Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Memoir) (2010) Read Online Free PDF Page A

folksinger who released an album with the winning title Sing Alleluia! The Isaacs lived four houses down from us-Mennonites tend to live in clumps-and we were on intimate terms with the lyrics of Sing Alleluia! Our parents had naturally forbidden us to listen to the radio or to anything that smelled secular, such as rock and roll, but Connie Isaac's Sing Alleluia! passed muster. There was one song that we sang relentlessly. It told the story of a Mennonite farm child, Little Anna Barkman, who couldn't come out and play because she was learning proper Mennonite work habits, counting over grains of red turkey wheat. Connie Isaac had invited her daughter Christie, Jamie's older sister, to sing the role of Little Anna Barkman on the album. In a voice high and clear as an alpine tinkle, young Christie tunefully lisped the chorus.
    Red color,
    good shape,
    heavyweight,
    one by one!
    Each grain,
    my tiny friend!
    When two jars are full
    my work is done!
    Well, I'm here to tell you that in the Janzen household we could not get enough of Christie Isaac singing about her tiny friends, especially after Connie Isaac made her first payment to me for babysitting services rendered.
    Connie Isaac paid me in fresh brown potatoes .
    I think we can all agree that the lives of most twelve-year-olds improve significantly with an incoming flow of brown potatoes. You may not be able to buy that bootleg lip gloss your heart yearns for, but you can prepare tasty potato dishes for the whole family. And cooking is one thing a Mennonite girl knows how to do.
    I have been happily and busily cooking since age five, when I served up my first kettle of Borscht, made with boiled lettuce instead of cabbage. (Say what you will, but it is easy to get confused in the face of such look-alike vegetables.) The women in our family are the kinds of cooks whom you can't kerfuffle. You need a dinner for ten an hour from now? No problem. We'll rustle up homemade bread, noodles, gravy, sausage, whatever. Mennonite food has its delicious moments-more on that later-but our true gift lies in the ease with which we cook. Some cooks struggle with timing, with menu planning, with missing ingredients. Not us. Our seven side dishes always come up at exactly the same time, and if we have run out of something, which we rarely do, we have improvised a delicious substitution. We're idiot savants when it comes to food preparation. You've heard of those developmentally delayed folks who can shout out what day of the week it was on May 16, 1804? That's us, only we're shouting, "Dinner's ready!"
    So I wasn't surprised when Mom stuck her head unceremoniously into the guest bedroom. As I needed a desk tall enough for me to wedge my legs under, I was working at one I had improvised from a narrow side table and two drawers propped under the legs. "Will you make some soup?" asked my mother brightly.
    "Right now?"
    "Whenever you get a chance. We've decided to celebrate Christmas Eve early this year, since we're leaving on Christmas morning for Hannah's. We're going to open presents at Aaron and Deena's. Caleb had the idea of us all bringing a different kind of soup, so we'll have that and Zwiebach."
    I nodded. Soup, okay. It was a good idea, actually. Zwiebach are double-decker buns, tasty and soft. You get a small but select thrill when you pull them apart, as with Oreos. Zwiebach, however, are not filled with anything. You slather them with unsalted butter and homemade rhubarb jam for Vaspa, the Sunday evening meal. Or you serve them with everyday Mennonite soups. The chief pleasure of eating Zwiebach is that the top part of the bun, about the size of a golf ball, sits there like a tempting knob. It says, Oh, you know you wanna! It's very tactile.
    I have my grandmother's recipe for Zwiebach. I mean I have the actual fifty-year-old piece of paper, written on the back of a Kalendarblatt , a leaf from a calendar. As far as I know, this is the one time my mother's mother-whom I call Oma-ever