Recipes: A Sharing of Friendship

A recipe can be many things. It can be a new dish, an untried flavor; it can be a delectable combination of familiar ingredients that add up to luscious eating.

A recipe can mean a new friend, a giving of some part of you and your day to brighten mine, a bit of your kitchen experimenting to be experimented now in mine.

A recipe can be a reaching across the miles, a blessing from your home to mine, a seal of friendship given and received.

Webb Dycus, of Duck River, Tennessee, received her apple bread recipe from her friend Erma Lee Stovall in Wichita, Kansas. Aileen Kilgore Henderson, of San Diego, California, says her recipe for pound cake was given to her many years ago by an Alabama relative. They share these recipes with friends of the Ensign.

Apple Bread

3 cups flour

1 1/2 teaspoons soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

2 cups sugar

1 1/4 cups cooking oil

3 whole eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

3 cups thinly sliced peeled apples

Sift together flour, soda, salt, and cinnamon. Cream together by hand the sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla. (Be sure to add the eggs one at a time and beat well after each addition.)

Add the sifted ingredients to the creamed mixture, alternating with the apple slices. Beat well.

Bake in a loaf pan at 325° F. until lightly browned and done. Wrap bread in foil as soon as cool, and it will keep in the freezer very well.

(I don’t believe one can go by oven temperatures in a standardized way. Perhaps you will want to bake the bread at 350° in a gas oven. However, my electric oven cooks hotter than my sister’s. I cooked my bread, starting at around 300°, until it was well on toward done, then ran it up to 325°. This is one of the best breads I have tasted.)

—Webb Dycus