Simple Cooked Apples and Aunt Annie

Here’s another recipe that’s really more about family. As I and my cousins and classmates have slowly become the elder generation, I’ve been sifting through, transcribing, and annotating recipes written on cards, in notebooks, on scraps of paper tucked into church-ladies’ cookbooks, on the backs of old envelopes. These are mom recipes, grandma recipes, aunt recipes, great-aunt recipes.

It’s been hard to complete this project, because I keep acquiring more of these recipes. I open up another one of their old cookbooks, and another little recipe falls out.

Then there are “recipes” that no one bothered writing down, because they were so standard, so simple, or so memorized they didn’t require it. But as I think back to how we used to eat, and compare it to how we eat today, I find I want to include these dishes.

This post is more about a person than it is about a recipe, and it’s only marginally a recipe, anyway.

This time, we’re featuring Aunt Annie—my great aunt Anna (Eggert) Wilmesherr (1904–1981), who married Emil Wilmesherr (1899–1990) in 1922. Emil was my grandma Clara (Wilmesherr) Renner’s younger brother.

Emil and Annie lived in Washington, Missouri, where his and Clara’s parents, William August and Pauline (Wehmeyer) Wilmesherr, had moved their young family from Kansas in about 1901.

Grandma Renner, though she didn’t have a car and couldn’t drive, still got to see her kin in Washington pretty often, with it only about an hour away on Highway 50. Emil and Annie had nice cars.

Fun fact: Aunt Annie’s sister Ida Eggert (1902–1956) married Clara and Emil’s older brother, Andrew Wilmesherr (1899–1990); they lived in New Haven. Two sisters married two brothers!

With Franklin County a center of the extended Wilmesherr-Wehmeyer-Brinkmeyer-Busekrus family, Emil and Annie often hosted the annual summertime family reunions. Sometimes it was at their house, but later it was held in the basement of the Leslie [now-Zion-no-longer-United] Methodist Church. (That congregation must have split from the mainstream denomination in 2023, but whatever.)

Uncle Emil often made homemade ice cream for the reunions, and when he got too old to make it, he ensured there was plenty of vanilla ice cream from the supermarket (or dairy).

I can picture him, sitting next to the big cylindrical tub of ice cream, professional-quality ice cream scoop in hand, dipping out perfect spheres of ice cream into everyone’s bowls. Between servings, he’d plunge the scoop into a container of hot water, to make the scooping easier. You only had to hold out your bowl to him, and he would fill it, or refill it, smiling, his eyes twinkling. So, so, good.

These reunions were potlucks, of course, so before the ice cream was served, we enjoyed a selection of all kinds of hot dishes, cold dishes, fried chicken, sliced ripe tomatoes, cold cuts and sandwich fixings, Jell-O salads, pies, cookies, and cakes.

While the adults visited, trying to figure out how they were related, and how many cousin-times removed they were, and learning about recent marriages and babies born, we kids visited and revisited the food tables. It was always really hot.

When the family’s formal meeting started, we went outside to play, or carefully explored the church sanctuary above. Being a young pianist, I was amazed with their 1908 pipe organ.

Emil and Annie had fruit trees in their yard, so they often provided bowls, or pies, of fresh peaches and apples.

And here is the “recipe”: one year, I remember that Aunt Annie had served a big bowl full of cooked, cold apples. They were fresh apples (probably Jonathans) from their trees, peeled, cored, and quartered, cooked until perfectly tender, sweetened with a bit of white sugar, chilled, and served in their own juices. Was there a hint of cinnamon? I can’t recall. They were tender, with only enough body to hold their shape just long enough to collapse when you closed your mouth on them.

I recall going back again and again to get more of those icy cold, delicious apples, on that hot day, in that musky church basement. These simple apples blew my mind. Yes, I was pretty young, but I was at an age where I was starting to notice and think about such things.

They weren’t apple pie, apple dumplings, applesauce, or baked apples. I asked Mom about them. “What do you call these?” She said she was pretty sure Aunt Annie had brought them. “Ask her.” So I did.

Aunt Annie kind of laughed her bubbly laugh and shook her head, with its snow-white hair, and told me, “Why, they’re just plain cooked apples, honey! How do you make them? Well, you just cook your apples, like you’re making applesauce, but you don’t mash them up!”

I must’ve expressed to her that I thought they were the best things on the whole potluck. She was flattered, but had to chuckle. She was always kind to us kids. And she had the sweetest smile.

Today I understand her bemusement, since at that point, for all I knew, applesauce was something everyone bought in a can. Only old-fashioned country people, it seemed, made homemade applesauce. But in Aunt Annie’s world, every female probably knew how to make applesauce from scratch by the age of eight. The simplest thing on earth.

I’ve been making them for myself for as long as I’ve had a kitchen. I use a steamer. I don’t turn them into applesauce—you can buy applesauce, right?

