A Bite To Eat: Miss Lizzie and The Stickies

My grandmother, Miss Lizzie, set up housekeeping at the turn of the 20th century when people were still cooking on wood stoves and refrigerators consisted of the “ice box” on the back porch. Those were her kitchen appliances as she raised four children who had come along roughly two years apart, three of them very rambunctious boys (two of whom decided to mix up some homemade gunpowder one day and blew a big hole in her back yard, but I’m getting way off track, here).

By the time I came along mid-century (the product of one of the gunpowder mixologists), she was the proud owner of an electric range and a Frigidaire (or a Kelvinator - depending on which brand one had purchased) and times had changed. She now kept frozen cubes of Kool-Aid in ice trays in her freezer for the grandchildren, and made sure there was always something sweet hiding in her kitchen to share with us.

Many of you have heard stories of my Nana. I only had her for the first thirteen years of my life, but she managed to pack those years full of impressions and memories that have never left me and never will.

One of her most memorable offerings was a baked treat that we simply knew as Stickies. If more than one grandchild was on site, the mention of that word caused a stir on a level with the anticipation of Christmas morning. We never knew how she made them - just knew that Stickies were on the way and she would give us as many as we liked, no questions asked. They were delicious little sugary spicy pinwheels about the size of a Ritz cracker and we regularly ate our weight in them.

Not long before she died, she asked me if there was anything in her house that I would like to have after she was gone. Looking back, I suppose I should have known enough to ask for the Tiffany lamp, but even today, if I had it to do over, my answer would still be the same - I asked for her Hoosier Cabinet and its contents. I now understand that my early-teen sensibility was reaching out to the thing that was the essence of her - even if I didn't know it at the time.

Years later, with a young family of my own, I suddenly thought of her Stickies and decided to make a batch. Opening the door of the Hoosier, I pulled out the little shoe box that contained all of her recipes - handwritten notes, newspaper clippings, her 1913 copy of the Crisco Cookbook) and began the search for the little scrap of paper that would surely read “Stickies” at the top, only to come up empty handed.

Thus began a long journey across decades - the quest to replicate Miss Lizzie’s Stickies. I searched hundreds of cookbooks (the result of a collecting frenzy that still rages today), went online, asked my daddy, asked my cousins, asked several of my friends who are trained chefs and culinary experts, stamped my feet, screamed, cried, repented and prayed, all to no avail.

Forging ahead, I started winging it. I experimented with the pinwheel dough - was it a cookie dough? - a yeast dough? - a biscuit dough? - or none of the above? And the filling - butter? brown sugar vs white? cinnamon? more? I finally gave up and made my peace with God.

Then one day I was finishing up a homemade Chicken Pot Pie to go in the oven, trimming the extra piecrust from the edges, and the lightbulb of the century went off in my head. In a split second, I knew exactly what my grandmother had done, probably one afternoon while her boys were busy blowing up the back yard and suppertime was bearing down on her. Not only that, I realized why she had never bothered to write it down.

The answer was simplicity itself, born of frugality, practicality, necessity, ingenuity, and four children with a sweet tooth. The delicious legendary treat known as Stickies is nothing more than piecrust, spread with softened butter, sprinkled with brown sugar and cinnamon, rolled into a log, sliced into pinwheels, and baked until done. She would no more have committed this procedure to paper than she would have offered a recipe for how to boil water.

I am not ashamed to say that the rendition of “Oh Happy Day” that rang out from my kitchen when I took that first batch out of the oven would have made Mahalia Jackson proud. And I am reasonably sure that God and Miss Lizzie were looking in the back window, shaking their heads.

“Took her long enough, didn’t it?”

Photos by Beth Yarbrough.

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