12 Days of Holiday Food Memories: Molly Wizenberg's Oklahoma Pralines
We asked a dozen food world luminaries to help us count down the next 12 days with culinary nostalgia, and they gave us their favorite stories of supermarket eggnog, standing rib roasts, discounted candy, and lots of cheer. Enjoy, and happy holidays!
Photo credit: Stockfood. Lettering: Brian Kaspr
Seattle-based food writer Molly Wizenberg is a staff favorite for her beautiful blog, Orangette. Her second book, called Delancey, is out this spring and focuses on “the exciting and somewhat harrowing experience of opening a restaurant on a tiny budget in a recession and trying to learn how to run it while being newly married.” She manages the restaurants Delancey and Essex with her chef husband, Brandon Pettit and tries to “keep my blog up to date, raise my babe, and make sure the dogs get to go outside every now and then.” Before her life became so busy around the holidays, there were pecan pralines to fill the time.
I grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. My mom came from a large Catholic family, my dad grew up Jewish, and neither one was at all religious by the time I came around.
We did celebrate Christmas, though, but not in Oklahoma, because my family is so spread out. So Christmases looked really different depending on where we were. If we were with my mother’s twin sister in the Bay Area, we always had Dungeness crab for Christmas Eve. We would spread out newspaper on the dining table [and] put a roll of paper towels at the end, lots of crusty bread and maybe a salad and we’d all eat with our hands. Sometimes went to the East coast where I have half siblings, and my sister, who is a wonderful cook and baker, does an elaborate Christmas spread. She makes six different kinds of scones Christmas morning—she portions them so they’re really tiny—and a wonderful peppermint bark. It’s always been a pretty food-focused holiday.
My mom used to do this incredibly elaborate Christmas baking and candy baking. She’d make beautiful, unusual things, not just sugar cookies with royal icing—things like mendiants with nuts and dried fruits and cookies with laminated doughs. One of the things she made, which I’ve written about for Bon Appétit, is a brown-sugar fudge called Aunt Bill’s [Brown Candy]. It’s not unlike a praline-type sweet that you might find in another part of the country, but the Aunt Bill’s are unique to Oklahoma because of pecans. So I grew up with my parents and [their friends] the Fretwells doing this—my mom and Mrs. Fretwell did their baking together—and I’d go over and hang out with her daughter, Leslie. We would get Chinese carry-out from the strip mall nearby and Leslie and I would run all over the house while our parents drank wine and stirred the Aunt Bill’s.
That’s the one night when my mom and Mrs. Fretwell would invite the husbands to help, because the bills require a ton of stirring! Right before you stir the nuts in, once you’ve got caramel at the right color, you have to take it off heat and crazily stir it for 10 minutes. It’s quite a workout. So they’d have the men stir them.
I was quite into making it for a couple years, but I don’t really now, mostly because Brandon works at night and I would have to stir it all by myself!
