Pilcher: Food brings people and family together

By Lisa Law

ELLAVILLE, Ga. — As the aroma of tea cookies filled the kitchen, she recalled baking her favorite recipe for her children as they were growing up.

“I baked tea cakes for my children in the morning before they went to school. I would have peaches with them. It wasn’t a very nutritious dish; I added the peaches to try to make up for it,” said Mary Nan Pilcher with a laugh.

Pilcher, growing up in the Concord Community just outside of Ellaville, remembers baking her first cake on the wood stove of her mother, Wilmoth Lightner.

“I can remember one Christmas receiving a baking set for a gift. It was before the Easy Bake oven. It was just a little kit. I made a cake and my first cake went into the wood stove,” she said.

Pilcher, the youngest of six children, was always told she couldn’t do anything because she was the baby.

“But I did what I wanted to do," she said as she brought out a cookbook from the early ‘50s titled “Home Comfort Cookbook.”

“This is the first book my mother and I used. It was left in my mother’s things after her death,” she said.

Pilcher also brought out a second volume of her mother’s favorite recipes.

“The family loved her recipes so I copy them. Some are copied in her hand writing,” she said reflecting on evenings at the dinner table and prayers recited over the food.

“My daddy, Willie Lightner, always said the prayer before a meal and I say the same prayer today: ‘Lord make us thankful for these and all our many blessings. We ask it in Christ’s sake. Amen,’” she said.

Pilcher’s favorite recipe is Lemon Chicken.

“My family loves my Lemon Chicken. My children call; even my son-in-law calls and said, ‘Granny what is the secret to your Lemon Chicken?’”

According to Pilcher, her family has tried to make the chicken like she makes it and has failed in their undertakings. Pilcher said her children even video taped her cutting up a whole chicken.

“They filmed me so they could refer back to the video. The secret is in cutting up a whole chicken with the skin left on it and mixing the mustard sauce. I have had daughter call and say, ‘Mama will you just make some of the sauce?’”

“First, you cut up a whole chicken, you can take the skin off after it cooks if you prefer it skinless. Salt and pepper it. Put it in the pan skin-side up . Take the juice of three or four lemons, depending on the size of lemon, then put in four heaping tablespoons of mustard and two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce. Bring the sauce to a boil; pour it over the chicken and bake at 450 degrees for 45 minutes. Cook until the skin is real brown on the chicken. And you have to have homemade biscuits with this dish,” she said.

Pilcher said she teaches Sunday School and the class was on the subject of sitting down and eating with family. She said one boy mentioned that his family never sits down together to eat.

“He said they may eat at the same time but never sitting down at the table to eat. The little boy said his table is full of his parents’ paperwork from work,” she said.

She said sadly families do not have time or do not take the time to sit down and eat theses days.

“I was raised to believe it was important to sit down together and eat. It was a time to connect and communicate,” she said.

Overall, Pilcher believes food brings people and families together.

“If we get together, someone ask, ‘What are we going to eat?”

Pilcher believes slowing down and taking the time to prepare a meal and joining in conversation with her family has been her ultimate goal and incentive to cook. With the world turning to fast food, fast cooking, paper plates and plastic ware, she would rather settle for old-fashioned china and silverware and the slow pace of a simpler time when memories were made not thrown away in waste baskets.

“I just enjoy cooking for my children,” she said with gleam in her eye as she finished preparing tea cookies for the evening.





Lisa Law writes for the Americus (Ga.) Times-Recorder.





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Tea Cookies

1 egg

1 stick of butter

1 c. sugar

2 c. of self-rising flour

Mix with mixture. Do not cream it or the cookies will be hard.

Roll them out like biscuits or cut with biscuit cutter.

Take a glass, wet the bottom, dip in sugar and pad each cookie top with the sugar coated glass.

Bake at 350 degrees for eight minutes until barely brown on the bottom.

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