Resolved

After my visit with Granna, I remembered that her sister, Roxie, made a cake every week. As I recall, Roxie usually made pound cakes and was so well-known for them that she earned extra money baking them for folks all around Meriwether County.

At home, I considered my collection of out-of-print cookbooks, most containing little slips of paper marking the pages of recipes that appealed when I first read them.  I started collecting vintage cookbooks just after college when my mother and I found a copy of the Atlanta Woman's Club Cook Book from 1921.  With chapters titled "Secrets of Kitchen Happiness" and "Queen Sweet Potato" plus recipes from all of the prominent ladies of the club, we were hooked!  It was a treasure.  Mom bought the book and told me that I could only have it after she died.

After that, I was on a quest.  I searched high and low for my own copy of the 1921 AWC Cook Book.  Along the way I have found many fantastic cookbooks; the best ones with inscriptions to new brides, hand printed recipes on scraps of paper, or pages stained with grease and vanilla extract as testaments to the previous owner's favorite recipes.  Around 1998, I found my Shangri-La in New York's Greenwich Village and it is called Bonnie Slotnik Cookbooks.  A small store, tended by Bonnie, herself, with book cases floor-to-ceiling full of cookbooks.  Visit her bookstore online, but plan a trip to New York to see it in person.

For years, I routinely begged my mom for the cookbook, as I was having no luck (even with Bonnie's expert assistance) finding my own copy.  Always Mom replied, "you'll get it after I die."  In 2006 she made a liar out of herself by surprising me with the cookbook on my wedding day.  She included a note advising me to pay special heed to chapters III and VII; "Budgeting Your Time" and "Needful Facts for Housewives."  I was a bride! And I had an inscribed cookbook treasure for a dowry.

Granna's story (and Keith's desire for a cake every Saturday) got me thinking about procrastination and all of the recipes, bookmarked but unmade, residing on my bookshelves.  I thought about tried-and-true recipes that we love but that I only make for special occasions. I waxed nostalgic for the cakes that the women on both sides of my family prepared and had taught me to make.  Then I embraced the idea of baking a cake every Saturday and at Keith's encouragement I decided to make it my New Year's resolution.

I shall bake a cake every Saturday this year.

This Saturday:  Pound Cake