Stories From Candyland (18 page)

M
y father always believed his son should study economics and his daughter should study
home
economics. It made sense to me. My mother was a superb cook, and my father enjoyed telling us that he paid for the food that turned into the great meals she cooked.

When I was eleven I wrote an article for our local newspaper to thank my father for the best gift ever. I called it “How I Gave My Father an Ulcer with My New Betty Crocker
Cooking Set,” and I wrote about how I didn’t know what I was doing and now I was being trusted to make actual food. I was seriously worried that my cooking experiments might not be good for my father—and then he developed an ulcer, whatever that was. I was sorry. He seemed amused, but he also seemed to enjoy my mother’s cooking a little less. I soon graduated from my Betty Crocker set to the real thing, next to my mother in our kitchen, and we shared some of the best times ever.

My mother’s kitchen was equipped with everything a 1950s cook would want, and we used every piece of equipment. She kept scrapbooks, folders, index cards, newspaper clippings, cents-off coupons with recipes on the back, handwritten notes from long-lost relatives, and magazine ads, totaling thousands of recipes, which I still treasure today.

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” my mother always said, quoting the unlikely pundit Fanny Fern, who wrote these words in 1853.

And our kitchen was the ultimate tool to satisfy the stomach and win the heart.

Our
Woman’s Home Companion Household Book
suggested a new concept for kitchens in the late 1940s, and my mother was among the first to buy:

. . . a desk and chair where you can plan meals, make grocery lists, and do all the other things which require thought and writing.

This is very efficient and a business-like idea . . . and the addition of a telephone on the desk will, again, save endless steps.

She got the desk, chair, and phone, and many more of our future steps were confined to the kitchen.

Mom and I worked side by side, creating stews and stroganoffs, desserts and sauces, appetizers and seafood, entrees and hors d’oeuvres, everything from veal piccata to vinaigrette dressing, layered pear and Roquefort cheese salad, to no-bake brownies and bouillabaisse. When I look at her recipe books, I see her handwriting and mine, side by side, as we experimented together, sometimes improving the published recipes, sometimes further tweaking our improvised improvements. It was all there, from stuffed cabbage with sauerkraut to popovers, from soup to gingerbread cookies with extra whipped cream, tri-tip pot roast to sour cream coffee cake, from steamed lobster tails to fried chicken. Tori especially loved the chicken casserole, Cornish game hens, and sour cream coffee cake, and made sure she took those recipes with her when she moved out.

I excelled in cooking and sewing in school, which satisfied my own ambitions and those of my parents. I never aspired to higher office, but I became president of the Home Economics Club in high school. My father was so proud. And I won second place in the Gold Medal Cake Bake Contest. My mother announced I should have tried harder.

Cooking was so much fun. My cooking teacher let me cook for faculty meetings. Before that, it never occurred to me that teachers actually ate food, and now here they were eating my food! What a thrill.

Later, I became the cooking teacher’s assistant and taught cooking to the freshman girls. I would start with the advice my mother always gave me: “Make sure all your ingredients are in front of you before you begin. There’s nothing worse than getting well into cooking the meal and discovering you don’t have everything.” I remember the students in my class writing this down, and for about four seconds, I considered becoming a teacher.

I couldn’t wait until Tori was old enough for us to start cooking together. When we had a chef, he or she would be exiled from the kitchen so Tori and I could bond the way my mother and I did. When Tori was little, I had the child-proof locks removed from two of the kitchen cabinets so she could delight in finding utensils and pots and pans that looked like mine. She especially loved banging her wooden spoon on the counter, and I remember wondering how my mother would have responded to such noise. I loved it. Maybe we’d open a restaurant together someday. But my plan didn’t last long. Tori was too impatient, would decide we were missing ingredients, and then move on to something else.

My mother and I never stopped practicing. She was so organized (all right, so am I). We had a book full of bread recipes. Our favorite was monkey bread, and I remember
her letting me write out the recipe, line by line, ingredient by ingredient, so we would always have it. She not only kept it, but made copies of it, which I found later in all of her notebooks and file boxes of recipes. Later, we modified it and made monkey bread popovers.

I loved baking the most, and my mother preferred cooking. We made a perfect team. I liked it when she gave me tips and we shared our cooking and baking secrets. She loved to pass along information she’d learned, assuming she agreed with it. She told me it was hard to fail at cooking. “If it doesn’t come out right, you can always adapt the recipe,” she said, as we adapted Betty Crocker, General Mills, Mr. Kraft, or whomever we were improving. That wasn’t the case with baking, where the measurements had to be precise.

My mother was also good at
taking
tips.

She kept the dog-eared copy of
The Woman
magazine that she’d read during her pregnancy. She’d marked up the story “Are Drugstore Meals Good For You?,” writing a big “NO!” on it.

The magazine answered its own question:

Yes, says this nation-wide survey of menus and preferences. The food sold at our soda fountains is well balanced, nutritious and economical.

“Don’t believe this story,” my mother told me. Of course, I would never have seen it had she not shown it to me.

Stating that twenty-five million meals were served in U.S. drugstores daily, the magazine reported, “Young stenographers and office workers are the chief patrons, and their grandmothers have been warning them: ‘You’ll ruin your digestion eating such food.’ ”

My mother was clearly on the side of the grandmothers. We never ate in a drugstore.

She and I also shared her favorite cookbooks, including
The Original Boston Cooking-School Cook Book
, the 1896 book by Fannie Farmer. Mrs. Farmer agreed with my mother about the importance of cooking. Her dedication thanked people for “promoting the work of scientific cookery, which means the elevation of the human race.”

