Cooking

 

Cooking and baking was a life-long occupation for Miss Mary. If not originally an obligation, it soon enough became a sort of hobby. I remember Mom telling me that when she was first married, she didn't know how to cook a thing. Toast was dependable. “We had bologna sandwiches every day,” she said.

I believe Dad told her nicely – as newly married people still do – that a little more variety would be welcome. And so she began to try new things. An eventual success and some perfectly-timed praise, set the ball rolling on a lifetime of good food. What wonders a casual comment can cause.

I forget what she said she first made that met with a smile - it was not bologna, at least – and I believe she called either a friend or family member for advice, but it didn't go unnoticed. My paternal grandmother was an excellent cook and I'm sure Dad missed the varied meals.

By the time I was born, four years later, she had cookbooks at the ready and I particularly remember one with cookies on the cover. A young boy was sampling cookies just pulled from the oven with a 1940's era mother smiling nearby.

Because my father worked just a half day on Wednesday, we'd have supper at my maternal grandmother's house. Mom's sister's family would join us. Sometimes my grandfather would join us and it became a regular family affair.

As a young child, my culinary desires were less than gourmet. I preferred raw carrot strips embedded in a bed of mashed potatoes on a slice of white bread. Though my grandmother was a good cook, she had basic foods probably due to her poverty. My favorite dessert was some foamy concoction made with a fruit-flavored fizzy tablet. Then, too, a specialty was fruit – especially fresh apple slices and maraschino cherries – in gelatin.

The family gathered about the table was the real attraction and we shared stories as we passed the food around in a circle.

Like my mother, my grandmother must have been one who liked to do everything herself. Teaching her daughter to cook would only have complicated life and so Mom entered married life with few homemaker skills.

But soon enough she got her kitchen legs and we never failed to have varied meals that were “stick to the ribs” good. I remember when she first baked bread. For isn't that a true test of culinary skills? Large loaves, beautifully browned, popped out of loaf pans regularly. We'd lather on margarine (butter was unknown at our house) and enjoy the yeasty goodness of thick slices still warm from the oven.

She came to collect recipes and she had a nice collection of cookbooks, all annotated with notes. She'd pencil in “Very good!” or “Use less flour” or “Add more milk” so the next time she could adjust the recipe to perfection.

My brother and I could count on baked treats after school and, like Dad, we wouldn't hesitate to praise our favorites so we could count on them again soon.

A favorite was “Applesauce Raisin Cupcakes” which I still make today. The recipe has been altered from the original, a Halloween treat with icing, to something of a more adult (and less messy) dessert. The icing went by the wayside and an extra spice or two was added and the baking time was lengthened because the cupcakes were larger (and fewer). This became a Miss Mary signature treat.

Recipe

As a child we had not yet become vegetarians, so hamburgers were a staple. Mom would make them in a skillet, frying the edges crisp, and we ate them as often sans bun on a plate with ketchup. I became a vegetarian in 1968; Mom and Dad followed a decade later. By the time we moved to Pinehaven, meat was erased from our diet.

I remember Mom tackling complicated desserts (for desserts were her specialty and what my sweet tooth remembers most): chocolate eclairs, large tea rings covered with chopped nuts, cherries and dribbled with white icing, cookies of every sort, and pies and cakes galore. For a woman who did not know how to cook, she soon enough commanded the kitchen.

Dad, a grocer his whole life, and a butcher to boot, became a vegetarian along with Mom, and I take that as a high honor. I suppose their initial reaction to my giving up meat was “it'll never last” but twelve years later it was pretty much a sure thing. All of us had a pacifist personality and our diet just became an extension of that.

For myself, vegetarianism was one of my reactions to the Vietnam war and a way to prove my attitude towards the taking of life. I'd never have taken part in a war, or any military service, and my reverence for life took a natural turn towards the animals, too.

In the final years of Miss Mary's life I often became the cook and bottle-washer. Like her I gravitated towards desserts and neither of us were adverse to take-out at some local restaurant. We continued to eat well even when she at last became mostly chair-bound. Even then she demanded her high standards be met: bowls could only be filled so full, they had to be just-so hot and one would never bring soup to her without several crackers.

And yet she was good-natured about it (most of the time). Illness did not mean she wanted her meal shortcutted. Eating was the one thing she still enjoyed. But she ate less and less and I worried about keeping her strength up. She always loved a bottle of beer and even in the final days of her life, she recorded in her journal how much she looked forward to her before-bed beer and a few crackers.

Her sister, too, loved beer and when, in the last few weeks of her life she no longer looked forward to her nightly brew, we knew the time was short. Neither abused alcohol as their father had and I always thought that daily beer was a source of both needed calories and relaxation.

We were never ones to frequent bars and never ones to overdo anything.

And so, when Miss Mary's final days came, when she could barely eat with a sore mouth, she tried at least a beer and a cracker at bedtime. She started light so many years before, with a bologna sandwich for lunch, and she ended with something even lighter.

It was that lifetime of good food in between that makes me smile.

© 2021 William G Schmidt