I would like to share a story and a recipe.
In the spring of 1975, three other missionaries and I were serving in le Havre. The zone leaders from Rouen, who shall remain nameless, had planned a visit and we "prepared" carefully for it by lining up some teaching appointments that day. Now zone leaders in all times have been imbued with a rather "devil-may-care" attitude about other missionaries' work, to the extent that paired off with their underlings in a teaching situation, they might just as not make a show of bravado by challenging an investigator they've never met before to baptism. (I'm not going to discuss the spiritual implications of this part of the anecdote; suffice it to say that we had decided not to expose our carefully taught investigators to any expedited challenges.)
So, as we contemplated the damage their visit could do, we resolved upon a strategem to keep them away from our rendez-vous that afternoon. We made both the standard vanilla cake, usually divided into four and topped with butter for dessert at that time AND a very potent lemon rocket fuel, with which we "iced" the cake. Moreover, we fed these elders with the utmost show of deference and sacrifice, until both became full of compliments for the fare, and one of them became simply too sick to go out. We wished them the best that afternoon and went out triumphant and unaccompanied to our planned meetings.
Now, the lemon rocket fuel recipe I remember was not the namby-pamby recipe seen elsewhere on this website. In our day or at least with all the elders I lived with, the standard practice was a cookie or cracker crust made with butter (reminiscent of the no-bake cheesecakes in the U.S.) filled with a mixture of two cans of sweetened, condensed milk and the juice of seven (count 'em) lemons. This produced a "cheesecake" of which any mission cook could be justly proud and was enjoyed nearly universally in the French Mission. |