How Crackers Show Affection

In a publishers' email I read of an event which included this great description: Janis Owen, the author of The Cracker Kitchen, came to Fairhope (Alabama) over the weekend and demonstrated how to make sweet potato pie at The Village Peddler, the town's kitchenware store. "Giving you something is how a Cracker shows affection," Owen told her audience. "If you were to tell my momma that you liked her iron skillet, she'd put it in the car before you left her house." This may be, too, a "relic" from our Egyptian memories, of sending our objects of value with us to the "afterlife," to appease the gods, or to use however we might need. Amazing to think on how our thoughts reflect our histories, our every cellular story.

As Janis O. writes on her blog, I frankly fear my biscuits will disappoint, and am privately relieved to be making them in the Great State of Alabama, where there is a good-natured acceptance of human frailty. If my biscuits fail to rise, I will be pitied rather than despised. Probably sell more books.