Jere Downs

Louisville

Home baking always stirs up memories. This is especially true for the sights and scents of holiday baking.

When I chop nuts or stuff dates this month, I will recall how my grandmother Jane Sorel baked and preserved her extensive holiday dessert array of homemade peanut brittle, sugar cookies, hermits, date nut bars and more. As each batch was elaborately decorated, she delicately wrapped the treats in wax paper before stowing them inside shoe boxes in her coat closet. When a friend or neighbor stopped by, she always had a gift on hand.

That frugal mid-century approach was echoed in 1950 Louisville, when a December Christmas baking article advised housewives to wrap home-baked treats with a snazzy collage of magazine clippings.

In the photograph accompanying the article, Kentucky favorites, such as springerles and fudge, are shown near examples of wrapped packages "that are dainty and sweet, others funny, some provocative, but all interesting," according to "Fun to Give and Receive," published in The Courier-Journal magazine Dec. 3, 1950.

Clipping newspaper or magazine headlines and pictures "will start you on your merry wrapping way," former Courier-Journal "Home Consultant" Cissy Gregg wrote. Pinking shears, with their jagged edges, make the prettiest paper cuts, she added.

The largest image in The Courier-Journal's illustration of holiday dessert gifts shows a cave woman dragging her man by the hair. Catching a man was a cultural preoccupation for young women at the time. Also in December 1950, another article in The Courier-Journal celebrated a Louisville woman who sought a bachelor's degree at Western Kentucky University but triumphantly brought home a bachelor instead. Cooking articles of the period are shot through with this kind of rhetoric. The 1950s idealized the homemaker, while women in the workplace were less desirable after World War II had ended.

My own grandmother always took a few minutes to swap her house dress for a nicer outfit and to re-apply her lipstick before my grandfather came home for dinner each night from his foreman job at Ford Motor Co. in Detroit. My grandmother kept house in a snug, brick bungalow, akin to the post-war cottage on South 45th Street in Louisville of Mrs. Edward S. Miller, a housewife who gave The Courier-Journal her recipe for springerles cookies.

Whatever their means, Louisville homemakers were counseled by The Courier-Journal's home pages that homemade holiday treats could help their husband's status at his job.

Cookies and holiday desserts make "a wonderful present for your friendly neighbor and will be just as appropriate for your husband's boss," Gregg added in the Christmas baking article. Gregg also featured housewives who baked together. For example, you'll find below a recipe for Corn-Norman Nut Rum Cake, featured at the far left of the photo. This recipe, which requires soaking raisins in rum overnight, is the result of a collaboration between two Louisville ladies of the time, a Mrs. Charles T. Corn and a Mrs. Colgan Norman.

Ann Corn tested whether her cake was baked by inserting a broom straw. While you wait for the treats to bake, you can bring your magazines to the kitchen to snip your own wrappings, Gregg counseled.

Wherever possible, I have selected from The Courier-Journal archives Christmas cookie recipes that are sourced to local bakers. Whether or not you recognize a name or treat here, please share your memories and recipes with us this holiday season.

Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669, @Jeredowns on Twitter and Jere Downs on Facebook.