|
Ho Cakes
and Heritage
By Steve Orton
She can only
be described as a character. We called her Aunt Luella even though
technically she was not a blood relative. It is just that in the
small Mormon community where I grew up, with its heritage of polygamy,
everyone was related more or less somewhere on the genealogical
tree. Moreover, the adult women of the town adopted the role of
“defacto aunts” as they watched over each other’s
children, monitoring their behavior regardless of bloodlines.
Aunt Luella was only
a couple of generations removed from the pioneers that settled the
community and from our vantage point we may have regarded her as
old fashioned. She wore no makeup, except for a pinch of rouge on
her cheeks, and she wore her graying hair in long braids coiled
on top of her head.
I thought she was wondrous.
Her kind, sweet face could light up a room. She was a pillar of
the ward. She always sat on the same bench in Sacrament meeting
and always bore her testimony first. It was a pattern that had developed
over the years. Out of respect and courtesy no one bore their testimony
before she did. Her testimonies were mini-sermons, and looking back
on it, I think she spoke less to the adults than she did to us youth
who occupied the rear benches and only half listened, the other
half of our attention being devoted to more important things like
who took whom to the Saturday night dance.
She and her husband,
a kindly farmer with rough hands and sunburned checks who was an
influential bishop in my youth, lived in a house made of adobe brick.
Though made of ancient materials, it was a grand structure after
the Victorian style with a large, round parlor on one corner, a
front porch trimmed in fretwork, and a large country kitchen. The
house sat on an in-town lot that occupied a quarter of a block and
hosted a barn, pens for farm animals, and a large orchard.
Her lot was our playground.
I remember summer afternoons playing cowboys and Indians in the
barn or cops and robbers among the trees in the orchard. It was
then we heard the clarion call from her back porch, “ho cakes.”
My playmates and I would tumble out of barn or tree to heed the
call. We piled into her large, warm kitchen knowing we were about
to receive a gastronomic treat. To this day I don’t know the
recipe for Aunt Luella’s ho cakes. I suspect they were nothing
more than fried bread dough, a byproduct of her almost daily bread
making routine. She pounded out the dough with her hands, each cake
round and flat. But they puffed up as they sizzled in the butter
in the bottom of a cast iron skillet and were served golden brown
and hot. A dollop of homemade butter and a slather of honey completed
the dish.
We all dug in eagerly
oblivious to the butter and honey dripping off our chins and the
fact that in a few hours we would be at our own dinner tables, our
appetites already satiated, picking at less appealing fare. Aunt
Luella was always in hot water with our mothers for spoiling our
suppers but repentance on this score was not in her soul. She had
a more lofty purpose that outweighed concern about our stomachs
or our mothers’ wrath.
After the ho
cakes, she would lead us into what might be considered her study,
a large room filled from top to bottom with books, magazines, Improvement
Eras, Church News, and various Church curricula. Here was accumulated
a lifetime of Sunday School, Primary and Relief Society teaching
materials. There were diagrams of the Plan of Salvation with circles
for the degrees of glory and arrows for who went where. There were
flannel board cutouts of all the Book of Mormon and Old Testament
characters. We enjoyed sitting at her feet as she rehearsed these
gospel stories. But what I remember most was a “lesson”
she taught one day on what it meant to be a “peculiar people.”
At that young age I was
only vaguely aware of what existed outside the mountain valley I
called home. But she laid out the whole story of the Mormon pioneers
and their flight across the plains. We were brought to these valleys,
she said, as a place of refuge. We were a peculiar people, using
the word as a synonym for “special” or “favored.”
In fact we were no other than the seed of Abraham of old. I was
riveted by this realization of my place in the long stream of history.
Aunt Luella was also
widely regarded as the town historian, and she had in her study
the pictures, biographies and genealogies of the Mormon pioneer
founders of the town, my ancestors among them. They had built this
place of refugee with their bare hands and had nurtured and sustained
it through all their generations down to mine. I slowly began to
see a grander vision for my life. I was part of a chain of noble
people who had done a great thing--something of consequence that
had meaning for the past, present, and future. I resolved then and
there that I would not be the weakest link. As I leafed through
the old photographs with their faces starring out at me I felt indebted
to them. I felt I owed them. They had lived hardscrabble lives making
the desert blossom as a rose and here I lived in comfort enjoying
the fruits of their labors. Moreover, they had stayed true to the
faith--as must I.
It was a defining moment
for me, one that influences me to this day. While the ho cakes may
have fed my body, Aunt Luella fed my soul--as was her intention
all along.
Click
here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.
© 2002 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
|
