Christmas special orders

Dec 22, 2024

Dear Friends,

We're in the home stretch. If you'd like to place an order for pickup on Christmas Eve for your holiday celebration, you'll need to do so before 10am Sunday. As of this writing we've got about 40 cookie tins that remain available. We will also make a limited number of buche de noel, stollen, and other holiday goodies.

Christmas Eve special order cut off is Sunday at 10am

This year I thought I would highlight our humble (and delicious) Emmy rolls. The Emmys are an old fashioned dinner roll that hails from a different era of American cooking - one that prized fried chicken after church on Sundays or a hearty meatloaf after a long day at work. Originally made with shortening, the dough was meant to be stored in the refrigerator (or more likely an icebox) where it could be held for anywhere from a few hours to several days. When you were ready, you just pinched off a bit, shaped a few rolls, and let them rise for an hour before popping them in the oven.

Sweet and rich, Emmy rolls take me back to my childhood, long before it became fashionable to compare notes on how often one should feed their sourdough starter or the latest strain of artisanal rye flour you might find at the farmers market - a time before you could buy a passable baguette at dozens of different shops around Austin. As it happens, this was the first bread my mother learned to bake and she would often make a batch for holidays and special occasions.

According to mom, she was taught to make Emmy rolls by my paternal grandmother Josephine Willcott at my grandparents' home in Pasadena Texas shortly after my folks were married in 1960. Grandmother Josephine is pictured here with my dad and his older brother Bob. And as I thought about the history of the Emmy roll, I found myself wondering about that early baking lesson.

My parents would've been quite young in 1960 - kids really. They met as college students at UT in the late nineteen fifties, and in a crazy act of family defiance or daring or something, they eloped to Mexico where they were married by the justice of the peace in Piedras Negras. I mention this only because I don't know how much my mother, who would've been 21 at the time, really knew about cooking and in those days, wives were expected to know about those things.

My curiosity stems in part from the way bread baking came to shape mom's life, and in part from the fact that mom and grandmother Josephine couldn't have known each other particularly well at that point. I doubt my grandmother had been expecting my dad to drop in for dinner with a new daughter in law in tow. Surely the act of teaching this ancient and ritualized process of bread baking to my mom eased some of the tension that probably came with their rather abrupt shift in relationship.

But my grandmother Josephine was tough and practical. She came of age during the great depression, and she definitely saw some stuff along the way. During WWII, she took her two boys and moved into her parents' (Pell and Big Daddy) modest 2 bedroom home in Muskogee while my grandfather Mark, a union pipefitter, worked in the oilfields of what is now western Iran in support of the war effort. His absence, and the uncertainties of that time couldn't have been easy. So I have to believe she took my parents' unexpected marriage in stride and simply did the next thing that needed doing - like making sure my mother knew how to make the family recipe for Emmy rolls.

Anyway, I like to imagine my grandmother teaching mom to make Emmy rolls in that long ago kitchen in my grandparents' Pasadena house. And I wonder if that lesson wasn't a fairly direct reflection of my grandmother herself, years earlier, as she learned baking from her mother Pell. I feel like I can almost see the two of them gathered around the table in the center of a tiny kitchen in the back of an old framed house in Muskogee as the war raged overseas. They are kneading a batch of Emmy rolls. The sticky dough clings to their fingers. Aprons cover dresses, and their sleeves are rolled up as the sunny afternoon breeze blows through open windows.

Warmed from the oven, our TFB Emmy rolls are a perfect addition to any meal - a fluffy soft yeasted buttermilk roll. If you'd like to order some for your Christmas table, you've got a few hours left to place an order for pickup on Christmas Eve. We will also make a few extras if you don't make the cut off. Come see us at the garden on Tuesday.

All of us at TFB want to wish you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays. We are grateful for your support over the past year.

bon appetit,

murph

ps - we've got big news brewing about the reconstruction of our building and the reopening of the restaurant coming in the new year - please stay tuned.