My Mother's Recipes 2-8-09

One of my house cleaning/purging projects of late has been to clean under my kitchen cabinets. Under the cabinet, with my cookbooks, I found several 2-pocket folders containing yellowed newspaper recipe clippings, recipes cut out of magazines, and recipes written in various hands on 3x5 index cards. These folders belonged to my mother. When my siblings and I cleaned out my parents’ home, following the death of my father two years after my mother's early demise at the age of 57, I took her folders full of recipes and two bulging recipe index card boxes home with me. I couldn't bear to throw them away without looking at them. I am embarrassed to admit that the recipes have resided under my kitchen cabinet, without being touched, for 15 years. I knew they were there, and assumed I would one day go through them. But I have waited too long; I no longer have children at home to cook for. The recipes are for family meals, not for my husband and me who are always dieting or getting home from work too late to prepare or even eat dinner.

As I go through the recipe files and boxes I am struck by a similarity between my mother and myself. I, too, cut out and save recipes. What is this compulsion we share? Is it an indication of our nurturing tendency? Or is it the picture a recipe can paint; the picture of a more glamorous life? A life where one has caviar as a staple in the pantry.

As I read my mother’s saved recipes it occurs to me that I don’t remember her ever preparing any of these dishes. My mother was a wonderful cook. She cooked the old-fashioned meals she learned from her mother and from her mother-in-law. Comfort food is what we call it today. The recipes she clipped and saved were not the hearty fare I found on the table of my youth. Going through the folders and boxes of recipes I see a version of my mother I never knew. I see a version of my mother that perhaps she wanted to be. A woman who could whip up Treasure Island Shrimp and Orange Salad or Beef Stroganoff Hollywood for a weeknight family dinner. How about Swedish Roast Leg of Lamb or Sesame Veal Cutlets for a Company Dinner. I don’t recall Company Dinners. It was usually just us – my mom, dad, two brothers, my sister and me. We sat together every night at our kitchen table and ate browned steak and gravy on mashed potatoes, or salmon croquettes with fried potatoes and stewed tomatoes or spaghetti with meat sauce from the American Beauty box or fried chicken, my mother made the best fried chicken in the world. We almost always had a salad of iceberg lettuce and tomato with Italian dressing from the Good Seasonings cruet, and a vegetable; usually out of a can. On Thanksgiving and Christmas we sat in the dining room and ate roasted turkey on the good china with the real silver. On Sundays, after church, we had sausage or bacon, and eggs, and pancakes, and maybe hash-browns. We sat at the kitchen table for hours on Sunday after church and laughed and talked and irritated my father who had left the table to go watch football on television. “Can’t you gosh-darn kids keep it down in there? I’m trying to watch the game.”

But who was the woman who clipped Wild Ducks Deluxe or Let’s Have an Old-Fashioned English Christmas? Why did I never see the Cheesy Beef Surprises or the Freezer Ham and Olive Sandwiches from the “Back to School with the Lunch-Box Bunch” in my brown paper bag in the cafeteria at Westcreek Elementary School? I usually had a PB&J or that packaged ham that was sliced so thin you could see through it.

In my mother’s recipe file there is a booklet that must have been a magazine insert, titled “Beachcombers Happy Hour Bar Guide.” The booklet, clearly from the 1960’s, is decorated with tan young bodies in their modest 60’s bathing suits drinking it up on the beach. Drinking Tom Collins and Planter’s Punch, Daiquiris and Honolulu Coolers while running through the surf or doing what appears to be the twist. Is this who my mother wanted to be? In 1965 my mother would have been 32 years old; she had four children under the age of ten. I bet she would have loved to be on the beach drinking a Gin Rickey and doing the twist.

What else can these recipes tell me about my mother? That she took pride in cooking. That she wanted to nurture her family. That she would have liked the time to make a Cranberry Avocado Mold instead of drilling me on my times tables. Or that just once she would have preferred to make a Standing Rib Roast for Thanksgiving. As I go through her recipes I am reminded that she was a good mother, no – a great mother. A mother who always took care of her family, who fed us well, and sent us off into the world with the optimism to clip recipes of our own, recipes like Shrimp Pierre, even if we knew we would never actually prepare it. Just the idea of it can give you hope and optimism and the idea that you are creating a family that might just one day sit down to a hearty helping of Shanghai Steak.