Ma Shaffer's Baking Book

My mother had a small stack of old, handwritten recipes on the table. Some of them looked like they would disintegrate in your hands and some you could barely make out the words on the page. They looked more like historical documents than family recipes. They were my great-grandmother’s, Lena or “Ma” Shaffer as some called her. My mother told me “Ma” learned to cook as a teenager at a summer resort in the Catskills (close to where I now own a cabin). After that, she was a cook at an isolated  lumber camp and then at a stone quarry (one of the only women in both of those places). Eventually she settled at my grandfather's restaurant. For as long as I can remember, my mother and her sisters would rave about my great-grandmother’s cooking, especially her baked goods. Not only would she cook for the restaurant my mother grew up in but every night, she would cook for my mother’s large family and anyone else in town who was in need of a meal. 

In 2023, I compiled all her baking recipes, along with early photographs and my mother’s intimate portraits she had taken of her, into a 228 page book. My cousin's daughter lovingly baked many of her recipes and took photographs, which were included in the design. It was a multi-generational effort. I wanted to put as much care into the book as she put into feeding everyone around her large dining room table for many, many years.