Evva Hanes, Who Made Moravian Cookies World Famous, Dies at 90

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.

The Moravians were pre-Reformation Protestants from what is now the Czech Republic who sought refuge from persecution in Germany. Before the American Revolution, 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 they 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…