I grew up cooking for my parents. I started with scrambled eggs at the age of seven, and was put on regular weekend breakfast duty as soon as I could prove that I wouldn’t set the kitchen ablaze, or burn the food. When I joined the Cub Scouts, I learned to make such delicacies as campfire hobo stew—chunks of meat and vegetables seasoned with salt and pepper and Worcester sauce, wrapped in aluminum foil, and tossed over an open flame. At the age of 9 when my parents were out, I attempted my first recipe from the checkered Betty Crocker cookbook—chocolate eclairs. They looked and tasted like eclairs. Pretty damned good eclairs, in fact. My ambitions betrayed me into service, however; since I could follow a recipe, I subsequently was assigned dinner duty for the two or three nights a week my parents both had afternoon classes to teach.
My juvenile culinary repertoire wasn’t large. I could form and broil hamburger patties, or pull off a variety of dishes involving ground beef and a box of Hamburger Helper or Rice-a-Roni (I still make porcupine meatballs using Rice-a-Roni to this day). I could bread chicken with cornflakes and seasoning and parmesan cheese from a shaker and set it to bake, and I could replicate a creation of my mom’s she called Chicken with Celery Soup, a casserole that required several cans from Campbell, two cups of Minute Rice, and an iron-clad stomach to keep it down. I could bread cubed steaks and fry them in oil, and serve them with mashed potatoes and grilled onions. By the time I was ten, I knew how to plan a meal and accompany it with starches and vegetables. I knew to remember to make rolls. My father insisted that it wasn’t a meal without a roll.
Rice-a-Roni meatballs aside, over the decades since I’ve left home I’ve become a much better cook. I enjoy trying new dishes and techniques. I scorn the boxes and mixes that defined my childhood. I make quarts of beans to freeze and use as sides or in other dishes; I’ve made my own jams and jellies. For years I had my own little kefir production facility. I’m proud that one of my skills is to keep a mental inventory of our pantry so that not only do I know at any given time what needs to be restocked, but if the week’s plans change, I can improvise meals on the spot. I make up many of my own recipes, and liberally improvise on others.
In October I left for an unprecedented five-week stay in Virginia, to take care of my father as he underwent radiation therapy for prostate cancer. In normal circumstances I wouldn’t necessarily have immured myself for so long; I could have arranged for drivers to take him to his morning appointments and spent a week here and there checking in. The pandemic’s tendency to throw the best-laid plans into disarray, however, meant that exposing my elderly dad to random Uber drivers, or having to venture out for his medicines, wouldn’t be a great idea.
My own doctor had told me in the middle of summer that given the situation with COVID-19, it would be best to bubble myself with my dad for an uninterrupted chunk, rather than travel back and forth or pass off the responsibility with my sister, week by week. I knew for some time that I’d have to be away from home for weeks or months. I knew, too, that I’d have to be the caregiver in a number of ways.
I confess to being guilty of foolishness: I indulged in sentimental reveries about cooking for my father. Usually when I visit we rely on restaurants for meals. Those visits are a mere handful of days, however, and this trip to Virginia was to last several weeks. Preparing meals is a form of nurture, for me, and I couldn’t think of any better way to shepherd my dad through his weeks of radiation therapy than giving him a nourishing, warm dinner to enjoy every night. And leftovers! I’d make dishes that yielded bountiful leftovers that he could eat for his lunches, or freeze to use as dinners after I’d gone.
I prepared for the trip by packing some things I might need to create a variety of meals. A large sheet pan. A cutting board. My rice cooker. A heavy cast-iron Dutch oven. Tumeric. Basil. Adobo seasoning. At the last minute, Craig suggested I take the Instant Pot, since I make a lot of meals in that. With all my recipes in the cloud at my fingertips, I departed for Virginia, my mind alight with rosy visions of sliding steaming bowls of hearty fare onto one of my dad’s plastic placemats of Gettysburg or Harper’s Ferry or some other laminated memorial of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century American history, whereupon I would bask in the glow of a good deed well done.
My first full day in Richmond, after my dad’s treatment was done in the morning, I sat down with him back at his house and explained that we’d do something similar to what I’d been doing at home, all during the pandemic: we’d cook our own meals six days out of the week, and do takeout on Friday nights, to celebrate another week down of radiation sessions. He seemed agreeable, so we sat down to plan meals and make a list. “Is there anything,” I asked, “other than the two dishes you know I will refuse to make, that you would enjoy for dinner this week?”
“Liver and onions?” he said, with cunning.
I recognized the strategy. By naming something he loves, but knows to which I and any other sane person would object, he was hoping to get some bargaining leverage. “Is there anything,” I repeated, keeping my voice level, “other than the three dishes you know I will refuse to make, that you’d enjoy for dinners this week that we both would eat?”
