I had just come back from marketing around 10:30 in the morning having gone to the Farmer’s Market for the arugula and Heirlooms, then just across the parking lot to the cheese store for some nicely gritty Gruyere. I had answered my emails and phone calls earlier. Dinner for eight wasn’t until seven. The house was clean.  I had a whole day for food—alone.

It was a Friday in Southern California and all the windows and doors were open, even in March. The dog lay on the deck in the sun. I turned on NPR.  I put away the glistening shrimp, the sausage, the peppers, the mussels. I was looking for the two paella recipes I often combined to make the best of both when I found my mother’s saved recipes in a blue plastic loose leaf binder.  The little notebook was buried on a crowded shelf in my kitchen eclipsed by my own slick hard cover and paperback cookbooks; Bobby Flay, Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, Chez Panisse and a host of others, plus my cobbled together collection of favorites in my own food stained notebook.

Some of her recipes were handwritten, others clipped from magazines and newspapers.  They often had a first name attached;  Betty’s Oven Baked Corn Flake Chicken, Vessie’s Hot Clam Dip, Jane’s Tuna Casserole with Crispy Potato Chip Topping, Kenny’s Thirty Minute Beef Stroganoff, Martha’s German Chocolate Cake.  She added comments such as “good” and “super.”  I remembered the food and with it,  “the girls” which they gleefully called themselves. Looking through the notebook I easily slipped into a sentimental journey of remembered retro meals indulging in self congratulation about how far I’d come.     

Since she died and as I grow older, I do an exercise of imagining my mother’s world at my same age.  In my California kitchen reading the recipes in her handwriting familiar as her smell I realize I left out how far she had come.  I didn’t go back far enough to her family’s poverty on the four hundred acre wheat farm in southeastern Kansas, the crops often flattened by drought or hail laying waste to a year’s work. 

I forgot the eight brothers and sisters, who seldom had shoes and made their toys out of sticks. I didn’t go back to having to butcher and bleed livestock for meat, or to twisting the neck of a chicken for company, stocking the dirt cellar which smelled like earth with preserved vegetables from the last winter or to milking cows twice a day the bucket, warm from milk between your knees, or churning butter till you had to take turns, and that was only getting the food.

“One Christmas we got an orange each. I kept mine under my pillow.”

 “Why?” I asked.

“Because if I ate it then I wouldn’t have it anymore.” And later when she left Kansas to marry my father I didn’t follow her to the Depression or on to WW II where books of ration stamps portioned out small amounts of sugar or flour and fresh vegetables were scarce.    

As I let go of the struggle to accept the woman I thought she was—beyond her depression, her disappointments, her exacting and demanding love for me, I find friendship and simple uncluttered affection for her life in the quotidian tasks I now do without thinking. Tasks I learned from watching her perform them.

I say “perform” because when I was little watching her it seemed to me I would never be able to do what she did. She flicked the knob on the stove to “High”, spun to pull a pot off a shelf, plucked a head of Bibb lettuce from the crisper and then nudged the fridge door closed with her fanny all while skillfully managing the ubiquitous Pall Mall.

Water running, the mixer going, the timer clicking, flour flying in the air, and Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians singing on the radio, saying, “Wait till they get here. You’ll see.  It’s going to be wonderful. Wonderful!”  I was at the same time transfixed and intimidated.

It is in the daily-ness of her life and the daily-ness of mine that we are connected. I imagine Betty, Vessie, Jane, Kenny, and Martha, the “girls” who had their girlhood stolen from them by hard times preceding me with corn flakes, canned tuna, cake mixes and Philadelphia Creamed Cheese laughing and smoking in their own kitchens pleased at how far they had come from their own mothers.  They might roll their eyes at my dinners. Or…or… they might ask me for recipes.

Tomato Surprise 

Butter a square cake pan or pyrex baking dish

Preheat oven to 350°F

1 large can of tomato puree
1 stick butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 loaf of *very* ordinary white bread

Melt first three ingredients over a medium flame. Taste occasionally to make sure it's sweet enough or buttery enough.  Tear pieces of that fluffy ordinary bread apart into the baking pan. Pour mixture over the bread, (now don't try to get fancy and add anything like basil or oregano or anything
clever...it will simply distract from the unabashed simplicity of the dish.)

Bake for 45 minutes. 

Your children will think you are a genius.

A writing coach, Claudette teaches ongoing creative writing classes in Los Angeles as well as workshops in New York and Seattle. Her web site is www.gotoclaudette.com  
 

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