Oh the Horror...Lady Fingers

As a child I begged to be told scary stories. And not just at Halloween or beside a campfire, but daily, hourly, at any moment I thought my pestering might produce something that would give me nightmares. Papaw, as he is called, was always willing to indulge this taste for fear. And he didn't hold back. From the age I could sit still long enough to hear an entire story, he filled my mind with genuinely horrific sounds and images.

Needless to say, I was a very frightened child. Certain that the beast under my bed would take advantage of every chance to pull me down and noisily devour me, I made sure to never allow my feet to dangle over the edge of the bed. Each night I fought to fall asleep in my blanket cocoon, trying to banish thoughts of the moaning corpse that might, the moment I closed my eyes, stumble from the closet door. Monsters lived in the basement laundry room and the attic as well. Sometimes I even thought that the glowing eyes of the cat that sat on my window sill at night showed devilish signs of intelligence. The first "adult" books I checked out of the public library were written by Stephen King. Pet Cemetery tormented me by day and by night. I read it twice.

The scariest story in Papaw's rotation was about a man named Jack who worked at a saw mill. A railroad ran right by his station, but he hardly noticed when the coal trains rushed by. His eyes had been ruined by flying splinters, and he had become near-deaf from the buzz of his saw. One evening when he was working late, he failed to hear the train coming and wandered too close to the tracks. He was dragged down by the train and his hand was cut clean off under a wheel. Jack's corpse was discovered the following morning by one of his coworkers, but his hand could not be found. A few people claim to have seen it, though, dragging itself along the ground by its fingers through train yards, searching blindly for the driver of the train that severed it from its body.

At this point, Papaw would demonstrate how Jack's hand slowly moved. Then his hand would turn towards me, and I would squeal, run out of the room (leaping past the door to the cellar which I knew was populated by giant rats), take a few deep breaths, and then start begging for another scary story.

I wonder now and then how these stories shaped my current feelings about bones (of both the edible and venerable sort), and my academic work which, to the discomfort of friends and family, concerns body fluids, monstrosities, illness, corpses, and wombs. Fortunately, my fear of the dark, disembodied hands, and hairy forest-dwelling creatures has been channeled into the pursuit of post-graduate degrees...and cookie baking.

I may in future years attempt pastry in the form of Jack's hand, but this Halloween I settled for lady fingers.


Although I find this photo disturbing, I didn't think that it quite captures the freakish quality of my Jack's Hand nightmares. This version gets closer:


Pretty scary, huh?

The recipe for these almond-flavored cookies with red-tinged almond nails can be found (along with other gruesome Halloween edibles) here. They are nice with morning coffee if your stomach can tolerate fingers at that hour.

My Lady Fingers started out all knobby and spindly like I imagine witch fingers to be, but once I put them in the oven, they started to swell to monstrous proportions. Obese Lady Fingers may, in the end, be scarier.

Ms. Stewart has a recipe for pretzel Lady Fingers here. Should you own a cast-iron, cauldron-like pot, you might prefer this recipe, as it calls for the fingers to be boiled before baking.