By Request

two recipes, and not by request, thoughts on handwriting

Well it was unanimous. You wanted the recipe for Hello Dolly’s. 

There are many names for these squares: Seven Layer Squares. Dream Bars. Coconut Dream Bars. The makers of Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk call them Seven Layer Magic Cookie Bars. Like all recipes made with sweetened condensed milk, they have a retro vibe. I like to imagine the name came about when someone walked into a party in 1969, stepped down into a carpeted, dropped living room, cruised over to the table where people were gathered, picked up a cocktail napkin, popped a square into their mouth and declared, “Well, Hello, Dolly!” Hello, Dolly came out on film that year. Barbara Streisand played Dolly. Louis Armstrong was singing, “Hello, Dolly, it’s so nice to have you back where you belong.”

This recipe deserves to be filed into a recipe box, re-written into a book, glued into a binder or saved in a recipe app. My version is a photo on my phone, taken from a page of my friend Lynne’s mother’s recipe book. Her name was Barbara, and everything she baked was delicious. Barb typed out her recipe on paper, cut it (curved at the top like a pattern piece for a sewing project), and glued it into her lined recipe book. Glued below, on a separate piece of paper, are these cursive words: Line pan with parchment paper.

Next week I have a podcast episode coming out exploring handwriting, and how we record recipes. It led to these thoughts that begin five years ago, in my kitchen, when Rex is eight.

Rex is sitting at the kitchen island after dinner, bent over his workbook. His blond curls have darkened, like mine did when I was eight. His legs are crossed, as they usually are, and his sports socks are pulled up over the bottom of his track pants. It was his own look, like a golfer from the 1920’s in knickerbockers. He later admitted he wore his socks this way to conceal the fact that his trousers were too short. He likes them short and doesn’t want them to go into the giveaway pile. Rex has a point of view, a style. He is the kind of kid who likes to get his homework done quickly so he can get on with his evening. 

I watch from the sink, wincing as he traces a pencil over the cursive alphabet with a furrowed brow. His workbook is called Cursive Without Tears. He is crying now. Cursive is meant to be helpful for kids with dyslexia, the unbroken flow of pencil on paper locks in the spelling of a word into motor memory, and keeps the words flowing inline. But this looks tortuous, like a boy trudging upstream, sweating and slipping and spilling on the rocks. We put the book away and move on to math. 

I loved cursive writing when I was eight. It was a curly dance I was trying on at the time, one that offered a grown-up coded series of swirls that cracked open another world of understanding. Swirls that left a trail. By 1982 I couldn’t spell very well, but I could swirl. I have evidence in a letter dated March 23, 1982. It’s written on notepaper, a gift from my grandmother’s older sister Alice, with a kitten in a bonnet walking a puppy in the bottom left corner. It reads:

Dear Aunt Alice, 

It’s a greate plesure to right you a letter with my new notepad, I even just finished ritting a letter to a good friend! I allso want to thank you for the wonderfull lunch you gave us, it was icstremly good and I hope I can come agen sometime. 

Love Lindsay

I liked degree adverbs at the time, words like great, extremely, barely, entirely. Anne of Green Gables used words like these to embellish the degree of her emotions. And messages were locked into Anne’s motor memory when Mr. Phillips made her write “Ann has a very bad temper” on the blackboard, again and again, after she hit Gilbert over the head with her slate. She changes “Ann” to “Anne”. Imagine the tail of the “e” circling up in a way that can never be achieved with the letter “n.” That’s what I wanted at the time - more twirl, more emotion, more imagination, more grown-upness. 

Of course Rex struggled through this dance. He wasn’t trying to grow up. He was and is a straight up guy who has never dotted an eye with a small circle. He doesn’t embellish. His writing is printed now, staccato and childlike. It doesn’t come out often. He has an iPad. 

My mom’s sister Sandra writes in a strong, looping cursive that charges across the page. She says writing on paper is like drawing. Her words are loopy shapes that look like bold doodles with hidden messages. It’s so free. 

Sandra has a collection of letters from friends and family in her art studio, saved because the lettering, the messages and tactile textures of the paper are art forms in themselves. She has a letter from me in the pile, written on a torn piece of packing paper with a sketch of two serving spoons across the top. I must have written it during a quiet time at the ceramic shop¹ where I filled in once and while when I lived in London. 

