How My Daughter Brought My Grandmother Back to Me

Reluctantly, Grandma measured flour and eggs, while my mother transcribed on index cards.

“I can’t say how much yeast to add,” Grandma insisted. “It depends on the weather.”

After Grandma died at the age of 95, we tried to duplicate her masterpieces, but none of the recipes ever worked. We’d lost her legacy of Central European pastries.

In my 20s, I inherited Grandma’s ancient muffin pan, slightly bent out of shape but full of sweet memories. Sadly, I was a one-trick baker, excelling at Toll House cookies, a skill I’d learned in college with my roommates when we were up late studying.

I had a cake phobia, worried I would overbake to the point of no return, and I could never master rolling out pie crust. And by the time I was raising a child and juggling a full-time job, who had time for elaborate baking projects? It was easier to pick up something from a local bakery.

My daughter never got to meet Grandma Regina, but I told her stories about the hours we’d shared maneuvering rolling pins, our hands dusted with flour. I taught Amy to make cookies, and from there she branched out on her own, first with simple achievements from kids’ cookbooks (zebra cake, a concoction of chocolate wafers and whipped cream) and progressing to perfectly layered cakes — never resorting to a cake mix.

Other parents worried about where their tweens were at night, but I knew Amy was at one of her friends’ houses, baking brownies, relatively safe except for minor finger burns, a hazard of the trade.

Years later, she and I tried a few times to re-create Grandma Regina’s recipes from my mother’s handwriting on fading index cards. They always bombed. Then one day when Amy was devouring baking blogs instead of writing a research paper, she found a recipe similar to Grandma’s streusel muffins. Amy tweaked it, making the muffins with pure vanilla extract and popping a mélange of berries into the mix for color and taste. It was the closest any of us have ever come to re-creating one of Grandma’s delicacies.

Initially, I mourned the loss of Grandma Regina’s recipes. But every time I watch my daughter measure flour with a digital scale — something Grandma could never have imagined — I’m reminded that the most important part of my grandmother’s baking was to show us how loved and blessed we were. In the kitchen, I’ll tell Amy stories about her great-grandmother or even show her a photograph or two. And now I am Amy’s assistant, sampling the tastes of my childhood — from a pan I saved from Grandma’s cupboard.