Sister sleuths seek heirloom recipes

It's that time of year again, when even the most tentative bakers don an apron, grab a sack of flour, and dust off the old cookie cutters to make a batch of holiday treats. For inspiration, one need not look far. With the click of a mouse, cooks can call up hundreds of tantalizing holiday recipes on the Internet. But the best recipes just might be those that have been handed down through generations, the ones that reside, perhaps, amid a heap of musty papers in your attic.

No one makes a more convincing argument for digging up old family recipes – even for those notorious fruitcakes – than Sheila and Marilyn Brass, authors of "Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters" (Black Dog & Leventhal, 293 pp., $29.95). It is elaborately subtitled: "More than 100 Years of Recipes Discovered from Family Cookbooks, Original Journals, Scraps of Paper, and Grandmother's Kitchen."

If their delightful cookbook doesn't compel you to explore your own culinary legacy and track down Aunt Verna's recipe for her signature Banana Cream Pie, nothing will. To nudge you along, the Brass Sisters include a keepsake envelope in the back of the book.

"Heirloom Baking" is a keepsake all its own.

The Brass sisters, who have been baking in their own kitchens for a combined 95 years, are so passionate about collecting recipes from America's past – including those from family, friends, and total strangers – that they have devoted about 30 years to scouring yard sales, flea markets, and used bookstores in search of them. They are especially on the lookout for recipes that are not only simple and delicious, but also tell a good story, revealing interesting tidbits about the women, families, and communities the recipes came from.

So far, their treasure hunt has turned up about 85 "manuscript cookbooks," or collections of personal recipes compiled by home cooks, dating from the late 1800s to the 1980s from all across America and a variety of ethnic groups. From these manuscript cookbooks, the Brass Sisters researched, tested, and tasted numerous batches of brownies, cookies, and biscuits as well as cakes, cobblers, crisps, pies, and tarts until they finally arrived at about 150 favorite "living recipes," as they call them, to feature in "Heirloom Baking."

"We'd go to about 40 yard sales every weekend, mostly in New England," says Sheila Brass, recalling some of their finds and the nicknames they gave the unknown recipe writers. "There was the 'church lady,' who jotted down a wonderful recipe for Black-Pepper Hush Puppies, and the 'radio lady,' whose pecan cookie recipe turned out so well."

But, of course, many of their most- treasured recipes came from the women they knew best – their mother, Dorothy Katziff Brass, and their aunt, Ida Tucker Katziff. Dorothy was a very talented home cook and baker, and she taught her daughters the basics of cooking when they were young. "When we could barely reach the kitchen table," they write, "we were already turning scraps of dough into miniature braided challah loaves and turnovers, lovingly brushed with an egg glaze to make them shiny."

Sheila baked her first cake at age 11, and Marilyn had mastered filled cookies by the seventh grade. To this day, both sisters recall vividly the smell of sour-cream coffee cakes and yeast breads baking in the cast-iron and enamel stove in their kitchen or watching "Mama" frost her chocolate-velvet cake.

But even more powerful than the memories was the message, says Marilyn, explaining: "Our mother put so much love into everything she baked that she made us feel baking was all about giving love to a family."

It's that simple, say the motherly, down-to-earth Brass Sisters, who call themselves "two rounded, bespectacled women in our 60s." Their total lack of pretense – in their characters and their recipes – is especially appealing in this day of celebrity chefs and multistep cooking instructions that call for exotic, hard-to-find ingredients.

"We are just regular people," says Marilyn in an interview at her sister's office just outside of Boston. " 'Heirloom Baking' is written by home cooks for home cooks."

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