Food for Thought

When it came to everyday meals, my mother was a perfectly adequate if uninspired cook.

Standard evening meals (with the exception of spaghetti every Wednesday and beans and franks each Saturday), consisted of mashed potatoes, two vegetables - one green and one yellow or orange - and some variety of meat, chicken or chops, an inexpensive pot roast or meatloaf. But when it came to desserts and breads, there was a time when she could and regularly did outbake everyone I knew, both my grandmothers included.

In her kitchen, there were rules with no exceptions. Artificial ingredients were absolutely forbidden - the very idea of whipped cream from a pressurized spray can offended her and the mere mention of a sugar or salt substitute could get you unceremoniously tossed out on your ear. She shunned the use shortcuts and most anything that needed to be defrosted. No ready made mixes where allowed and the concept of margarine was too insulting to be discussed. When she made strawberry shortcake, it was from scratch - fresh berries and cream whipped by hand served in flaky, still warm pastry shells. I began coming to terms with her alcoholism when the shortcake was served on store bought spongecake with frozen strawberries and Cool Whip. There were no more marathon Saturday morning baking sessions, no more fresh breads or egg tarts or slabs of apple pie with sweet, sticky juice and a hand laid criss cross crust. She wouldn't admit it, but she'd always baked by memory and instinct and with both beginning to fail, she found having to rely on an actual cookbook to be degrading - it hurt her pride. Any damn fool can cook out of a book,

she wept to my daddy after a disasterous mixup with sugar and salt and an inedible banana cream pie. And with that she put away her baking dishes and mixing bowls forever and we came became a Saralee and Aunt Jemima family.

Not long after that, the house I'd grown up in was sold, my daddy moved in with my grandmother, and my mother found a place in the country where she spent her days alone and didn't cook at all except on weekends. The isolation allowed her to drink without discretion or recrimination and it was here she began a gradual descent into the fuzzy world of dementia and eventually cancer. The cabinets in the tiny kitchen bulged with cereal boxes and multiple stacks of canned goods, rotting food cluttered the kitchen sink, the refrigerator reeked from spoiled milk and moldy packages of meat but the liquor cabinet was always fully stocked, a half dozen or so six packs of beer crowding out the back up stash of icebox manhattens in their slim, dark, dust-free bottles.

My mother's table - too often the prelude to an after dinner battle with food as the fuel - became a place to play cards, fold clothes, and answer letters. She was right about any fool being able to cook from a book and I learned to make green beans and porkchops and the like - but I never took much pleasure in the kitchen and I never, ever stopped missing that shortcake and apple pie.