No matter what shiny toy Santa brought each year, my friend Tammy White’s favorite present was the brown paper bag given by her grandmother Gusteva White, also known as Nanny. Tammy adored her grandmother, and the feeling was mutual. “Nanny made me feel important and was always glad to see me,” Tammy told me. “She was my everything.”
Growing up during the Great Depression, Nanny learned about resourcefulness from her parents. Money was tight, but each Christmas, Nanny and her siblings received homemade gifts such as dolls fashioned from rags and guns whittled from wood.
Later, as a young mother herself—to seven children under the age of nine—Gusteva couldn’t afford Christmas stockings. Hence, she began the tradition of the brown paper bags, each hand-decorated with images cut from magazines, catalogs, and ad mailers. Over the years, her craft project grew from seven bags to 17, as grandchildren joined the family. Along with pictures of Christmas trees and Santas, cutouts of baby dolls, roller skates, and pocket watches adorned the bags to fit each person’s personality. Nanny then filled each bag with homemade sweets like peanut butter fudge, sugar cookies, and a nutty confection known simply as Nanny Candy.
Nanny and her Christmas bags.
Kay Acton
From an early age, Nanny instilled in Tammy a love for baking. “Growing up, we didn’t have anything,” she recalls. “But Nanny gave me these old cake pans. I would make mud pies and pick flowers to decorate the pies.” When Tammy turned five or six, Nanny began pulling a chair up beside the stove for her to stand on. Thus began the tradition of Tammy “helping” Nanny bake the Christmas goodies.
Written versions of Nanny’s recipes didn’t exist—they lived solely in her memory. “When we baked, she never measured anything,” says Tammy. “She would always say, ‘a smidgen,’ ‘a handful,’ ‘a pinch,’ or ‘a dusting.'” Thankfully, Tammy decided to document the recipes for future generations. Today, her handwritten recipe cards bring a smile to her face as she reads her long-ago words: “Cook to roaring bubble. Keep stirrin’…stir, stir, stir!”
Kay Acton
Now as a home cook, Tammy carries on her grandmother’s tradition, baking hundreds of sweets each holiday to share with family and friends. One of her favorite Nanny recipes is decadent peanut butter fudge. After hearing Tammy rave about it, and because I couldn’t resist anything made with peanut butter, I whipped up a batch of the fudge. Big mistake—I couldn’t stop eating it! I ended up taking some to a holiday party so I wouldn’t eat the whole batch, and three people asked for the recipe. With just five ingredients and a few simple steps, this homemade peanut butter fudge comes together in no time.
Nanny’s Peanut Butter Fudge
Ingredients
- 3 cups sugar
- 12 tablespoons butter, plus more for greasing
- ¾ cup evaporated milk
- 7 ounces marshmallow cream
- 1 cup creamy peanut butter
Directions
- Butter a 9×13-inch baking dish.
- Combine sugar, butter, and evaporated milk in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat; cook and stir until mixture comes to a boil. Boil for 4 minutes, stirring constantly.
- Reduce heat to low. Stir in marshmallow cream until melted. Stir in peanut butter until combined.
- Pour fudge mixture into the prepared baking dish.
- Cool at room temperature before cutting into squares, at least 30 minutes.
