Evva Hanes, a North Carolina farm woman who took a centuries-old Moravian cookie tradition that she had learned by watching her mother bake on a wood-fired stove and turned it into a family business, one that now ships out millions of fragile, crispy Moravian cookies every year, died on June 22 at her home in Clemmons, N.C. She was 90.
The cause was complications of brain cancer, said her grandson Jedidiah Hanes Templin, who is president of the Moravian Sugar Crisp Company, better known as Mrs. Hanes’ Hand-Made Moravian Cookies.
The Moravians were pre-Reformation Eastern European Protestants who sought refuge from persecution in Germany. Before the American Revolution, some left for Pennsylvania, taking with them a recipe for a spice-heavy ginger cookie called Lebkuchen.
They kept moving, and in the mid-1700s they began a religious community on a large tract of land in North Carolina that would become the city of Winston-Salem. The Southern food scholar John Egerton wrote that the North Carolina Moravians, like the Pennsylvania Dutch — whom he called “their theological and gastronomical kin” — have maintained a strong baking tradition that is hundreds of years old.
Debbie Moose, a North Carolina cookbook author who has written about Mrs. Hanes and other Moravian cookie bakers, remembered a time when you could find the cookie only in the Winston-Salem area.
“It is so singular,” she said in an interview. “You didn’t even see it in other parts of the state.”
Mrs. Hanes, the youngest of seven, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of the thin cookies to supplement what little money the family’s small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women sold cookies, too, adhering to a recipe with molasses and warm winter spices, like clove and ginger, that were popular around Christmas.
Mrs. Foltz began baking a crispy vanilla-scented version as a way to differentiate herself and extend the selling season. By age 8, Evva could bake them on her own. By 20, she had taken over her mother’s business and slowly begun to expand it, selling the original sugar crisps as well as the traditional ginger version but eventually other flavors, too, like lemon and black walnut.
By 2010, the cookies were so popular that Oprah Winfrey added them to her “favorite things” list. “It wouldn’t be Christmas if Quincy Jones didn’t send me Mrs. Hanes cookies,” she wrote in her magazine.
The cookies are still rolled, cut and packed by hand, with about 10 million a year sold to locals — who swing by the company’s small factory, next to the family’s home, to pick up a few tins — as well as to a robust list of national and international customers.
“I could make 100 pounds of cookies in eight hours if somebody did the baking, and I didn’t stop for anything,” Mrs. Hanes said in a recent oral history produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance. “I’m a time-and-motion expert, I guess, because I didn’t make any moves…
2023-07-08 13:25:27
Article from www.nytimes.com
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