As I pulled out ‘the bag’ of recipes saved over the many years of my homemaking and cooking, preparing for family arriving in a few days, I found many written in my mother’s lovely hand from years back. The times when family would gather at her house, I believe, were her happiest.
There are certain of her recipes that I have used so often they are second nature to me now and I don’t need to look up anymore. Others I came upon last night that I have only tried maybe once or so, because they demand more time than I am willing to give, such as 12-day pickles, tomato juice from garden tomatos, fruitcake, and potato bread.
Looking back on it, our mom really loved cooking. It was one way she was able to transmit her caring of friends and family.
For me approaching cooking early in my marriage was a formidable task. To begin with I had absolutely no confidence, as I had never done any except for a brief time sharing a house with fellow graduate students one summer. I took the easy way out at home growing up. My mother cooked and I washed the dishes and set the table. I regarded cooking as a job I had to learn to do.
I would first agonize about what I could actually make that people would eat, then make a copious list of every step involved up to setting the dishes on the table. My husband had actually more experience in the kitchen than I did, coming into the marriage. But in our day it was understood that the wife was in charge of household duties. This was when TV dinners were pretty much the choice for prepared food, long before supermarkets had extensive delis and extensive selections of foods ready to eat.
To this day I still make my step-by-step to do list but am not afraid to buy from the deli and do experiment a bit, having gradually gained in confidence.
The first ready made foods my mom would have encountered were TV dinners. I never knew her to buy one herself. The nearest she ever came to serving prepared food was fish sticks when they came out and Chef Boyardee pizza in a package.
One of the first signs we knew she was having memory difficulties was in her cooking. I remember an autumn Sunday in 2005 when she had invited her family over and we were a bit late arriving from our trip, my aunt and cousin had arrived early to help her get the meal ready. I remember thinking how strange that she should need help.
Then a few years later after she came to stay with us in Ohio she would want to help me in the kitchen. The one thing she could still do was make potato salad. We had potato salad often. (My brother later told me that was what our mom would fix at his house.) And then the day came when she couldn’t even fix the potato salad. I now realize how hard that must have been for her, watching me do it all when she had been so good at it.
