The lamb lives: Cooks share their stories

		Grand Mom  Audrey  Mettel Fixmer

In this month when we are honoring mothers, it is fitting that I reflect upon my own mother. Gertrude Patterman Mettel has been enjoying the "fullness of the Kingdom of God" for 20 years now, but I can only hope that she has not lost touch with any of her five children, especially the two of us remaining on earth.

If that's the case, she would know that I wrote about her lamb cakes last month in this column, and she will be "tickled pink" (one of her favorite expressions) to learn that my Sacrificial Lamb story evoked a flood of letters from my readers, most of whom requested her recipe for Chocolate Applesauce Cake.

At the risk of sounding like a Martha Stewart wannabe, I will happily devote another column to culinary matters.

Lamb mold secrets

I was surprised to hear that so many people do have lamb cake molds. Many of them are relics from the past, made of iron, rather than the aluminum models available today. ( I am not sure, however, where one can purchase them.)

Emilie Killian of Sun Prairie has outdone me in every department. She writes that she has 16 children! Compared to hers my 10 sounds like a small family. She adds that yes, she is Catholic, but "that has nothing to do with it." (Is she kidding?)

Gertie's Chocolate Applesauce Lamb Cake In mixing bowl, beat 1/2 C butter until soft. Gradually add 1 C sifted sugar. Beat until light and fluffy. Beat in 1 egg. Sift before measuring, 1 3/4 C flour. Sift a little over 1 C raisins and 1 C chopped nuts. Resift remainder with: 1/2 t salt, 1 t. soda, 1 t. cinnamon, 1/2 t. cloves and 2 T cocoa. Stir sifted ingredients gradually into butter mixture until the batter is smooth. Add raisins and nuts. Heat 1 C thickened applesauce and beat it into batter. Bake in greased and floured lamb mold, face side only. Insert toothpicks in ears and skewer in head and body Set backside on top of form loosely. Bake at 360 for 55-60 minutes with back removed for last 10 min. Let cool in pan. Pray! Then carefully remove it.

Emilie included her own recipe for a lamb cake, which she says is more like a nut bread. You don't use a mixer, but mix the batter just until lumps disappear. Best of all, though, she gave me the same hint that several others did: Embed toothpicks in the ears, and a meat skewer that attaches the head to the body. Why didn't I think of that?

Lamb raffle

Sun Prairie must be loaded with lambs! Dolly Shiveler wrote that when St. Bernard Parish was having their 50th anniversary of their Palm Sunday Dinner, Msgr. Mack asked all women of the parish to bake a lamb cake for the food sale that day. Dolly baked two. The ladies running the bake sale didn't know how to put a price on them. They ended up raffling them off and took in $87.

Now, Dolly is not your run-of-the-mill cake baker. She says that her friends had urged her to go to MATC and enroll in a cake decorating class because she was so creative.

"When I saw what they did to a lamb cake, I decided I wanted one of those cast iron molds. This was in the early 50's and there were none to be had in the stores. However, Wolff Kubly and Hirsig said they could order one for me but I might have to wait . . . I waited a whole year and was thrilled to finally get a call, the lamb mold was in."

Plenty of mishaps

Dolly uses a popsicle stick inserted in the neck before baking, and she uses a pound cake recipe because it is a firmer texture. Even so, she says that she has had her share of disasters, too, and "we butchered many crippled lambs." She had learned from her mother to make cottage pudding out of broken cakes, so nothing went to waste.

Instead of the coconut "fleece" that I use, Dolly uses a royal icing, making many different kinds of flowers a couple of months in advance and stores them covered as she lets them harden. "These I use around the lamb's neck and place them in the colored coconut grass round the lamb on a tray for presentation."

Wow! My lambs are no competition for hers!

Recipe requests

From Mary Ann Schulte in Madison I got her sympathetic ear because she lost a lamb to her dog! To Miriam Williams in Beloit and Eileen Ackerman in Fort Atkinson, and all my other soul sisters out there, thanks for helping to immortalize my mother by requesting her recipe.