By then my handwriting had settled into a scratchy hybrid of connected printed letters. It stiffened in high school, inspired by my friend Heather who shaved her head, wore gold clasp earrings and wrote in a vertical font with “g’s” and “p’s” and “y’s” that had tidy half moon tails. It loosened again in university when I scribbled frantically across the page, capturing whatever thoughts I could before the information slipped away. At night I worked at a medical clinic with a doctor from India who wrote notes with a pale blue fountain pen in fat, perfect cursive. She said that cursive was drilled into her in school. I thought her writing was beautiful. I can see it in that letter to Sandra, just a touch, in a capital “R” or a rolling “w.” By then I was newly married, new to owning a tiny backyard, new to noticing nature and the rhythms of the seasons, but still writing letters. 

… It’s been a busy but wonderful spring in London. I was supposed to go on a trip to Malaysia and China with a cookbook author who I’ve been working for, but alas, SARS. Instead I fell in love with our backyard and everything else to do with home. Our walls are newly painted, I’ve finally hung pictures, the shrubs and trees in the garden surprise me every week with colours and shapes. We have a little blue shed in the back - a few weeks ago a Californian Lilac bloomed with dark blue flowers and now I know why the previous owners painted the shed that colour… 

I must have been reading The Artist's Way, a gift from Sandra. I talk about morning pages and I encourage Sandra to trust the process with a weaving commission she was working on. I tell her about the fox cubs that were born under the lilac blue shed, how they wrestle on the grass every night at dusk. The gentle messaging is juxtaposed with my thin, black scratchy pen. It’s like London - beautiful and dirty, smooth and rough. I was settling in at that point, finding my feet as I criss-crossed the city most days on my bicycle, hustling freelance jobs and hauling food and props to studios. I wasn’t an embellished twirly person anymore; I don’t think that lasted long. 

I have recipes of Sandra’s tucked into my messy binders on the kitchen shelf. They’re written on scraps of thick card stock, their edges cut with pinking shears. Lemon Milk Cake is written in CAPS across the top, with a drawing of a lemon in place of a word. She’s drawn a zester on the side, with tiny yellow dots of zest flecked around it. I see it when I pull out the binder, a zap of yellow within the black and white. 

My recipes are saved these days on recipe apps. Paper versions are slid between cookbooks or shoved into my old, frail, recipe book. I also take photos of recipes from cookbooks and the images sit in my phone - pale squares of text amidst the other 13,300 photos. I forget about them. 

Do you write down recipes anymore?

Barb’s Hello Dolly’s

Preheat oven to 325F.

1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs

1/2 cup melted butter

a pinch of salt

Combine mixture and press into an 8x8 inch pan. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and leave oven at 325F.

Add, in layers:

1 cup shredded coconut

6 oz (170g / 3/4 cup) semi-sweet chocolate chips

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1 can Sweetened Condensed Milk (Barb calls for Eagle Brand)

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until top is lightly browned.

---

Some recipes I’ve memorized. This is problematic when it’s time to share the recipe. Take the chicken thighs marinated in Ginger Ale that I mentioned in my last podcast episode, for example. The recipe was given to me, a long time ago, by my friend Tara. I scratched it down, made it, shared it a few times, sort of memorized it, and now I’m questioning myself. I know the original recipe called for Tamarind Soda, but I’ve substituted ginger beer and ginger ale over the years. They all work. Soy sauce, garlic, ginger, the warmth of cumin and coriander and a touch of heat are all critical. I’ve served these chicken thighs alongside big salads for birthday parties, special gatherings, or sliced into tacos. It’s a great and clearly forgiving recipe.

I’ll write it here so we’ll all have it, forever.

Ginger Marinated Chicken Thighs

2-1/2 lbs boneless skinless chicken thighs

1 teaspoon chile powder (or something hot - I’ve used Sriracha too)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

1 inch of fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped

1/2 cup (125ml) soy sauce

12 ounces Tamarind Soda, Ginger Beer or Ginger Ale

Combine ingredients in a bowl (or a ziplock bag), add chicken thighs and refrigerate for 12-24 hours.

When ready to cook, heat grill to medium-high heat. Grill chicken thighs on both sides until cooked through.

1. Lindy, I’m sorry for writing letters while working.