“What are the other two dinners you won’t make?”
“You know what they are.”
“Meat pie?”
I nodded. He was correct. Briceland Meat Pie is a terrible heirloom recipe passed down within the family for generations that, if I have anything to do with it, will die out for good in my own. It’s a labor-intensive dish with absolutely no payoff whatsoever in taste. My mother would joylessly make it by cooking stew beef and potatoes in a rickety, hissing old pressure cooker; the mixture, which was completely unseasoned—not even with salt or pepper—would be spread atop one layer of homemade pie crust in a rectangular glass dish, then covered with another layer of pie crust, and baked. The resulting pie was basically a particularly bland pasty. Instead of eating it crispy out of the oven, however, each slice is placed into a bowl and then drowned with the liquid left in the pressure cooker. The jus, as it is grandly called, is gray and flavorless and tastes like dirty laundry water.
Again, I must emphasize that there is absolutely no seasoning in the recipe. The jus picks up all of the grease and none of the flavor of the beef. Once doused with hot scummy water, the pie crust becomes gummy. The whole thing is a mess. My father, however, loves Briceland Meat Pie. My mom would occasionally cave in and cook it for him because she was at times a good sport, but she and I would pick at it with our spoons and cast each other sympathetic glances across the kitchen table while he would tuck in with gusto.
“Correct,” I said. “I will never, ever make meat pie for you.”
My father paused, as if considering playing the Sick Old Man With Cancer card. Eventually he recollected how cold and hard-hearted I am when it comes to Briceland Meat Pie, however, and asked, “What’s the second dish?”
“You know what it is.”
“Brunswick stew?”
Yes. Brunswick stew. I’m always surprised when I have to explain Brunswick stew to anyone who didn’t grow up with it. In Virginia, it’s ubiquitous; they even serve the damned stuff at all the local Arby’s. Basically the dish is a chicken stew in a tomato base with beans loaded with other vegetables—but there I go making it sound almost edible. My father loves Brunswick stew, I suspect, because it reminds him of his college days at William and Mary, when occasionally he’d escape the campus and grab a dinner at Chowning’s in Colonial Williamsburg. I too attended William and Mary, but I have no fond memories of that vile mixture of stringy chicken, overcooked corn, mushy green beans, and horrifying nuggets of my least-favorite vegetables, lima beans and okra. As a kid I would press my spoon onto the mess and siphon the broth into the basin, leaving all the solid ingredients in the bottom of the bowl. Inevitably, I’d be ordered to finish it all, and I’d have to hold my nose and shovel unappetizing spoonfuls down my throat. To this day I can’t even think about Brunswick stew without a queasy stomach.
“Anything other than those. Do you have ideas?” I asked.
My dad’s ideas consisted of eking meals out of pre-cooked foods in his fridge. He had slices of Little Caesar’s pizza that were only a week and a half old that we could use for a meal. There were some frozen cooked hamburgers we could put on buns. He had a quarter of a rotisserie chicken breast from Food Lion we could divide and eat with, oh, he didn’t know. Potato chips?
“Never mind,” I told him. “I’ll take care of it.”
So I planned out a week’s worth of meals and went shopping. The next night I set down before him a bowl with one of my favorite colder-weather meals. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a cheese tortellini and Italian sausage soup,” I told him.
He sniffed at it. “Where’s the sandwich?”
“Sandwich? What sandwich?”
“Isn’t there a sandwich with it?”
“Why the hell would there be a sandwich?” I wanted to know.
“Soup needs a sandwich.”
“This isn’t broth,” I said, appalled. “It’s a hearty meal. It has cheese-filled tortellini and big chunks of Italian sausage. The soup part is more of an afterthought, if anything. This soup doesn’t need a sandwich.”
“Well.” He wrinkled his nose. “I always get a sandwich with my soup.”
The soup was delicious. It always is. But my dad spent the meal scooping up bits in his spoon, then asking, “What’s this?”
“It’s a piece of tomato,” I’d say.
“What’s this?”
“A sliver of onion.”
“What about this?”
“It’s a tortellini,” I’d growl, beginning to lose patience.
“What’s a tortellini?”
He finished his portion—mostly—but didn’t seem enthusiastic. “I had planned to have the leftovers tomorrow,” I said, as I collected the dishes, “but seeing that you didn’t like it that much….”
“I don’t eat leftovers the day after I’ve had a meal,” he announced.
I was shocked. Leftovers are the best part of cooking a big meal. Leftovers are the virtuous reward one reaps from cooking well. I’ll work hard on a more complicated meal solely to know that I can have even more of it the following night without any more exertion than it takes to reheat the stuff. What kind of crazy person doesn’t look forward to leftovers the next day? “How about the day after?” I said, modulating my voice to a level that definitely didn’t sound like a screech.
