THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702090065
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 54 lines
We're not so far from Eden, really.
A recent recollection by a Chesapeake reader about passenger pigeons evoked a note from Bill Luedtke of Virginia Beach.
``My grandmother, born in 1866, told me that the passenger pigeons were very stupid and slow,'' Luedtke writes.
``The flocks flew so close to the ground that her brothers in Wisconsin could knock them down for supper using sticks and sawmill slabs.''
And then he, as a boy in the 1930s on the family farm where he worked 18 years, marveled at migrating snow geese.
``The sky was covered from horizon to horizon with snow geese,'' he writes. ``Their passage would last perhaps a half hour.''
In another piece of mail, our local laureate, Nanette Emanuel, offers a four-liner in verse, ``Hymn to a Certain Grain'':
Although I'm not Rebel born,
I love the bread that's made of corn!
Those wondrous, soulful scents that seep
Must prove my Yankee roots skin deep!
For me, just to make corn pone, the shaping of the pone in your hands from corn-meal batter, like a child playing in the mud, and then the baking of it, has a calming effect. And then there's a good deal of suspense in taking the iron skillet out of the oven.
In my case, there's no knowing how the pones are going to turn out.
Still, now matter how it's done, a concoction of nothing but corn and water and short'ning is bound to be edible. Ain't nothing you can do wrong that will make it inedible. It's pretty nearly fool-proof.
But I couldn't compose a poem to a corn pone.
And certainly I'd be helpless in trying to bake a 10-layer chocolate cake, which Kathleen Nelligar began doing when she was 9 years old and still does regularly.
Now 84, she bakes cakes for friends and for her 16-year-old grandson.
How'd she learn?
``I taught myself. If it didn't turn out, I tried something else,'' she said.
She makes the layers real thin, and it takes about 2 1/2 hours to finish the cake.
``Young people nowadays are not going to take the time to make that cake,'' she said.
She doesn't have to follow the recipe as she whomps up the cake, but she offered, generously, to recall it for me.
I declined. This paper is still mailing out recipes for that red velvet number, and readers are still calling me to report variations.
There's no one way to make that cake.
I'm just grateful nobody got hurt. Nothing blew up.