Glenna Fair, an elder at Wychwood Presbyterian Church, is a Toronto gal, born and bred. As a child she attended Hope United Church at Main and Danforth. Glenna recalls not the food, at Sunday School picnics, but the thrill of travelling to Toronto Island where the church held its annual picnic. In the 1930s there was a tram, along the Danforth, that turned at Main St.
Hope Church would obtain a private tram (streetcar) and on a sunny summer, after church, 300 children file aboard and ride to the Toronto Harbour ferry docks. For Glenna the tram journey was the grandest treat in the drab Depression years.
During the Great Depression, the Fair family, like their neighbours, were poor and the only time there was cake, in the Fair household, was when Mary Fair baked for the church. “Mother would make a chocolate iced cake for church bazaars. My twin brother Kenny and I would look up at the shelf with greed. When we couldn’t stand it any longer, we would steal bits of the icing,” she says. “Then we would spit on the thin spots and smooth them over with our fingers.”
Glenna assumes her mother made up the cake recipe, but Mary did leave behind, when she died in 1997, a ringed notebook containing typed recipes and her housekeeping records. In 1948, for example, Mary’s list of summer “Canning” includes 15 pints of beans, 6 quarts of raspberries and 10 pints of tomatoes.
Glenna recalls that her father, a Cape Bretoner, loved Potato Scones. Mary had a recipe that was handed down, to her, from her mother Martha Clarke. Some 70 years later, in her mind’s eye, Glenna still sees the pleasure on her father’s face when Mary made the scones, a traditional Scottish favourite.
Mary Clarke Fair’s Potato Scones
2 cups of flour
½ tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1 cup cold mashed potato
2 tbsp of butter or shortening
¾ cup milk
METHOD
Sift dry ingredients together. Add potato and fat. Work with a fork or fingertips until it holds together. Add milk and mix to soften the dough.
Roll out on a floured board. Knead for ten seconds.
Divide into two portions. Shape into rounds.
Bake on a greased griddle for 20 minutes, turning over two or three times.
Serve hot. Split and butter.
