Evva Hanes, a North Carolina farm woman who used a centuries-old Moravian cookie tradition she learned from watching her mother bake on a wood-burning stove and turn it into a family business. family, a business that now ships millions of crispy, fragile Moravian crackers annually, died on June 22 at her home in Clemmons, NC, at the age of 90.
Her grandson Jedidiah Hanes Templin, president of the Moravian Sugar Crisp Company, better known as Ms. Hanes’ handmade Moravian Cookies, said the cause was complications from brain cancer.
The Moravians were pre-Reformation Protestants from the present-day Czech Republic who sought refuge from persecution in Germany. Before the American Revolution, a number of people came to Pennsylvania, bringing with them a spiced gingerbread recipe called Lebkuchen.
They continued to move, and in the mid-1700s they began to form a religious community on a large tract of land in North Carolina in what would become the city of Winston-Salem. Southern culinary scholar John Egerton has written that the Moravians of North Carolina, like the Dutch of Pennsylvania—whom he called “their culinary and theological relatives”—maintained a tradition of making food. Cakes are hundreds of years old.
Debbie Moose, a North Carolina cookbook author who has written about Hanes and other Moravian cookie bakers, recalls a time when you could only find cookies in the Winston area. – Salem.
“It’s weird,” she said in an interview. “You don’t even see it in other parts of the state.”
Hanes, the youngest of seven, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of thin biscuits to supplement the meager money the family’s small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women also sell cookies, following a recipe principle with molasses and warm winter spices, like cloves and ginger, popular around Christmas.
Ms. Foltz started baking a vanilla-flavored crunchy version as a way to differentiate and extend the sales season. By the age of 8, Evva can bake them herself. By the age of 20, she took over her mother’s business and gradually began to expand it, selling the original sugary crisps as well as the traditional ginger version but eventually with additional flavors. others, like lemons and black walnuts.
By 2010, cookies had become so popular that Oprah Winfrey added them to her “favorites” list. “It wouldn’t have been Christmas if Quincy Jones hadn’t sent me Mrs. Hanes’ cookies,” she wrote in her magazine.
The cakes are still rolled, cut and packed by hand. They sell more than $2 million a year — that’s about 10 million cookies — both to locals who drop by the company’s small factory next door to the family home and to a large list of customers. domestic and international.
“I can make 100 pounds of cookies in eight hours if someone bakes them and I don’t stop for anything,” Ms. Hanes said in a recent article. oral history produced by Southern Foodways Alliance. “I’m an expert in time and motion, I guess, because I don’t do any unnecessary action.”
Evva Caroline Foltz was born on November 7, 1932, in Clemmons, a suburb of Winston-Salem, to Alva and Bertha (Crouch) Foltz, descendants of the Moravian colonists of Pennsylvania. A shy, freckled redhead with a serious work ethic and natural aptitude for sports, Evva is a high school basketball star who is recruited to work as a wire tester. nylon at the Hanes Knitting Factory (not related), partly so she could play company basketball. team.
“I’m still good at basketball,” she wrote in a 2017 holiday letter to clients. She wrote the letters every year until 2022, when she completed her autobiography. , “What more could I ask for,” which she herself published this year.
In 1998, she self-published a 600-recipe cookbook, “Six o’clock and We Don’t Wait,” based on dishes she would cook for hearty dinners almost weekly. .
The family cookie business was still a small kitchen business when she married Travis Hanes, a salesman for a chewing gum and gum company, on June 13, 1952. who met in 8th grade and he was the only boyfriend she had ever had.
“I know she’s looking for a husband,” Hanes said in a 2019 video for Our State magazine. “I didn’t know she was looking for a future employee. She has both.”
Together they grew the business, appearing at trade shows, state fairs, and anywhere else they thought they could find customers. By 1970, the business was so successful that they built a bakery next to the family home.
“We are tired of waking up every morning to the smell of cookies,” Ms. Hanes said in her oral history. They then added seven more times, relying on a team of seasoned bakers, mostly women, who had learned the craft under the master’s hands.
In addition to her grandson Jedidiah, Mrs. Hanes is survived by her husband; their four children, Ramona Hanes Templin, Caroline Hanes Fordham and Michael and Jonathan Hanes; six other grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Ms. Hanes has been active in the 250-year-old Friedberg Moravian Church. The church is located on the same street as the house her great-grandfather built in 1842 – where she was born and where she died. All of her children and grandchildren live nearby. Many work or have worked in the family business, carrying a philosophy that Ms. Hanes often repeats:
“We do all we can and sell all we can and every year we make a little bit more.”
