Getting Ready for an Engagement

March 13, 1936  The womenfolk baked and prepared for Jake’s engagement party.

Since the engagement party was hosted by the groom’s parents, the womenfolk had to prepare.  This would have included wife Margaret, daughter Mary, bride Anna R. Friesen, and probably other Reimer relatives.  They would have baked dozens and dozens of tweeback, loaves of bread, and cookies and probably prepared giant kettles of soup and moos.  They would have kneaded many bowls of dough, let them rise and punched them down, then squeezed off one ball of dough after another and double-stacked a big one and a little on top to make the tweeback, and finally let them rise again before baking them.  The cookies were the unfrosted sugar cookies that we loved in later years.  Margaret insisted for many years that baking had to done over wood heat because everything turned out better, so they would have had to keep the cast-iron range supplied with wood to maintain just the right temperature.  The oven had a thermometer, but there was no mechanism to maintain a certain temperature – just the attentiveness of the cooks as they fed the fire.  The smell of the warm bread and cookies would have mingled with the excitement as the Siemens prepared for the first wedding in their family.