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.

Bringing Mom into the Cottage

For all the years of my growing up, there were two chairs on either side of the Italian marble fireplace in our Chicago brownstone. On the left was Dad’s chair, overstuffed, beige, comfortable, but not exactly a stylish piece of furniture. On the right was Mom’s wingchair, more delicate and ladylike, upholstered in turquoise because it was her favorite color. There they sat most evenings after supper, reading silently but often reading to each other. One would say, “Listen to this,” and read some passage, and pretty soon the other would respond similarly. Their minds were so in sync that they couldn’t resist sharing passages. Sometimes that sharing resulted in their reading aloud to each other. I distinctly remember that they went through all the volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization that way.

Fast forward down the years, and Mom’s wing chair ended in whatever house I lived in. It was reupholstered several times, the latest being when I moved to the cottage and chose a light, whimsical patterned fabric. But then where to put it? Neither the living area nor the bedroom were spacious and there seemed no place. Still, I would not get rid of it because, well, it was Mom’s. For several years it has been shoved into a corner in front of my desk, with a dog crate making it inaccessible to all except Sophie who climbs on it when she needs to see out the window to the driveway and check on who is coming and going.

Yesterday, upholstery cleaners came. The couch and both barrel chairs that flank it needed cleaning. Over the phone, the owner of the company had asked if the fabric was washable or needed dry cleaning, and I said I had no idea. So two affable gentlemen came to look and do a fabric test. Their conclusion was that the colors could run. The furniture needed dry cleaning which meant they had to take it to their shop where ventilation allowed safer use of the strong chemicals involved (I hope they don’t come back smelling like cleaning fluid).

The absence of those two chairs left the living area looking barren, so tonight, before company came, Jordan rearranged and put the wing chair on the right side of the couch. I love it in that position. Not only does it look good, it seems to bring a bit of Mom into the cottage. As it happens, I am doing some work on a project that involves my mom and her cooking and recipes, so it is doubly fitting that her chair is in the living room. Not that I’m sure she would enjoy all conversations that go on in my cottage—I can see that chin go up in the air and the eyes go out the window.

But with the chair there, I think I can and will talk to Mom more. Like, “Why did you like this recipe?” and “Where did you learn to cook this?” I am delighted.

Yesterday, with no chairs, a young friend (she’s the age of my children) from the TCU library came for an early happy hour. When she settled on the couch with no chairs around it, I asked what she wanted to drink and offered my two easy choices: wine or water.

Reluctantly she said that she felt dehydrated from the heat and a lot of hauling and schlepping she’d done that day (librarians do not get the luxury of sitting behind a counter all day), and she’d prefer ice water. I already had my water, so I joined her. We laughed and gossiped and caught up on each other and TCU news for over an hour, and when she left, she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t make it a happier happy hour. Wine next time.” I assured her it was plenty happy without the wine. And that’s what struck me as important about it: I am so used to serving wine at happy hour that it was a delight to know that jolliness comes with ice water too. I look forward to a repeat.

My trivial note for the day: do you know what the latest TikTok self-care topic is: bed-rotting. Awful name, isn’t it? It means taking an extended period of time out by lying in bed, not sleeping but doing other activities. My first question was: how much else can you do? Okay, there’s the obvious quick answer, but get past that. I for one do not like to eat or read in bed, though I have been known to lie in bed, sort of half-conscious, for hours at a time, if I’m not quite right with the world. In fact, I claim I nap because some of my best ideas come in that twilight, almost-asleep period. But bed-rotting? It’s an awful term.

Sleep tight, pleasant dreams—but no rotting. (Do you know how hard I’m resisting a play on words here?)