Food and Family

I don’t think my mother either loved cooking or hated it. It was just a daily task like making beds or sweeping the floor. We dined on meat, potatoes, and vegetables from a can, unless fresh vegetables happened to be in season. Mashed or boiled potatoes were so predictable that I could start them after school without knowing the dinner plan for the day.

Schoolmates spoke of ethnic foods from their Irish or Italian traditions. My Anglo-Canadian heritage offered none, I thought. In time I realized that breakfasts of porridge (instead of “hot cereal”) and marmalade (instead of jelly) on toast were ethnic, too.

Mother rarely cooked from recipes during my childhood. Later, when I asked her to dictate instructions for making meatloaf—no one else’s tasted as good—she had me write “a handful of this” and “that, not so much.” Even a carefully written old recipe card can lose precision through the generations. I hoped exactly to replicate my mother-in-law’s mother’s favorite casserole dish until I read on the ingredients list, "One ten-cent bag of potato chips.”

My mother taught me basics of cookery, and so did the women with whom I shared an apartment and meals in my twenties. I treasure friends’ family recipes named for people I never met: Susie’s sweet potato pie, Aunt Dorothy’s hot chicken salad. A housemate’s mother’s delicious “up yonder rolls” got their name from the old gospel hymn, “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.”