit and only fit three of the cobblers in at the same time. The cobblers were lined on the bottoms and brushed with butter and sprinkled with more sugar. The marinated peaches were added with more butter in chunks on the top.
Then the artistic work began with the lattice work of the dough strips gracefully placed over the tops of each cobbler. These were pinched at each intersection, fluted around the edges, ruffled around the entire outer rim of the cobbler, and sprinkled with more sugar and a slight glaze of cinnamon. Over the next three hours, we baked the cobblers and cared each group of three to the summer porch to cool on top of metal racks or make shift metal pots turned upside down.
It was an entire days work and we stopped for sandwiches at
lunch.
About 5:30 pm, Rea announced that she was going to freshen up and that I should do the same and then ready the car.
The next surprise was that she wanted all nine of the peach cobblers placed in a separate bag and placed on the floor of the car or in the trunk. The next project was a drive to nine different friends or business associates homes and the delivery of the cobblers by the end of the evening meals. We took these delights and surprise desserts to the head of the water district, the pastor of the People’s Church, the superintendent of the PSJA school district, the mayor of San Juan, the owner of the hardware store, the owner of the lumber company, the tax accessor/collector of the county, the foreman of the ranch, and her dressmaker.
These deliveries of the peach cobblers took us to Donna, Alamo, Edinburg, Pharr, and back to San Juan.
We did not eat any of the peach cobblers we made and only licked our fingers and the bowls.
We went to the local hamburger stand and celebrated our day of work with juicy drippy burgers and chocolate malts.
Later in the evening when Rea had settled in the parlor and had read her evening paper I asked why we did not have a cobbler for us to keep? and why she selected these nine people to receive our creations? – home grown and home made and with personal delivery.
Her response was at best terse. It was also a lesson.
“You will keep the memory of creating and sharing.”
“There are many ways to pay your taxes and to earn interest.”
The next time we cooked it was autumn and we made a stew and she had me deliver a large pot to the police station.
Entry – August 28, 2007
