Livia and her friend were supposed to get together last week to bake a cake, but their plans fell through. I invited Livia to bake with me instead, and she said yes. We decided to try Vóvó’s recipe for biscoitos. Vóvó had given the recipe to me over the phone some time ago. She just called me up one day out of the blue and told me to grab a pen. She said she knew that she wouldn’t be around forever, and she wanted to make sure we had her recipe.
I was never certain I’d gotten the quantities right, so I didn’t know how well the recipe would work. At first we followed the recipe exactly, but we started tweaking it along the way. We found that the oven temperature was too high, the cooking time too long, and the dough a little too dry. We adjusted the temperature and timing, and for the last batch we added more milk.
The end result was a perfect biscoito, just the way Vóvó used to make them. And in tweaking the recipe we’d adhered to Vóvó’s own philosophy. She told me repeatedly that adjustments might be needed. As she put it, “We have to learn these things for ourselves.” She had the best attitude about cooking.
Vóvó doesn’t bake anymore. She is very old now, and her mind wanders. She is not the person that she used to be, and that makes me sad, but it helps to know that her recipe, her cooking philosophy, and her love will always be with us. I just wish she could know that we’d tried her recipe, because I think it would make her happy.