by Jessica Runberg
Every time I sit down to coffee with my ninety-year-old grandma she tells me the same story, which is such a comfort.
“My mom traded my coffee ration for sugar during the war,” she begins. “I didn’t drink coffee until I married your grandpa.”
Her mother, my great-grandmother, was a cook who turned my grandma’s coffee ration into homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, and white cake with seven-minute frosting.
She did it using the ingredients she had (eggs from the backyard hen-house, strawberries from the garden) and those she did not (whole milk, butter, and marshmallows of all things). If she’d had a magic wand, she would’ve traded all the scarce sweeteners for the safe return of her three sons. My grandma was their youngest child—their only daughter.
But all she had was ingenuity, grit, a positive attitude, and a mixing spoon to see her through.
I love looking through my grandma’s cookbooks from that time, seeing all the strange substitutions in otherwise familiar recipes. Potatoes standing in for eggs in mayonnaise. Tea replacing milk in eggless sponge cakes. Mushrooms subbing for meat in gravy.
I never thought I’d relate to that in a tangible way.
Then the coronavirus hit.
We’d gone to the store in early March after the country made survive-the-apocalypse-toilet-paper runs at Costco but before Trump declared a national emergency, stocking up on—but not hoarding—staples like pasta, sauce, peanut butter, cheddar cheese, and yes, toilet paper.
A week later, I sent my husband back to the market and it was decimated. With milk, eggs, and butter in short supply, I was transported to the 1940s. I eyed our copy of The Vegan Starter Kit that we’d picked up on a whim at Seattle’s Book Larder last summer, now gathering dust on our coffee table.
“We have to organize our food,” I said, declaring a state of emergency in our kitchen, like I could Marie Kondo my way out of this.
We removed everything from the pantry, lined the shelves with contact paper that I’d bought at The Container Store over a year ago, inventoried what we had, made a list of what we needed, and then put everything back—save for a few items that had clearly overstayed their welcome. Instead of tossing the half dozen loose sugar packets I excavated, I asked my seven-year-old to empty them into the sugar jar.
I explained to my daughter that while we had plenty of food, we didn’t have enough to waste. “This is not the time for picky eating,” I said.
As we tried to navigate the new normal of staying inside, working from home, and playing school, I stress baked. A Guinness chocolate cake on St. Patrick’s Day, cornbread to accompany split pea soup, hamburger buns to house veggie sloppy joes, a Funfetti cake for afternoon tea, a lemon meringue pie that turned into a lemon tart when the meringue wouldn’t set (waste not, want not).
Our daughter ate (almost) everything we put in front of her.
I’ve never been one for fractions or numbers of any kind, but I found myself doing a bizarre new kind of math each time I slipped on my apron: If I make this, will I have enough for that?
I made a cup of coffee and called my grandma.
I asked her to tell me all about her coffee ration. “OK,” she began enthusiastically, settling into her favorite mauve armchair as she often does and telling the tale as if it were the first time.
I listened as though it was.
It wasn’t the first time she’d had to make do. As a Great Depression baby, her childhood was about making it work. Going barefoot in the summer to prolong the life of her rubber-soled shoes, saving ham bones so another family could make ham-bean soup, and handing down every shred of outgrown clothing.
“We never thought about what we didn’t have,” she said.
What she remembers most is being in the kitchen. “I was my mother’s helper. There’s wasn’t a meal when I wasn’t at my mother’s elbows,” she said. She did whatever needed to be done, and was responsible for setting the table and picking fresh flowers. “But I was never allowed to touch the meat!”
My grandma’s apprenticeship lasted until she was nineteen years old, when she dropped out of business school to marry my grandpa. “I got my MRS instead of my BS,” she joked.
Being a 1950s housewife suited her. My grandma had an aptitude for accounting, but her real passion was for home economics—essential life skills like cooking, sewing, and finances, that schools have replaced with academic rigor, churning out graduates that excel at calculus but can’t balance a checkbook.
My daughter, three generations later, has been at my elbows since we’ve been staying safer at home while our nation teeters on the brink of a second Great Depression. She’s no stranger to the kitchen or helping around the house. We’ve been baking together ever since she could reach the counter, but our time spent bonding over batter has increased exponentially during the last several months.
Logging into my daughter’s Google Classroom and trying to keep up with schoolwork caused us both unnecessary stress during this already stressful time, but plotting our next baking project has brought calm during a crisis.
Reading, math, and science meld together when we translate a recipe from page to pie pan. We wash our hands for twenty seconds after cracking eggs, and talk about germs and safe food handling. My daughter giggles when we add the rising agent because my husband told her that yeast is like a tiny animal that eats all the sugar and lets out a giant fart, resulting in towering loafs of bread. While I load the dishwasher, she squats in front of the oven like a contestant on the “Great British Baking Show” and watches cakes balloon before her eyes, proving that alchemy is the purest form of magic.
I fill my grandma in on the week’s baking adventures and she tells me how much I remind her of her mother.
I wonder how long my daughter’s apprenticeship will last or what she’ll tell her children or grandchildren about this strange time. I hope she remembers the way we coped—baking our way through the Coronavirus in our pajamas.
One particularly gloomy news morning, I enlisted my daughter’s help to make double-chocolate cake donuts for breakfast. I did the math. I’d still have a quarter cup of buttermilk leftover (enough to make waffles on Saturday), but not enough flour to make another loaf of bread (we were down to four slices, or two more PB&J’s worth).
“What do you think?” I asked my daughter.
“Do-nuts, do-nuts, do-nuts,” she chanted.
Sometimes you have to make the most of what you have. And sometimes the thing that sustains you is covered in sprinkles.
My grandma taught me that.
Jessica Runberg is a freelance writer living in Phoenix and a recent alumna of NYU SPS CALA’s Writing Parenthood class. She also has a marketing degree from Northern Arizona University and worked in marketing communications prior to freelancing. Her work has been published in NBC News, Raising Arizona Kids magazine, SheKnows and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaRunberg.