In the Kitchen with My Mother

My mom had already gotten a fairly good start at being an only child by the time my grandmother decided, as one of her many vague and apologetic afterthoughts, to produce three more boys. Between my mom and the oldest of her siblings lay almost a decade of difference in age; her youngest brother was only in second grade by the time she’d married and given birth to me.

The Second World War forced my grandfather into service; my grandmother picked up a welding gun and worked as a Rosie the Riveter until he returned. In peacetime he kept the family afloat—barely—as a carpenter. He built the family’s home himself in the hills of what was then backwoods Georgia. My grandmother took a number of low-paying jobs to keep the ever-increasing number of mouths fed. Still, it wasn’t until my mom was in high school that the family graduated from an outhouse to indoor plumbing.

My mother had learned how to deal with colicky infants and change diapers before she’d mastered her times-tables; she’d been pressed into baking bread from scratch several times a week before she’d donned her first training bra. Every night, week in and week out of her youth, she prepared family dinners from the rawest and most local of ingredients while simultaneously she raised three children who weren’t her own all before her first adolescent date. She was parent to those boys, too—later in life all three of them professed that she had been more mother to them than the woman who gave them birth. When she managed to win a scholarship and become the first person in any branch of her family tree to go off to college, my youngest uncle for months was inconsolable that he’d lost his mommy.

It’s no wonder that when she had a household of her own, my mom wanted almost nothing to do with cooking. She’d already spent a lifetime in front of her mother’s oven. The automated kitchens of the nineteen-sixties would have seemed like space-age technology compared to the primitive conditions in which she’d toiled. However, the only thing she enjoyed about her electric oven with a timer, her dishwasher, and her vast harvest gold refrigerator/freezer was making herself a big pot of coffee, lacing it with cream, and ignoring them all as she curled up at the kitchen table with a Ngaio Marsh novel or a crossword and a cigarette.

In one of her rare moods, I might come home from school to find the house fragrant and yeasty from loaves of fluffy wheat bread she’d baked from scratch on whim. Once or twice I’d find her humming over a bubbling cog au vin she’d improvised. If she were in a good enough mood to roll out a batch of her favorite angel biscuits, they’d be so light they’d practically float to the ceiling. She was a fine cook, when she cared to be. For her, though, any romance the kitchen might have had was long dead.

Most of the time she’d regard the stove like a death row prisoner might the electric chair. From time to time my father would persuade her to make an ancient family recipe known as Briceland Meat Pie, which he and my sister adored and my mother and I loathed. The dish consisted basically of unseasoned chunks of fatty beef and overcooked potato sealed in homemade pie crust, baked until dry as a desert, then served scooped up in a bowl and drowned in a greasy jus made of the drippings. She’d accomplish each step of the recipe with a set mouth and a face as gray and grim as the end result itself. Every mouthful left the same aftertaste as a long-standing grudge.

She denied any responsibility for breakfasts, reasoning that any child who was old enough to no longer require breast feeding was old enough to open his own package of Pop-Tarts. School lunches she left to my father, who had the minimum agility required to capture some peanut butter and jelly between two slices of Wonder Bread. That left an awful lot of dinners, however. My mom was an early member of NOW and an avid and unabashed feminist and crusader for the Equal Rights Amendment who did not feel that enforced kitchen duties comprised any part of her life goals or career. She was also practical enough to recognize that she was the only member of the household who actually had know-how enough to extract ingredients from the pantry and combine them into something vaguely edible.

Convenience cooking was her only lifebuoy. It took only five minutes to stick three random tins—one of Campbell’s soup, say, one of deviled ham, and one of succotash—under the electric can opener, mix them into a casserole dish, and bake at 350° with a crumbling of canned onion rings on top for texture. That was an entire ninety minutes she didn’t have to spend over the stove. That was half a murder mystery. If forced to provide some god-damned cookies, as my mother would say, for a god-damned church youth group meeting or for school, her preferred approach was to dig around in the breadbox for a only slightly-desiccated package of old Fig Newtons to fling my way, but under the threat of shaming from other parents, she was a fan of the boxed cookie mix that required only a cup of water to reconstitute. When Hamburger Helper came out in the early nineteen-seventies, my mom stocked up on the whole line. Having to brown the beef was too much like real cooking, but she applauded the expediency of merely having to rip open a paper package and pour in water to finish the dish.

I think I made it all the way into my teens before it occurred to me that vegetables don’t naturally arrive in cans. The peas and carrots and corn and lima beans that were the staples of my youth, courtesy of Del Monte, went straight from their aluminum enclosure into a pot, then occupied the soggiest portion of my plate. The only fresh vegetable we ever saw was summer corn on the cob and the occasional chopped heads of bland iceberg lettuce. Even the latter arrived at the table drenched in a candy-sweet French dressing.

It was when I joined the Cub Scouts that my mother found a way to offload even more of her kitchen responsibilities. My mom hated all branches of the scouting organizations; she claimed they were fascist fronts that might as well be sharing office space with the Hitler Youth. My father was slightly inclined to agree with her on most political fronts, but he’d been an Eagle Scout as a lad and still had a secret soft spot for scouting. He lured me into the fold by strategically leaving his old scouting handbooks from the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties lying around where I could read them. The world of those handbooks—which depicted Aryan, unabashedly masculine, clean-cut youths with short hair and pressed uniforms learning Indian chants and exploring the pristine forests of an unindustrialized America—was as foreign to me as Narnia. It was also no less alluring because of that fact.

The day I came home wearing my Tiger Cub uniform and brandishing a copy of my new, updated handbook, which had considerably less talk of Indians and forestry, my mother confiscated it for her afternoon read, fully prepared to scorn the regressive patriarchal values brainwashing the youth of America on every page, I suspect. But when she saw there was an unabashedly masculine Cooking badge to be earned, she set aside all scoffing, looked at me speculatively, and came up with a plan.

At the branch library she found a copy of a book—little checked-out, from what I remember—called Cooking For Boys. The volume was bound in a virile brown and heavily illustrated with photos of hearty little boys wearing manly plaid shirts roasting haunches of meat over roaring bonfires with friendly Indians. It was ancient. I could tell that by the mere fact it dated from the vanished era of my dad’s scouting handbooks, in which one could apparently persuade boys into just about anything by throwing an American native into the mix. I don’t recall any of the recipes between those macho covers actually requiring open flames or freshly-butchred elk, for that matter. Most of them were about as complicated as ‘Cheese on Toast,’ which seemed pretty self-explanatory. But my mother pointed out the colorful cooking badge in the Cub Scout manual, showed me the library book, and announced that I was going to learn to cook! That it would be fun! That my future girlfriends would be so impressed by my culinary skills! Especially if said skills extended beyond the chili made from cans and the peanut butter sandwiches that were my father’s exclusive specialty!

So I learned to make scrambled eggs. At the time I thought transforming raw eggs, a little milk, and some butter into something delicious and edible was something of a minor miracle. It was like real-world alchemy, and I was fascinated. I’d grown up on Pop Tarts and Danish-Go-Rounds. I might not have even had scrambled eggs until that point. I instantly became the first grade’s Scrambled Eggs Champion, permitted—if not encouraged by a pair of parents who wanted to spend Saturday mornings in bed—to make the family’s weekend breakfasts.

From there I swiftly graduated to a Cooking for Boys dinner in the form of individual rustic stews prepared in aluminum foil. I seem to recall they consisted of chunks of beef and potatoes and perhaps carrots mixed with some kind of primitive sauce—ketchup, maybe—in a bundle of foil screwed into a taper at the top. Once they’d thoroughly baked in the oven, I’d carefully transfer them onto a plate and we’d all open them at the table. When the built-up steam had dissipated, we’d dig into the deliciously savory contents.

My mother’s canny plan worked. Not only did I earn my cooking badge within mere weeks, but it wasn’t too long before I’d more or less willingly assumed a share of dinner duties on my own. I could whip up a Hamburger Helper meal with only a minimum of supervision from the executive chef, who was taking a permanent cigarette-and-coffee break at the kitchen table. When eventually I could be trusted at the stove by myself, I followed my mother’s example and made up my own casserole dinners from random boxes and cans in the pantry (Rice-a-roni, say, with ground beef and a can of corn). I could even make my own damned cookies for the god-damned church youth group.

What my mother always found strangest, however, as I took over more and more cooking duties the older I grew, is how little I actually minded it. I never did. I still don’t.

She would have found very curious and repellant the modern nostalgia for homes centered around the kitchen, or for cuisine done the old, hard way without boxes or convenience ingredients. That there exist entire popular cable networks around cooking would have baffled her. If she were still around and knew I hadn’t eaten a canned vegetable or brought home a head of iceberg lettuce since I was in college—that I willingly pluck brussels sprouts from the stalk or snap green beans by hand, despite the time involved—she would’ve shrugged and given me one of those it’s-your-life-I-guess looks, as if I’d declared I wanted to join what she declared an oddball religious cult, like the Unitarian-Universalists.

I would never suggest that growing up on canned vegetables, meals made from boxes, cheese from a can, or frosting from a cardboard container is a fantastic diet. It isn’t. I still make things from boxes, on occasion. I appreciate having a few time-saving recipes in my arsenal. Generally these days, however, I tend to prefer taking the longer and less convenient route to preparing meals.

Yet during those idle moments I find myself clipping recipes from the web, ordering cookbooks even before their publication date, or mentally planning out dinners weeks in advance, it pays to remind myself that what some people dream of, others flee as their worst nightmare.