"Grandmom" likes hearing from other senior citizens who enjoy aging at P.O. Box 216, Fort Atkinson, WI 53538.

Saint Gianna: A patron saint for life

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

Amidst the myriad canonizations and beatifications proclaimed by Pope John Paul II, some have involved exceptionally dramatic lives.

Dramatic lives

Think of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan martyr of charity who offered his life in the starvation bunker at Auschwitz to save the father of a family.

Or Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), the brilliant philosopher and proto-feminist who rediscovered her ancestors' faith in the God of Abraham through Catholicism.

Blessed Miguel Pro, S.J., shot by a firing squad of violent anti-clericals during the Mexican Cristero uprising in 1927, was perhaps the first martyr in history to have had the moment of his death photographed.

There is Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who lived a different kind of drama - the drama of intense spiritual purification, revealed only after her death when we learned from her spiritual diaries of her prolonged, agonizing "dark night" of the soul.

Gianna Beretta Molla

Now, on May 16, God has given the church another heroic model for our times, in the newly canonized Saint Gianna Beretta Molla.

Born near Milan in 1922, Giovanna Francesca Beretta began medical studies at the University of Milan in 1942, transferring to the University of Pavia in 1945; there, she graduated in medicine and surgery in 1949.

In 1952, she received a specialist's certificate in pediatrics. During a medical practice involving extensive volunteer service to the poor, Gianna Beretta met Pietro Molla, an engineer, whom she married in 1955.

Gianna and Pietro's correspondence reveals a couple who believed that marriage was their way, together, to sanctity. Their family, they hoped, would be a "little cenacle where Jesus may reign over all affections, desires, and actions," as Gianna wrote Pietro.

Three children were born in the first years of their marriage. Then, in 1962, after a series of miscarriages, Gianna began another pregnancy.

Choosing life

Toward the end of her second month, Gianna started experiencing sharp pains; the diagnosis was a fibrous tumor in the ovary. A knowledgeable physician, Gianna knew the options: surgical procedures that would, directly or indirectly, take the life of her unborn child, or removal of the tumor in such a way that the pregnancy was saved, despite the ongoing risk to her life.

She unhesitatingly made the choice for her child, the tumor was removed, and the risky pregnancy continued.

Shortly before her delivery, she repeated her decision to her doctor: "If you have to choose, there should be no doubt. Choose - I demand it - the life of the baby. Save the baby."

Beatification

On April 21, 1962, Gianna Emanuela Molla was born. A week later, Gianna Beretta Molla died from multiple complications involved in carrying her fourth child to term and giving her birth.

Gianna was laid out in the family living room, her children's playroom, so that the enormous crowds of people whom she had served as a physician could pay their respects.

After the funeral Mass, her casket, covered with the red roses long associated with the gift of one's life to Christ, was carried to the cemetery as Pietro, holding the hands of the two older children, walked behind.

Gianna Beretta Molla was beatified by Pope John Paul II on April 24, 1994; Gianna Emanuela, for whom Gianna had died, helped carry the offertory gifts to the pope. Fittingly enough, the miracle confirming Gianna Beretta Molla's heroic sanctity involved a difficult pregnancy successfully carried to term through the new saint's intercession.

Choice for love

In a world rife with confusions about the meaning of womanhood and the distinctive qualities of the feminine, Saint Gianna Beretta Molla exemplifies the unique heroism of women and women's distinctive vocation to love. Beyond her special importance for women, mothers, and those living the vocation of marriage, Saint Gianna is a message for all of us.

The church celebrates her new saint at a cultural moment when "choice" rarely means self-gift - making our lives the gift to others that our own lives are to us.

Saint Gianna Beretta Molla made a choice: a choice for love, even unto death, because she knew that "choice" in the truly human sense means freely choosing the good.

May her prayers at the Throne of Grace strengthen us in living and defending the Gospel of life.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.