We children had candy only at Christmas or when someone gave us some. My father kept Necco wafers or candy corn in his pockets. Occasionally he would give one piece to my sister and one to me. He was solidly against begging, though. My mother received a long narrow box of orange sticks dipped in chocolate every Christmas. She hoarded them; it was a treat to be allowed to get the box off of the refrigerator and distribute one to each person. I was and still am a rules follower; I didn’t swipe any most of the time.

When in my youth I was awarded an allowance of 25 cents per week, contingent on doing chores, my sister and I walked a half mile to the main street Five and Dime, where we pored over the selection of candy. At some point we must have tried everything; I settled on candies that could be played with, like mummy bones that could be fit together and came in a small plastic coffin. I also liked small cylindrical candies in a variety of fruity flavors and colors. I spent hours lining up the colors and making patterns of hexagons and lines, very geometric.

The other main source of sweets was church activities. My parents served cake and ice cream for birthdays, of which our family had several (I’m the sixth of seven children). But we children mostly got sugar from outside the house. When there was a church dinner, there would be cookies, brownies, cakes and pie. Frosting was a treat, raisins a disappointment. No-bake chocolate cookies my brothers made at home and we ate them at church, too.

Nuts were good for a change, not often eaten in my home except at Christmas. Tree nut allergies were not yet a known thing. My family ate peanut butter and honey to glue our whole wheat sandwiches together, but peanuts themselves were still a rarity. Peanuts and mixed nuts were served at wedding receptions, along with mints homemade out of cream cheese and rolled in sugar. Mixed nuts in the shell were a Christmas time treat, the only time we got out the metal nutcracker and sharp nut picks. They had their own bowl with slots to stand the nutcracker and picks upright in the center.

Whipped cream almost never showed up at home, though Jello gelatin did. Later my mother switched to unflavored gelatin, no food coloring, and used it to gel canned fruit she had bottled herself. She bought small jars of maraschino cherries and cut each cherry in half to add color to fruit salad. She made green Jello with shredded carrots in it, that trope of potlucks. She also made shredded carrot salad with mayonnaise, sugar, and chopped canned pineapple. But whipped cream, no. Especially not Cool Whip. It was too expensive for mostly air, sugar, and additives. Consequently whenever someone served it at church we ate some.

My mother did make pudding. My favorite of the instant puddings was pistachio, a lovely mint green color. My mother usually cooked her pudding, though; flour, sugar, milk, one egg, and redhots to give it a cinnamon flavor and a bright pink color. She had a set of four tiny food coloring bottles, rarely used to color frosting. The maraschino cherries and redhots were otherwise the only artificially colored foods I remember her using regularly.

Cakes were things you could make out of whole wheat flour, or half whole wheat half white flour; cake mixes I don’t remember her using much. The one exception was angel food cake. When as a young married woman I made an angel food cake from actual eggs, I found out why it is always made from a mix. Eggs have too much moisture. Powdered egg whites make a lighter cake that doesn’t sag and holds its shape much better.

My mother did experiment, finding recipes for new things and following the recipes slavishly. At one point my mother made hundreds of small part-whole-wheat cream puffs for a church activity. She was feeding the sisters in the ward, the adult women. It was intriguing to learn how cream puffs were made… Then she filled them all with tuna salad.