My mother was a cook between Gordon Ramsey of Hell’s Kitchen
and Martha Stewart. Mom didn’t cook
fancy dishes like souffles or ever heard of beef Wellington. But
what she did prepare for her family was good or at least we thought so. Even though I’ve lived most of my life in
Indiana, we ate Southern delicacies’ like fried okra, beans and cornbread, or
fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy.
Vegetables always came from a can and it was rare to have fresh fruit. Nearly everything was fried. When Dad came home from work, supper was
always waiting for him on the table.
Except Fridays, this was grocery shopping day. She would always let us pick out whatever we wanted
for dinner that evening. My brother,
sister, and I always chose frozen pizza and Dad wanted steak. The best part was that we could have a Coke
or a Pepsi with dinner. Back then it was
a special treat to drink a pop because the rest of the week we drank milk or
water. We rarely ate dinner out and if
we did it was at McDonald’s or a place similar, besides nothing can beat home
cooking. All of us sat at the table to
eat together and talk. There were no
cell phones, iPods, or computers to distract us then. Those were the best memories for me.
Mom was 4 feet 11 ½ inches tall, with short dark brown hair,
intense blue eyes, and perfect teeth. She had a short temper to go along with
her small stature. More than once she
said to me that I wasn’t too big for her to knock me down. I’m not tall either and wouldn’t really have
that far to go before hitting the ground.
When Mom was about four
years old, her mother passed away from TB.
Within six months my grandfather married another woman. This created problems for Mom because she was
not given a “mothers love” that she so desperately needed. Lack of self confidence, poverty, a
preacher’s kid, and fearing that others will make fun of her, my mother
repeated the 7th grade three times.
During that time, a child went from grade school to high school. It was
the early 50’s and life was very different than it is now. She never went on to high school. Feeling trapped at home with a step-mother
who forced my mother to help take care of the children, my mom married the
first man that came along. That man was
my father. She was sixteen and he was
twenty. She desperately wanted to leave
the prison of her father’s home in hopes to have her own life.
At sixteen, she couldn’t have had that much experience
cooking. During the early years of her marriage, she relied heavily upon
cookbooks for the basics. As time went
on her skills improved. Then her family
started to grow. When she was twenty, I
was born. Then a year and a half later,
my brother came along. Randall was a very finicky eater as a child. Mom would try all kinds of things just to get
him to eat. She would mash up a banana
and mix it with his egg hoping that he would eat breakfast. As you know, canned spinach is like
mush. In order to get my brother to eat
it, she would mix bacon grease and egg into the boiling green blob, trying to
convince him that it was really good to eat.
He never fell for it. She would
find rejected food underneath the sofa cushions all of the time. There
would be peas, green beans, and even fried chicken. Really?
Fried chicken? What boy doesn’t like fried chicken?
The best of her cooking that I remember was when we all lived
together on Elm Street. The 70’s were the
best years. She would scour magazines
looking for recipes and in a few days we would have some new dish to try. At Christmas, we would have barbecue ribs
instead of the traditional ham or turkey dinner. The ribs were so tender that the meat fell
off the bone; her potato salad and coleslaw were exceptional. We had pot
roasts, baked chicken, and Uncle Ben’s wild rice salad to name a few. There was
only one recipe that I could hardly stomach. Her vegetable soup was made with a
tomato juice base and it was awful. The rest of the family loved the soup, but
I cringed whenever she made it.
Eventually, I told her that I didn’t like it. She still made the soup, but I was given
something different to eat than the rest of the family. This was the only time
one of us was given an alternative. Some
time later, I asked her to sit down with me so that I could write down my
favorite recipes. I bought a couple of blank books and together we wrote them
down.
As soon as I started working, I began collecting
recipes. She sparked the love of cooking
within me. I would often spend evenings
and well into the night trying new recipes.
I ventured beyond the borders of our own cuisine and began trying dishes
from other cultures. My dad would take a
bite of carrot from a plate of fried rice and declared that it wasn’t
“done.” We laughed and told him that the
way it is cooked is the way it is supposed to be. My Mom knew that she had succeeded when they
came home from vacation one year and I had an elaborate supper waiting for them
when they arrived home. As they drove up
to the house I was putting dinner on the table. I made biscuits, fried chicken, gravy, corn
and mashed potatoes.You should have
seen the smile on her face that day. It
was priceless.
In the early 80’s life changed. My father passed away in 1984 and then in
1993 my mother went to be with him. Every
once in a while, I will take out the books and stare at her writing. I place my finger on the page, and then move
my finger along the curve of each letter, remembering her, missing all of the
moments we could have had with each other since.
