Baking

“Cream the butter and sugar until pale,” it says in her cursive writing. “Soak the fruit in a cup of sherry.” This little notebook must be nearly a century old. It’s penned in pounds and ounces and smudged with the syrupy stains of hundreds of cakes.

I don’t remember the lady who owned it, my great-grandmother, who died when I was two. But her name, Rachel, is threaded like a tacking stitch through our family, and her recipes for rock cakes and neenish tarts are still filling lunch boxes five generations later.

Like my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, I bake. A lot. Cakes, slices, more scones than seems appropriate for a woman two decades short of 60. I bake when I’m stressed and when I’m happy. Mostly, I do it when I want to make other people happy.

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