Marilynn and Sheila Brass
Authors of Heirloom Baking With The Brass Sisters and Heirloom Cooking With The Brass Sisters
Hosts of The Brass Sisters: Queens of Comfort Food
Marilynn
We are two roundish bespectacled women in our sixties who have a combined total of 114 years of home baking and cooking experience. We have always felt comfortable in the kitchen because we learned to bake and cook at a very early age. Our mother, Dorothy, was an inspired home cook, and the meals she produced when we lived on Sea Foam Avenue, in Winthrop, Massachusetts, more than 60 years ago are still memorable.
We believe that there is nothing more comforting than the smell of a thick vegetable soup simmering on a back burner, a glistening brisket braising in the oven, or a dish of macaroni and cheese with its golden crust of buttery crumbs. We still re-live the glories of the appetizers, vegetables, breads, main dishes, and desserts that came out of that sunny kitchen to become satisfying home-cooked meals.
Both of us have always felt comfortable in the kitchen because we first learned the basic kitchen skills from our mother, who was a talented home cook and baker. When we could barely reach the kitchen table, we were already turning scraps of dough into miniature braided challahs, and jam tarts, lovingly brushed with an egg glaze to make them shiny.
We remember the smell of sour cream coffee cakes and yeast breads baking in the idiosyncratic oven of our cast iron stove with its green enamel trim. We still cherish the good times we had with our mother when she patiently instructed us, transferring her love of family and the cooking and baking to her two young daughters. The time she invested in us has made us who we are. We love being in the kitchen; it is there we feel the most happy and creative and adventuresome.
Some of our fondest memories are of those summer Fridays with Mama, baking and cooking, learning, and tasting our creations. Music and food went together in our family. With the cooking underway and the aroma of chicken soup and parsnips wafting through the house, Mama often “took a break” while the challah was rising, by sitting down at the piano to play our favorite songs. Almost sixty years later, we still remember what it was like to lie on the oil-cloth-covered glider on the back porch, reading and eating an egg salad sandwich, watching our mother through the window as she put together one of her blueberry pies or frosted her Chocolate Velvet Cake.
Sheila
More than thirty years ago we discovered manuscript cookbooks, those collections of personal recipes compiled by home cooks. Handwritten notes on crumbling scraps of paper or the pages of old, well-worn cookbooks led us to “lost” family recipes. Recipe collections that survived were typically gathered together in small bundles, stitched, tied, stapled, or boxed, and handed down to the next generation. These forgotten bundles of culinary history turn up at yard sales and flea markets, in used bookstores, and on the pantry shelves of friends. Over the years, we have acquired more than 150 of these collections of living recipes.
Writing Heirloom Baking and Heirloom Cooking has been a labor of love. We are dedicated to recovering, updating and — above all — enjoying the best home recipes from America’s past. By presenting these recipes simply and with a contemporary flair, we are hoping to help a new generation of cooks and their families discover and enjoy the special tastes of the culturally diverse American kitchen.
We’ve taken a culinary journey across America, traveling through the South, the Midwest, and New England meeting old friends and making new ones. It was a sentimental journey because these visits with home cooks reinforced our belief that every family has a story and a recipe that document its own personal history. Sometimes the stories are sad, sometimes they are funny, but all are touching.
These encounters were precious, but the message was always the same. Cooking is the way we show our love for others. It’s the way we nurture and support our family and friends. Heirloom cooking and baking is just another definition of comfort food.