But each time I make them, I think of Aunt Annie, and her smile.

Another Kind of Air Show

Two Sundays ago, on the thirteenth, Sue and I did something unusual for us: we left the house, and not only did we leave the house, we did something that was strictly for fun! We weren’t procuring food or dry goods, or running errands, or driving anyone to an appointment. We just drove north of town, across the river, to see the weekend’s air show more closely.

We’d been hearing and seeing the planes pretty well from our yard; we’re only about three blocks from the Capitol, and thus the river, and the airfield is just north of the river. Some of the planes even flew over our house. As they do.

We didn’t want to pay or anything, and we didn’t need to see any patriotic signage or whatever. We just parked in a gravel lot between US 54 and the airstrip and looked up.

It was okay.

Sue always waves when she sees a small plane flying fairly low. It’s leftover from her childhood, flying on Island Airline’s Ford Trimotor to visit her grandma Bower on North Bass Island in Lake Erie.

When the air show seemed to be winding down, we took a brief, leisurely walk on the Katy Trail nearby.

The Katy Trail is a fun way to be out in nature, sort of. Most of the plants are what you’d call weeds. Many are nonnative. I mean, look, they’re growing along some old traintracks. And in many places, the trail goes by agricultural fields (perpetual soil disturbance), and the whole shebang is in bottomlands: moisture.

But although the vegetation is weedy, the growth is rank, and there are many nonnative and invasive plants, it is fun to see the insects that are drawn to all the jungley vegetation.

Here are a few little “friends” I saw along the trail, putting on their own brilliant air show.

First, a dolichopodid, or longlegged fly. I have no idea of the genus, much less the species. But it was so pretty, like a tiny jewel-bird, perched on a leaf. On close inspection, I could see it was dining daintily on a gnat.

I usually take a whole bunch of pictures, hoping that at least one turns out okay. In the process, I accidentally jostled the leaf, causing the fly to launch upward a few inches, but then it lit again near where it had been. It hopped a few times before it settled more comfortably. But for a few seconds, it looked like it was performing some kind of interpretive dance, its long legs hopping and landing, hopping and landing.

So that’s the first little air show.

The second was a surprise for me: I’m usually not fooled by flies that mimic wasps, but boy, this was a good one! This was a fly, but as it crept around on several big clusters of goldenrod, I thought surely it was a yellowjacket.

Now, yellowjackets are very common this time of year—they’re drawn to juicy, rotting fallen fruits, to whatever sweet things are in outdoor trash containers, and to untended, open soda cans. Be careful when you sip!

But, yeah, no! This lovely insect is a type of syrphid, or flower fly. Just like the longlegged fly, it is a true fly (family Diptera); it is no more harmful than a housefly. Bees, ants, and wasps are in a completely different family.

This species is the eastern hornet fly, Spilomyia longicornis. It’s simply fantastic, even compared to other syrphids.

The mimicry is brilliant. Look at the crisp black and yellow bands, and even the smooth surface sheen of the body. The swirly, mottled eyes disrupt their huge size that would otherwise help us see this as a true fly. Also, notice how the middle and hind pairs of legs are yellow, while the forelegs are black—at a glance, they give the impression of a wasp’s long, busy antennae, downplaying the little V of tiny antennae characteristic of flies. Finally, the fly’s two wings are two-toned, giving the impression of a wasp's four slightly overlapping wings.

For that matter, the timing is brilliant: this is the peak time for yellowjacket activity and numbers, and here are these flies, making the most of their resemblance.

As I ponder this, what really gets me is that this mimicry evolved and functions to fool animals incapable of logic. And this camouflage will certainly fool most people, whether they’ve taken any biology or not.

You’d think that black and yellow bands, and “buzz-buzz,” should be enough, but the mimicry of this insect goes above and beyond. It disrupts many of the anatomical hallmarks of a true fly: the two wings, the short antennae, the enormous eyes, as well as the body shape and color pattern. These are the kind of characters you’d learn in “Zool. 350: Invertebrate Zool.”

I actually did not see this insect fly; it was so addicted to the goldenrod’s nectar and pollen, it just crept from flowerhead to flowerhead, pigging out. But this spiffy flier was certainly a highlight of my own personal air show that day.

And yeah, this is a great time of year to look for cool insects on goldenrods. Bring your camera.

Grandma Renner's Southern Cornbread

My grandma Clara Renner’s recipe, as my mom typed into her own recipe notebook. Mom said that her Grandma made cornbread frequently.

As usual, although this post is about food, it is also about the connection: my grandma. Therefore, I’m sprinkling in some photos of her, taken by Mom in the 1950s.

A note on the photos: About fifteen years ago, Mom diligently digitized her old slides, but she didn’t clean the slides before scanning. So there are zillions of unfortunate specks and spots. Sue color-corrected some of them for me, but others still retain a pinkish red color shift. She did all she could. Sorry about that.

