The kitchen door of the house where I grew up, in the countryside north of Atlanta, was, when I was very little, a Dutch door, with a top half that opened to let hausfraus lean out and gossip while keeping children in and dogs and chickens out. When my parents added on to the house after the birth of their third child, they moved that door to the basement, where it opens onto the driveway. Before that, though, it opened to the back yard. Around the corner of that door, stone steps led into the old basement dug into the hard, rough, earth walls of Georgia red clay where the house met the slope of the hill. The earthiness of those walls gave that part of the basement an eerie, cave-like feeling that half fascinated and half frightened me as a child. Today my father keeps his bottles of homemade wine on shelves built into the hard, dry, clay bank of the basement, his cave de vin. But the winemaking was a long time away when I was three or four, and what I remember about the basement—my earliest memory—was not of making wine but of making ice cream.
I remember my tiny hand in my father's big one as he helped me down the outside steps. I remember the dank smell of the basement and the cold concrete floor, how good it felt to be in such a cool place, away from the sultry Georgia heat. Most of all, I remember squatting beside a small wooden tub, watching with great excitement as my father turned a churn at the top of the tub. It was making a nice crunching sound. My father let me take a turn with the handle before it got too hard to push.
We were making ice cream. That's the first thing I life that I can remember.
My son, Ela, has told me that his first memory is of running with a horse in a field, that free-as-the-wind feeling, a sort of wildness very different from the inwardness of the dark basement. But he, too, has memories of making ice cream by hand. Elsewhere in the country, people who still made ice cream at home had diluted the memory potential by using electric ice-cram makers, but here on the mountain we still did many things the old-fashioned way. Sometimes it made for better memories.
One August day my land-partner, Lyn, came home from town with a hand-churned ice-cream maker.
The next day, Ela and I and Lyn's daughter, Mahara, went off with buckets, sun hats, and long-sleeved shirts to pick blackberries. We picked and picked, trying not to eat so we could fill our buckets faster and save our appetites for what was coming. When our buckets were full, we returned to my house, where Ela and Mahara washed the berries and picked out the stems while I made a batter of flour, milk, and honey and melted a stick of butter in a pan in the oven. Then we poured the batter over the melted butter and the tumbling black berries onto the batter, and I stuck the cobbler in the oven. Soon hot-berry smells floated through the room. As soon as the cobbler was done, I carried it in thick hot-pads through the woods to Lyn's house with two excited children hopping alongside. While the blackberry cobbler sat steaming on Lyn's kitchen counter, the four of us took turns churning the handle of the ice-cream maker until the cream thickened into ice cream. I cut the cobbler into four dark red, thick-juicy pieces. Lyn scooped generous gobs of vanilla ice cream on top of each piece, and we ate what we had made.
Though I don't remember anything more about the ice cream I helped churn when I was four years old, I still remember that sweet-tart cobbler made from blackberries only two hours from the vine, and the ice cream as creamy rich as only hand churning can produce, just melting onto the warm cobbler, and two little children of the mountains thinking they were in heaven.
Next week: "Reverting to the Ways of Our Ancestors"
Recipes from this post: Blackberry cobbler
serves 6-8
Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk
4 cups blackberries
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 400º. Let the butter melt in the oven in a 9"x13"x2" pan while the oven is heating.
To make
Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and milk. Pour the batter over the melted butter, and the berries over the batter. Bake at 400º for 30 minutes or until the batter has formed a golden-brown crust where it has bubbled around the berries. Serve with ice cream.
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