He shrugged. “I still think that if you’re going to do soup, you should offer a sandwich.”
So I learned several things from that first meal. First: I wasn’t serving soup any longer, because my father’s idea of a sandwich consists of two slices of white bread, mayonnaise, and a couple of wafers of that dreadful pressed-meat concoction that passes as a cold cut in his mind, and I’m sorry, but I’m prideful enough that that mess is not going to make it into one of my dinners. Second: I wasn’t going to be able to craft any dinners that resulted in significant amounts of leftovers, because my dad would turn up his nose at them.
Third, as I discovered when I attempted to make a sheet-pan meal, I couldn’t make anything that required baking or broiling, as the oven has a tendency to stop working without warning—so a whole another avenue of meal preparation closed to me.
Fourth, as I found out the next day after my dad had a painful night peeing, and as confirmed by his doctor, meals with tomato were off the menu entirely. Thanks to the radiation, the acidity of tomatoes irritated his urinary tract. Dishes with tomato—I mean, that’s half my repertoire right there. Suddenly I had to rethink everything.
I spent the following weeks grimly trying to imagine dishes that weren’t too weird or spicy, didn’t produce a copious amount of food, didn’t have tomatoes, and weren’t soup. (A pity. I make some damned good soups.) Any Norman Rockwell fantasies I harbored about steaming plates of savory homemade viands flew out the window, substituted by the grim reality of what my dad’s limited palate would accept, and what his cooker could produce. So I bought ham steaks and fried them in a pan and served them with Stove Top stuffing and green beans. I’d make penne (“What’s a pay-nay?”) with pesto (“What’s in pesto? Where on a pine does a pine nut grow?”) and frozen turkey meatballs and a salad and call it a day. I’d make fried rice with the inevitable ham steaks leftovers my father left on his plate.
One time I made Salisbury steaks in the instant pot in an attempt to justify having lugged it all the way down from Connecticut. Salisbury steaks and mashed potatoes—the staple of the classic TV dinner—should be right up my dad’s alley, right? They were delicious as all the times I’ve made them, but my father picked at his and asked for a catalog of every ingredient. Even though I halved the recipe, there were two steaks remaining that I suggested putting into containers with extra potatoes that he could freeze and heat up as small meals after I’d gone.
“No,” he said. “I’ll take care of the leftovers.”
Three days later, he announced that he’d eaten one of the patties. “Oh, you warmed it up with potatoes in the microwave?” I wanted to know.
No. He hadn’t. “I picked out the meat part and scraped off the gravy, and then I put it into a bun,” he told me.
“So you scraped off the delicious homemade mushroom gravy,” I sighed, “and turned the Salisbury steak into a hamburger.”
“I put a slice of cheese on it,” he offered, as if that made anything better.
Most of the meals I ended up throwing together during the rest of the long visit are what I think of as bottom-tier dinners. The kind of things I’ll toss onto the table when I’m tired and not totally willing to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Quesadillas with ground beef and olives. More pasta with sauce from a jar. Quesadillas with chopped chicken and olives.
Weirdly, the only two meals my father actually said he enjoyed were both improvised. I’ll occasionally make a dish I call Chicken with Hummus, in which I’ll sauté chunks of chicken breast with onions and snapped green beans and cumin and lemon and other spices. I’ll then serve it atop rice with a helping of hummus on the side. It has no particular recipe and tends to be accommodating to whatever vegetable leftovers I might have in the fridge. My father ate his entire plate and declared it a winner, surprisingly me greatly. (I’d by that point made peace with the notion that, as my mother had for years, I’d have to learn to live without a ‘good dinner!’ or ‘delicious!’ as my reward.)
The dinner he liked the most was probably what I thought was the single worst of my stay. At home I’ll occasionally make bowls similar to those they serve at the Chipotle chain—a bed of brown rice topped with either homemade seasoned black or pinto beans, topped with chopped chicken I’ll season with adobo and cumin and chili powder, then simmer in sofrito. Then I’ll top it with cheese and usually a homemade corn salsa.
The version I made at my dad’s, thanks to a lack of resources, consisted of white rice, the sofrito chicken, and a warmed-over can of Bush’s Southwestern-style pinto beans, topped with shredded cheddar cheese. The beans were dreadful—mushy and one note, with that note being cayenne pepper. There was no corn salsa.
If I’d never been to Chipotle and someone had told me this was similar to what they’d served, Chipotle would never get my business. But my dad loved the rice bowl. Raved about it. Told his sister about it on the phone the next day while I winced and questioned why I even tried.
I tried, though, because that’s who I am. I tried because cooking for someone is a way I show I care. It’s just that as I had my option whittled down for me, I might have stopped trying quite so hard.
At least at home, I can dive into the leftovers without shame.
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