Evva Hanes, a North Carolina farm woman who took a centuries-old Moravian cookie tradition that she had learned by watching her mother bake on a wood-fired stove and turned it into a family business, one that now ships out millions of fragile, crispy Moravian cookies every year, died on June 22 at her home in Clemmons, N.C. She was 90.
The cause was complications of 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.
Before the American Revolutionary War, some left for Pennsylvania, taking with them a recipe for a spice-heavy ginger cookie called Lebkuchen.
They kept moving, and in the mid-1700s began a religious community on a large tract of land in North Carolina that would become the city of Winston-Salem.
The Southern food scholar John Egerton wrote that the North Carolina Moravians, like the Pennsylvania Dutch — whom he called “their theological and gastronomical kin” — have maintained a strong baking tradition that is hundreds of years old.
Persons:
Evva Hanes, Jedidiah Hanes Templin, Hanes ’, John Egerton
Organizations:
Sugar Crisp Company, Eastern, Pennsylvania, North Carolina Moravians, Pennsylvania Dutch
Locations:
North Carolina, Clemmons, N.C, Germany, Winston, Salem, The, North, Pennsylvania