Cherry Dew Dumplings

I called Ruthie Mae this week. Wednesday afternoon. The usual time. The nurse said, "She's having a middling day, Mrs. Henderson." Middling. Not good, not bad. The dementia's version of overcast — not sunny, not storming, just gray. The gray days are the hardest because on the gray days Ruthie Mae is half here and half gone, and you can see both halves at the same time, and the seeing is the cruelest part.

She came to the phone. "Hello?" she said. I said, "Ruthie Mae, it's Dot." She was quiet. Not the good quiet — the searching quiet, the quiet of a mind looking for a file that used to be right there on the desk and has been moved to somewhere it can't find. Then: "Dot. Dot is... my sister?" A question. Not a statement. She was asking, not telling. She was checking whether the word matched the face in her mind, whether "Dot" was a name or a sound or something she used to know.

"Yes, baby," I said. "I'm your sister Dot. I'm the one who cooks." A pause. And then, quietly: "You cook good, Dot." Three words. Present tense. Not "you cooked good" — "you cook good." She knows, somewhere in the gray, that I cook. The cooking is the fact that the disease can't erase. The cooking is the identity that survives the forgetting. Dorothy cooks. That is the last thing Ruthie Mae will remember about me, and when she forgets that, she will have forgotten everything, and I will still call on Wednesdays, and I will still tell her about the garden and the babies and the food, because the telling is for me as much as it is for her.

I told her about Pearl. "Ruthie Mae, Kayla had another baby. A girl. They named her Pearl. After Mama." And there was silence. And I don't know if the word "Pearl" found anything inside her — found the memory of our mother, found the kitchen, found the shotgun house — but I said it anyway, because the saying is the honoring, and the honoring doesn't require comprehension.

Made red rice tonight. Ruthie Mae's favorite. The Gullah rice. The rice I make every time I visit her or call her, the rice that connects the phone line to the kitchen to the shotgun house to the girl who followed me around and stole my biscuits. The rice doesn't reach Augusta. But the love does. The love always does.

Now go on and feed somebody.

The red rice was already done — had been done since before the call, really, because I’d started it the moment I picked up the phone, the way I always do, like the cooking is the prayer I say while I’m waiting to hear her voice. But after I hung up and sat with those three words — you cook good, Dot — I needed something sweet, something that came together easy and asked nothing hard of me. These Cherry Dew Dumplings are that thing: soft, a little sticky, the kind of dessert you pour together and let the oven carry. I’ve made them after hard calls and after good ones, and they taste right either way, which is all you can ask of a recipe when the day has been middling.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 40 minutes | Total Time: 50 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

2 cans (8 oz each) refrigerated crescent roll dough
1 can (21 oz) cherry pie filling
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon almond extract (optional, but it brings out the cherry)
1 can (12 oz) Mountain Dew soda

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Heat your oven to 350°F. Lightly butter a 9x13-inch baking dish and set it aside.
Fill the dough. Unroll the crescent dough and separate into triangles. Spoon a heaping tablespoon of cherry pie filling onto the wide end of each triangle. Roll each one up from the wide end toward the point, tucking the filling in as you go, and place them seam-side down in the prepared baking dish.
Make the pour-over. In a small bowl, stir together the melted butter, sugar, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and almond extract if using. Spoon this mixture evenly over the top of all the dumplings.
Add the dew. Slowly pour the Mountain Dew around — not over — the dumplings in the pan. The soda settles into the bottom and creates a caramel-like bubbling sauce as it bakes. Do not stir.
Bake. Place the dish in the oven and bake uncovered for 38 to 42 minutes, until the tops are deep golden brown and the sauce is thick and bubbling at the edges. The dumplings should look glossy and set.
Rest and serve. Let the dumplings rest for 10 minutes before serving so the sauce can settle. Spoon the pan sauce over each dumpling when you plate it. Serve warm, with vanilla ice cream if you’ve got it, or just as they are if you don’t.

Nutrition (per serving)

Cherry Dew Dumplings — The Sweet I Make When the Saying Has to Be Enough