Aunt Jane and the Chocolate Fudge Icing

For as long as I can remember, Aunt Jane has been an almost mythical character. I can still hear my Dad's voice when he talked about Mom's older sister. "Your Aunt Jane was a wonderful woman," he'd say whenever her name came up. Mom would never say much, but she'd get this look in her eyes when Dad would talk about Aunt Jane, and she'd add little bits of information -- not much, but enough to make me wish I had known this woman who died long before I was born. Understanding the special place that Aunt Jane occupied in Patrick and Ruth's hearts requires a little background.

Aunt Jane was Little Grandma Ruthie's only sister, and she was quite a few years older than mother. I don't know the precise timetable, but I think she was already married and living in Elkins, West Virginia, when Vonnie Jerusha Zeiler Long, our mother's mother, died when her twins Frank and Ruth were four years old. The time after that was a very lonely time for Granddad Long. I got a sense of just how lonely from something that happened one day when I was in high school. I had learned the old song "My Buddy" when I was a kid. I was singing it one day at home. Mom stopped me and told me that that was the song Granddad Long used to sing. She said he'd stand in the kitchen looking out the window and sing that song. ("Nights are long since you went away; I think about you all through the day, my buddy.")

Granddad was still fairly young when Grandma Long died, but he tried to keep things together. Since he still had the four-year-old twins at home, he employed a series of housekeepers to cook, clean, and take care of the kids. Either Uncle Frank and little Ruthie were real hellions, or the housekeepers were pretty unreliable, because Mom told me that Granddad never knew when he came home if the housekeeper would still be there. I learned much later from Uncle Frank and Aunt Lena that he actually married one of them, a Mrs. Abernathy, probably to ensure that she stuck around. Apparently "ole lady Abernathy," as mother called her, was a piece of work who was downright mean to the twins. Uncle Frank said she was particularly hard on Ruth. She used to lock her in her room, and she was nicer to her cat than she was to the kids. This possibly explains a couple of Little Grandma's quirks. She never liked to have doors locked or even shut all the way, and she never liked to have animals, particularly cats, anywhere around her, especially in the house.

"But," to quote Sophia Petrillo, "I digress." Eventually, despite Granddad's marrying her, ole lady Abernathy ran off, and this led to the deep dark secret that I didn't learn until I was a grown woman: Granddad divorced her. He was a divorced man. This would have been quite a scandal back in the 1920's. From that time on, Ruth took on a lot of the household duties. At some point, Granddad apparently thought that Ruth needed a woman's influence because Ruth was shipped off to Elkins, West Virginia, to live with her married sister Jane. She attended high school there and graduated in 1928. She stayed in Elkins and worked as a telephone operator. It was during that time that she met "her Patrick."

The match between Patrick Gillooly (an Irish Catholic and a bit of a wild boy since his mother also died at a young age and Aunt Marie used to say he sort of "raised himself") and Ruth Long (a young woman from a somewhat prominent Protestant family whose brother-in-law, Jane's husband Harmon Kerr, would eventually be mayor of Elkins) was probably not very well received at first by either family. Please remember all you young things out there that this was the time when there were signs posted in places of employment that said "Irish need not apply."

This brings us back to Aunt Jane. She apparently treated Patrick well because he never had anything but kind words for her. He said she was a wonderful cook and a great hostess. She loved parties, and she would jump at the chance to have one. The one negative thing Dad had to say was always said affectionately: She wasn't much of a housekeeper; she was too busy reading anything she could get her hands on. Now that's my kind of relative!

I believe Aunt Jane died when she was in her early 40's. She had gall bladder surgery and died of peritonitis. She was the closest thing to a mother that our mother ever had. Her untimely death led to another of our mother's idiosyncracies. Grandma Ruthie had terrible gall bladder attacks when we were kids, but she resisted having gall bladder surgery for years. No wonder.

I have some of Little Grandma's recipes that I copied over the years, and I think several of them are Aunt Jane's, but I know this one is definitely Aunt Jane's because it said so on the card I copied. It's a recipe for chocolate fudge icing, and our mother used it quite often when we were kids. She also made it with brown sugar and without the chocolate for a caramel icing.

Aunt Jane's Chocolate Fudge Icing

3 squares of chocolate (softened)
(or 9 Tbsp. of cocoa and 4 Tbsp. of butter)
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
dash of salt
1 tsp. vanilla
2 beaten egg yolks
powdered sugar

Put chocolate (or the cocoa and butter), sugar, milk, and salt in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir and cook for 2 minutes (be careful with the time or the icing will get too hard). Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Add beaten egg yolks. (Stir a little of the hot mixture into the egg yolks first so the egg yolks don't curdle when you add them.) Beat in powdered sugar to an icing consistency. Be careful not to add too much powdered sugar as this icing thickens as it cools.

For Caramel icing, eliminate the chocolate (be sure to add the butter) and substitute brown sugar for the white granulated sugar.

As to the inexact measurement of the milk, a lot of the old recipes are written that way. At least it says "1/4 to 1/2" and not just "add milk." Well, that's all for today. Love to all.