It's true... you really CAN find everything on the internet

When I was a kid, my mom was a prodigious cookie maker.  She was a superb cook in all areas- well, okay, she made undrinkable coffee, but that was her only failing- and a remarkably versatile baker.  One of her favorite cookie recipes was that for By Cracky Bars.  She made them from time to time and the taste and smell of them particularly lingers in my memory.  She got the recipe from a publication of the Pillsbury Cook-Off entries, a slim, paperback 5X7 little book that bore the stains of frequent use.  

When my mom died, my sister inherited most of her effects.  This was entirely fair, since she had been Mama’s primary caregiver throughout the long illness that finally took her.  Among those effects was that little cookbook.

For the past couple of years, I have been obsessing about By Cracky Bars.  Even though I am diabetic and can’t eat them, I want to make them, to see and smell them again, and to feed them to my granddaughters to see if any of them love the cookie as much as I did as a child.  I asked my sister for the recipe- but after 15 years, and a couple of moves, she could not find the cookbook.  

Sigh.

And then I thought, what the hell?  I googled “By Cracky Bars” and up popped a partial recipe.  All the ingredients were there, but oven temperature and baking time were not.  What WAS there, however, was the source for the recipe.  The 1953 Pillsbury Bake Off Cookbook.  A title. A year.  A miracle.

So I immediately scurried to the online Barnes and Noble,  www.bn.com straight to the out of print book tab, and typed in 1953 Pillsbury Bake Off.  Voila!  There it was in all its glory- actually several copies were listed- and so it is now wending its way to my kitchen.  I will be so happy to have it, not just because I will get to taste By Cracky Bars for the first time in 40 years, but because I will have a little “memorabilia” of my mother’s days as a baker.   I wonder if her recipe for prune coffee cake is in there?