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| Myrtle Baker |
The Aptly Named Mrs. Baker
by Molly O'Neill
A grandmother's affinity for baking perfect and tasty cookies
Myrtle Baker is a retired schoolteacher, a wood-carver who creates Swedish folk-art animals, and one of Minnesota’s most venerated cookie bakers. No one bakes sugar cookies to such a perfect buttery crispness.
The secret says Baker, is to handle the dough as little as possible. “Most people roll the dough out and stamp it,” she says, “I think that’s too rough. I pinch off a little dough, gently roll it into a little ball and then smush it down on the cookie tray as quickly as I can.”
Her cookie genius was not inherited. Her father’s parents emigrated from Sweden and her mother’s came from Germany. Neither of them brought recipes or the innate desire to bake.
“There were ten of us kids and my father was a lamplighter on the railroad,” says Baker. "There were just too many of us and too little money for luxuries like cookies. We couldn’t afford the ingredients. We couldn’t afford to experiment with food.”
Cookies were, in Baker’s young mind, something to strive toward.
Montevideo, the small village in southwest Minnesota where she grew up, was primarily a Norwegian town that had the typical Scandinavian obsession with Christmas. Baker, therefore, felt more than a little self-conscious about her family’s lack of holiday celebrations.
“We had a lot of love, but we didn’t have sweets or presents,” she says. “Christmas was just any other day.” She now thinks that pushed her to “be someone.” Baking would be proof that she had, in fact, “arrived.”
“My whole life, I imagined how wonderful it would be to have a grandmother or an aunt who baked. I imagined how their kitchen would smell; I imagined going to visit and eating cookies.”
At 15, Baker grew tired of Montevideo. “There were too many drunks there,” she says, and it was a typical small, poor town where everyone spent their time in the barroom. She subsequently went to live with her sister in the tiny Bohemian town of Olivia. Fifteen years her senior, her sister helped raise her and became Baker’s first cooking teacher.
“She was a great cook, but she was lazy,” said Mrs. Baker. “She wanted to lay on the bed and listen to 'Ma Perkins' on the radio.”
The younger sister would yell from the kitchen, “How do you make a cake?” and her sister would yell back the directions. “‘Take a cup of flour,’” Baker recalls, “and that was the way I started learning how to bake.”
After graduating and becoming a country schoolteacher, Baker learned from the families she lived with — there was a Norwegian who taught her to make Norwegian rosettes as well as Swedish spice cookies, the Italian family who taught other recipes, the Bohemian family who taught her others still. The elders at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, Minn., mentored her later studies. But her most steadfast adviser, she says, was Betty Crocker.
“If you don’t have her cookie book, you better get it.”
Suffering from a chronic illness, Baker and Bob, the man she married in 1946, were unable to have children. Baker, however, became the aunt or grandmother for more than 40 nieces and nephews and for hundreds of the children she taught during her 40-year career in one-room country schools and later, as a principal in town and city schools.
“I make at least one batch of cookies every day of the year,” she says.
“Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I make five or ten different batches a day. You can almost tell the future bakers by the way a 6-year-old handles the cookie, the way they take the first bite.”
Continue to the recipes: Sugar Cookies & Chocolate Crinkles
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