A bit of writerly excitement

 

Cottage pie
Image courtesy Mary Dulle

For some time now, I’ve been fiddling with a project I tentatively titled, Mom and Me in Kitchen. I want to somehow capture the importance of learning to cook from my mom in the Fifties with all that decade implies about foodways in America. It was a time of vast change—WWII was over, the soldiers were home, the post-war economy was booming. America was optimistic.

Food manufacturers faced a challenge: realign their product from feeding the military to feeding the public. And thus fast food, convenience food, prepared foods—all those were born. The food industry launched a massive advertising campaign based on the premise that housewives did not like to cook. Cooking was a chore they had inherited, because of their gender, and they longed to have it simplified for them. The less time in the kitchen, the better. Advertisements boasted of prepared meals that could be on the table in fifteen minutes or less—think Swanson’s frozen turkey and mashed potatoes dinners.

Not all American housewives bought that fifteen-minute dream. Surveys and polls showed a lot of hold-outs, women who were still scratch cooking for most of their meals. My mom was one of those hold-outs. Oh, sure, she fell for some of the hype—we occasionally ate Spam, and when she and Dad were going out, she satisfied my BFF and me with cans of spinach and Franco-American spaghetti. We thought we were in food heaven. But mom still canned her own tomatoes, made her own applesauce, baked pies and cakes, even angel food, from scratch. And made seven-minute icing, which took patience and dedication. She made her own bread, and today my kids still clamor for her dinner rolls, with a pat of butter hidden inside each.

My cooking today reflects that. I make some of the dishes I learned at her elbow, but more than that, the dishes I make today build on what she taught me in that Chicago kitchen. So that’s what I wanted to write a cookbook about. Easier said than done.

For some time I have floundered trying to explain my culinary interest and to justify my weekly food blog, “Gourmet on a Hot Plate.” I enjoy the occasional challenge of a sophisticated and difficult recipe but mostly I want to cook familiar things, the kind of food I grew up eating. For instance, last night I made a meatloaf just for me—no one else was around for supper, and I figured I’d have leftovers for lunches. Tonight I made a shepherd’s pie—I don’t think my mom ever made that, but it’s in the spirit of the food she cooked. I just wasn’t sure what kind of label to hang on that approach to cooking in the 21^st century.

So I was reading Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, a wonderful resource, and I came across this line: “In culinary history, the ordinary food of ordinary people is the great unknown.” For me, it was an Aha! moment. That’s what I’m trying to talk about. Menus from upscale restaurants and magazine articles about the rich and famous tell us about gourmet food, but peoplelike my mom didn’t write about their dinner. So far in research about the Fifties, I find only the upscale or the bizarre, but not the ordinary—no tuna casserole, not chicken tetrazzini, no meatloaf. And that’s my niche.

I can bypass the bizarre—all those jellied salads and sandwich loaves iced with cream cheese and most of the convenience recipes. To James Beard’s horror, Poppy Cannon, author of The Can-Opener Cookbook, once made vichyssoise with frozen mashed potatoes, one leek, and a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup.

The more I read today and took notes, the more I realized that this was going to be a memoir about my mom. That’s okay. She’s a good role model. And I’ll have to delve into that. Born in 1900 (we could always figure out how old she was), she lived through two world wars, the Depression (and oh my, did the effects linger). She was widowed at thirty-four with a young son. I won’t put her on a pedestal, but I will say despite all she had a terrific sense of humor, and our kitchen episodes often involved laughter, if not the outright giggles.

So that’s where memory and Mom are taking me, and I’m having a good time with it. Writing can be fun.

I want to end tonight, though, with a hope that we all pray for both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Most of them are innocent pawns caught in a war fomented by men with power who court violence. It’s not a question of right or wrong—it’s a question of human lives and unbelievable suffering and grief. Pray for peace.