Today would be my grandmother Fannie’s 126th birthday, had she not died in 1974. Here is a photograph of her with friends standing on the steps of Plymouth Congregational Church on Detroit’s Eastside, in 1936.
Taken as we talked on our Church steps 5/17/36
By Jim Dunbar” The Church was Plymouth Congregational Church. F. Graham is my grandmother Fannie Mae Turner Graham.
When my sister, cousins and I were growing up in Detroit, my grandmother would make us birthday cakes. They were always yellow cake with pineapple filling between the layers and chocolate icing over all. The recipe below is in the front of my mother’s falling apart cookbook. My daughter is going to make one for us this weekend and I will take a photograph and add it to this page.
The food spatters, torn edges, and deep creases on this recipe wonderfully tell the story of many times it must have been made over the years–and by multiple generations. I look forward to seeing the picture after your daughter makes it for you.
Yum.
Great! We will come for cake!
Give me directions to your house, I am on my way!!!
What a great photo of your grandmother! How full of life she looks! And how terrific that you have her recipe in her beautiful handwriting and that it is still being made, three generations on. I had and treasured a similarly tattered and grease-bespattered page of recipes my mother gave me when I lived on my own for the first time. But two years ago I took it with me to a 50th birthday gathering of a friend so as to make one of the recipes on it (prawn (shrimp, that is) curry) and I haven’t found it since. Wish I had scanned it! But that was one delicious prawn curry, made with fresh-caught wild Maine shrimp.
good pics.
connected, well!
looking forward to that cake!
gem!
My Aunt Sallie Bea was famous for her jelly cakes. She passed them to her Granddaughters. Would of loved to have them. She gave me a lot to make up for it in Oral History. Yummy!