Better to have imperfect pictures than none at all. Sometimes soft photos have a perfection all their own, you know?

Grandma was born in Kansas and grew up in Washington, Missouri. From the time she was a teen and throughout her adult life, she lived in Jefferson City. She worked hard, raising four children and taking care of her husband and his father during the Great Depression and then World War II. Grandpa worked at the local printing company.

Like I said, Grandma worked hard. She had a garden, she raised rabbits for cash, she took in laundry and ironing for cash. She had to hide her grocery money from Grandpa. (I didn’t learn about Grandpa’s depression and drinking problems until long after he had died.)

Grandma had German heritage; her dad’s grandfather had immigrated to America in 1858, and her mom’s mother had been born in Germany, too. She grew up speaking German in the Lutheran church she attended. (If you struggled to learn the Lutheran Catechism, just imagine learning it in German!)

Unlike my other grandma, who was the daughter of German immigrants, Grandma Renner seemed much less Germanic. Culturally, she was more rural, or more Americanized. Grandma Schroeder would make split pea soup served with rye bread, and Grandma Renner would make ham and bean soup served with cornbread. At Christmas, Grandma Schroeder would make sauerbraten; Grandma Renner would make roast chicken (or turkey, though she greatly preferred chicken) . . . or a plain pot roast.

Or she would grill steaks out in the backyard, basting it with homemade BBQ sauce.

So, I find it interesting that she’d have a recipe for southern cornbread: southern. Most people would just call their cornbread “cornbread,” right?

Therefore, we need to talk about southern cornbread.

First, the sugar. Always the sugar, with those southerners. Can’t have too much of it in the iced tea, but can’t have a speck of it in their cornbread.

There’s a lot made out of the idea that “true” southerners never, ever, ever include sugar with their cornbread. But then, many southerners “admit” that they use “just a titch” of sugar.

Grandma’s recipe includes one tablespoon of sugar for four cups of corn meal and flour. That’s not very much.

I think it’s reasonable to include a small amount of sugar with cornbread in order to correct deficiencies in the sweetness of the cornmeal being used. If it’s super fresh and high quality, it’s probably sweet enough on its own. But if your cornmeal sits around on your shelf, or if it’s been in a warehouse for who knows how long, it might need a little help. In fact, what you bought at the grocery store probably does need a little help.

The overall idea, however, is that southern cornbread is not obviously sweet; it shouldn’t be like cake; it should be sweet only in the sense that corn itself is sweet. It’s a lot like adding a small amount of sugar to a tomato sauce.

Another southern thing is to make cornbread in a cast iron skillet. The old-fashioned technique is to preheat your oven, then heat your well-seasoned iron skillet on the stovetop, mix your batter, dollop some butter or lard into the skillet (which is so hot it immediately starts to sizzle), and right after that, put your batter into the skillet; it sizzles instantly. Then you transfer it into the oven to finish. This way, it develops a buttery, crisp, golden crust on the bottom, which you can make the top by inverting it upside-down onto a serving plate. Or serve out of the skillet, as you prefer.

But I’ll bet my grandma didn’t fuss with that. She wasn’t a southerner, anyway. For goodness’ sakes, her immigrant grandpa had served in the Union Army from 1861 to the end of 1864. And she was a modern midwestern homemaker. I bet she made it in a cake pan or a baking dish, in the oven.

So, what’s better, northern or southern cornbread? Southerners apparently see it in black-and-white: southern style is best, doggone it! Meanwhile, northerners usually don’t get so het up over it.

Me, I prefer to have all the colors in my coloring book. I like both the sweet kind and the unsweet kind. I like cornbread with blueberries, cheese, jalapenos, peanut butter, jam or jelly, split and toasted with butter and caraway (or poppy) seeds—you name it.

And I like corn griddlecakes with sorghum molasses!

As always, I have some comments on the recipe:

First, with its 3-to-1 ratio of cornmeal to flour, it will be dense and rather dry, not delicate and cakelike as in northern cornbread. Cracks will develop on the top, like the Dry Tortugas, or the Nevada Proving Grounds. . . . Rub some butter on the top surface.

This is perfect for crumbling into a bowl and topping with cooked beans and their juices, or with bean soup, or with thin, soupy chili.

As with most quick breads and muffins, mix the drys and wets separately, first; then combine them together.

Grandma’s recipe doesn’t give a pan size, precise temperature, or baking time. I use a 9 x 13 Pyrex baking dish, set the oven at 425 degrees, and start checking it at around 12 minutes; it’s done when it starts turning golden brown on top and a toothpick comes out clean.

• 3 cups cornmeal
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
• 3 or 4 eggs
• 2 cups sweet milk
• 1 tablespoon lard [melted, surely; or melted butter or vegetable oil]

Mix all together and bake in hot oven.