Evva Hanes, who made Moravian cookies world famous, dies at 90

She made several varieties of thin, crispy cookies at a factory near her home in North Carolina, and sold 10 million a year.

Evva Hanes, a North Carolina farmer who took an age-old Moravian cookie tradition she learned from watching her mother bake on a wood stove and transformed it in a family business, which now ships millions of fragile, crispy Moravian cookies each year, died June 22 at her home in Clemmons, N.C. She was 90.

The cause was complications from brain cancer, said her grandson Jedidiah Hanes Templin, who is president of the Moravian Sugar Crisp Company, better known as Mrs. Hanes' Hand-Made Moravian Cookies.

The Moravians were pre-Reformation Eastern European Protestants who sought refuge from persecution in Germany. Before the American Revolution, some left for Pennsylvania, taking with them the recipe for a spice-rich gingerbread cookie called Lebkuchen.

They kept moving, and in the mid-1700s they started a religious community on a large tract of land in North Carolina that would become the town of Winston-Salem. Southern food scholar John Egerton has written that the Moravians of North Carolina, like the Dutch of Pennsylvania - whom he called "theological and gastronomical relatives" - maintained a strong tradition of baking centuries old. hundreds of years.

Debbie Moose, a North Carolina cookbook author who wrote about Mrs. Hanes and other Moravian bakers, remembered from a time when you could only find the cookie in the Winston-Salem area.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">"It's so unique," she said in an interview. "You haven't even seen it in other parts of the state."

Ms. Hanes, the youngest of seven children, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of thin cookies to supplement the little money the family's small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women also sold cookies, adhering to a recipe with molasses and warm winter spices, such as cloves and ginger, which were popular at Christmas.

Mrs. Foltz began cooking a crunchy version with a vanilla flavor to differentiate itself and extend the selling season. At 8 years old, Evva could cook them herself. By age 20, she had taken over the business from her mother and was slowly starting to expand it, selling the original sugar crisps as well as the traditional ginger version, but also other flavors, such as lemon and walnut. black.

In 2010, cookies were so popular that Oprah Winfrey added them to her list of "favorite things". "It wouldn't be Christmas if Quincy Jones didn't send me Mrs. Hanes cookies," she wrote in her magazine.

Cookies are always rolled, cut and hand-packed, with around 10 million a year sold to locals - who stop by the company's small factory, next to the family home, to pick up a few boxes - as well as a solid list of domestic customers and international.

"I could make 100 pounds of cookies in eight hours if someone was baking, and I wouldn't stop for anything," Ms. Hanes said in a recent oral history produced by the Southern Foodways Alliance. "I'm an expert on time and movement, I guess, because I didn't make any movements that weren't necessary."

ImageMs. Hanes in 2000. His philosophy for his family business was, "We made everything we could make and sold everything we could make and every year we made a little more."Credit...Allie Brown/ Winston-Salem Journal

Evva Caroline Foltz was born November 7, 1932, in Clemmons, a suburb of Winston-Salem, to Alva and Bertha (Crouch) Foltz, descendants of Penny...