Neat. My mother and I were elevating the human race!

Farmer continued:

Cookery is the art of preparing food for the nourishment of the body. Prehistoric man might have lived on uncooked foods, but there are no such races to-day who do not practice cookery in some way, however crude.

I wasn’t so sure about that, but my mother assured me we were far away from anyone crude or prehistoric. I thought about Fannie Farmer whenever we visited one of the dinosaur exhibits at the museum. I knew they didn’t practice the art of cookery, but it was clear they ate a lot.

I keep my mother’s copy of
America’s Cook Book
because I
remember how excited she was when she got it. She read to me that this fourth edition had “speed” and “ease” in mind. But the exciting part was that it had a whole section devoted to pressure cookers, and there were recipes from thirty-eight countries to “bring the world into your kitchen.”

Becoming international was a great idea to me. I learned other languages with fancy-sounding words like
cordon bleu, soufflé, éclair, chop suey, goulash, spareribs Reykjavík, café brûlé, café diablo, kebab, chicken cacciatore, polenta con salsiccia
, and
egg foo yung
. Ooh la la!

One of the few times I was secure in life was when I was cooking. I loved cooking for Aaron when we got married, and there were many times when we didn’t have chefs on staff. My specialty and his favorite was fried chicken, but he ate everything I cooked. He was most partial to anything fried that he could top with ketchup, but he also loved pork chops, my mushroom barley soup, chicken and rice (with my special onion soup), beef Bourguignon, and stew with lots of gravy.

The ultimate compliment came when my parents had a dinner party to celebrate their wedding anniversary, and they asked me to cook for it.

My biggest culinary mistake was probably the easiest job I ever had. One day Aaron said he wanted hot cereal, but I had never made (or eaten) it. I ran out and bought Cream of Wheat and couldn’t wait until the next morning, when I would prepare it for him. Instead of looking like the picture
on the box, though, it bubbled, formed lumps, and smelled really bad.

My willpower failed. I upchucked the smelly, lumpy, ugly stuff. I hit my stove and the counter, and ran around spreading my mess over the rest of my spotless kitchen. I was horrified. My husband was a remarkably good sport and so sweet.

“I’ll just have toast, hon,” he said. “I can make it.” For the many years we were married, neither of us ever ate hot cereal or anything with lumps.

My kids were great eaters. Aaron usually worked late, so I fed the kids early. That part actually worked out quite well. I’d always present their food to them positively, as when teaching them to eat vegetables. Had I let them stay up late to eat dinner with their father when they were really young, they would have seen their father making faces and complaining about vegetables. This way, they didn’t get any negative food messages. I wonder if that’s in Dr. Spock’s book.

When Randy and Tori moved into their first apartments, I gave each of them a copy of
The Joy of Cooking
. First, though, I added some of my handwritten notes on some of the recipes. My mother had taught me well, so I thought I’d pass along the cooking expertise to my own children. Later I learned that Tori had raided some of my recipe notebooks and file boxes containing mine and her grandmother’s recipes. I should have been flattered, but I wanted my recipes back! (
Note to Tori:
Give them back.)

Among the dozens of cookbooks in my kitchen are those my parents gave me as presents over the years. Each has its own words of wisdom.

My mother said she was constantly inspired by her
America’s Cook Book
:

Planning three meals a day for your family is a boring task only if you choose to regard it that way. Consider it a challenging game with high stakes and you and your family will both benefit. You’ll find that they’ll appreciate your efforts and you yourself will gain a real feeling of satisfaction.

By the time I started getting my own cookbooks, society was changing, and there were bigger challenges up ahead.

My 1960 copy of
Menus for Entertaining: 72 Parties and 400 Recipes for the Good Cook and Hostess
begins with:

The civilized, three-star occasion dinner party has not completely vanished, fortunately. But the single standard of entertaining will not, we trust, return in any form.

There are no formulas to rely on any more. You do have to stop and think.

I thought of my mother’s little kitchen “business center,” her place to stop and think and make grocery lists.

I liked three-star-occasion dinner parties, and I wanted to cook for one. I didn’t worry too much, though. My book had formulas for summer (and winter), formal breakfasts for twelve, teenage parties for ten, Christmas Eve open houses for a hundred or more, and three chapters on the “Informal Summer Luncheon for 4.” With all that learning to do, there wasn’t much time to agonize about fewer parties.

One of my high-school graduation presents was
The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook
, an update of my mother’s trusty old friend. This 1963 edition was talking right to me, as it identified groups of American women such as “young brides who valiantly cope with the complexities of new marriage” and “young high school or college graduates.” I already knew most of the recipes, so I was way ahead of everyone else.

My new book had full-page color photos of hams, chicken curry, caramel apple dumplings, chocolate cinnamon tortes, and more. I thought that if I ever needed a change, some of these photos would be suitable for framing and would look good when I had my own kitchen walls to decorate.

When I did get my own apartment, my mother loaned me one of her true prizes,
The Cordon Bleu Cook Book
. It made me feel very important.

The Blue Ribbon, or Cordon Bleu, is of special significance to those who know and enjoy good food. . .. Originally, the term Cordon Bleu was used in France to
designate noblemen who entertained their guests with supreme munificence.

I wasn’t sure what that meant. I only knew that blue ribbons were tops, and my mother trusted me with her prized book. I memorized the glossary, which went from
artichauts
(globe artichokes) to
vin ordinaire
(table wine).