North Carolina farmer Eva Haynes turned the centuries-old Moravian cookie tradition she learned from watching her mother bake in the wood stove into a family business that now makes fragile, crispy cookies. has shipped millions of She made Moravian cookies every year, but she died at her home in Clemons, North Carolina on June 22, aged 90.
The cause was complications from a brain tumor, said grandson Jedidiah Haynes Templin, president of the Moravian Sugar Crisp Company, known as Mrs. Haynes’ Homemade Moravian Cookies.
The Moravians were Protestants in pre-Reformation Eastern Europe who were trying to escape persecution in Germany. Before the American Revolutionary War, some people left for Pennsylvania with a recipe for spiced ginger cookies called lebkuchen.
They continued to move, and in the mid-1700s established a religious community in the vast North Carolina land that would become the city of Winston-Salem. Southern food scholar John Egerton notes that the North Carolina Moravian, like the Pennsylvania Dutch, calls him a “kind of theology and gastronomy,” with a strong bread-making tradition spanning hundreds of years. It says that it maintains
Debbie Moose, a North Carolina cookbook author who wrote about Mrs. Haynes and other Moravian cookie bakers, recalled a time when cookies could only be found in the Winston-Salem area.
“It’s very peculiar,” she said in an interview. “I haven’t seen it in other parts of the state either.”
The youngest of seven children, Mrs. Haynes grew up watching her mother, Berta Foltz, bake and sell hundreds of thin cookies to supplement the little money the family’s small dairy ran. Other Moravian women sold cookies as well. A recipe that uses molasses and warm winter spices such as cloves and ginger that were popular around Christmas.
As a way to differentiate and extend shelf life, Mrs. Foltz began baking a vanilla-scented, crispy version. By the time she was eight, Eva was able to bake her own bread. By the age of 20 she had taken over her mother’s business and began to slowly expand her business, selling her version of the original Sugar Her Crisp and Traditional Ginger, but eventually also sold other flavors such as lemon and black walnut.
By 2010, the cookie was so popular that Oprah Winfrey added it to her favorite list. “It wouldn’t be Christmas if Quincy Jones didn’t send Mrs. Haynes cookies,” she wrote in the magazine.
The cookies are still rolled, cut and packed by hand, and about 10 million per year are sold to locals (who visit the company’s small factory next door to their parents’ house to pick up a few cans) and , are sold to people on a strong list. of domestic and foreign customers.
“I could have made 100 pounds of cookies in eight hours if someone had baked them. I stopped for nothing,” Mrs Haynes said in a recent article. dictation history Produced by Southern Foodways Alliance. “I consider myself an expert in time and movement because I didn’t do any unnecessary movements.”
Eva Caroline Foltz was born on November 7, 1932, in Clemmons, a suburb of Winston-Salem, to Alva Foltz and Bertha (Crouch) Foltz, descendants of Moravian settlers in Pennsylvania. A shy, freckled redhead with a strong work ethic and natural athleticism, Eva was a star basketball player in high school who joined the Hanes Sock Factory (relationship) partly to play company basketball for his team. No) was hired for a nylon inspection job. .
“I still play basketball very well,” she wrote in a 2017 holiday letter to clients. She will write every year until 2022, completing her autobiography, What More Could I Ask For, this year.
In 1998, she self-published a cookbook, Supper’s at Six and We’re Not Waiting, with 600 recipes based on the dishes she made for the big dinners she used to make almost every week.
The family cookie business was still a small kitchen enterprise when she married gum and candy company salesman Travis Haynes on June 13, 1952. The two met during her eighth grade and he was her only boyfriend.
“I knew she was looking for a husband,” Haines said in a 2019 video for Our State magazine. She said, “She didn’t know she was looking for her future employee. She got both.”
Together they grew their business, exhibiting at trade fairs, state fairs and wherever they could find customers. By 1970 the business had grown so large that he built a bakery next door to his parents’ house.
“We were tired of waking up to the smell of cookies every morning,” Mrs. Haines told Oral History. Since then, they’ve added bread seven times, relying on a long-time baking staff, mostly women, who have learned the craft in the hands of masters.
Mrs Haynes has a husband in addition to her grandson Jedidiah. Their four children, Ramona Haynes Templin, Caroline Haynes Fordham, Michael & Jonathan Haynes. Six other grandchildren. and three great-grandchildren.
Mrs Haynes was active in the 250-year-old Friedberg Moravian Church. It’s on the same road as her great-grandfather built her 1842 home, where she was born and died. Her children and her grandchildren all live nearby. Many work, or have worked, in the family business and carry on a philosophy often repeated by Mrs. Haynes:
“We made everything we could make, sold everything we could make, and made a few more every year.”
