My mother was a fantastic cook. Or so I’ve heard. While I did experience the occasional testament to her expertise, for the most part my brother and I were part of the inaugural generation of Better Food Through Chemicals and Convenience. Our live-in kitchen help consisted of Mr. Chef-Boyardee, Mr. Frank O. American and Mr. C.A. Swanson who rotated their duties.
My brother and I often had our meals separate from our parents due to the fact that my father was a military officer and my parents’ evenings were many times taken up by social events. Even on an unscheduled night, my father got home later than my friends’ dads and he and my mother had the ritual of the evening cocktail and the wind down. In retrospect, I wonder that it rarely occurred to me to be curious about what they were consuming later in the evening after their Manhattans. I was mostly just grateful that they didn’t make me partake in their sophisticated adult fare, which probably contained either mushrooms or peppers, both food items whose edibility I resolutely contested.
My brother and I were both “picky eaters” who rejected many of the mainstays of the American diet – we would not allow either ketchup or mayonnaise to pass our clenched teeth. Ketchup wasn’t that hard to avoid, but a mayonnaise aversion makes life much harder since every single picnic and barbeque and pot-luck and family gathering have as their lynchpins and centerpieces various comestibles often laughably called “salads”, i.e. potato salad, pasta salad, etc., that are basically just chopped up bits of things held together with a white, oily, library paste. At least that’s how we viewed these items. So, I really don’t blame my mother for finding the convenience food of the day a godsend when it came to feeding her suspicious and rejecting offspring enough calories to keep us alive and carrying enough weight to not attract the attention of social service authorities.
There is no more competitive cook in the entire world than the military wife, or at least this was the case in the fifties and sixties. Occasionally, the Wives Clubs of the various bases and commands would publish a cookbook. These spiral bound tomes would often have very very similar recipes with slight differences – Martha’s Famous Beefy Cheese Casserole might have jalapenos whereas Margie’s Week Night Goulash would be the same thing but with green chilies. Martha uses Campbell’s condensed tomato soup and Margie uses Ro-Tel tomatoes. I think the reason these duplicative recipes existed side by side is that no one but no one had the guts to tell either Martha or Margie that their recipe was not the unique culinary inspiration they thought it to be. I also have to imagine both Martha and Margie getting their copy of the base cookbook and finding the dueling recipes and thinking “WTF! That’s MY recipe!”
My parents would have the occasional dinner party and my mother would make something from one of the volumes of Mastering The Art Of French Cooking which could involve flaming something with brandy. Or she would make her famous shrimp or chicken curry which was served on an elaborate curry set which was a big platter surrounded by the matching condiment dishes which contained bacon bits, toasted coconut, chopped peanuts, chopped egg, and chopped peppers. My parents also hosted fondue parties. My mother had four fondue pots and made both a beef and a cheese fondue. I found the beef fondue kind of blah, but the cheese fondue – OMG! Instant transport to the Alps with the gooey white wine and Kirsch flavored cheese on the crusty bread. Folks, there’s a reason there was an actual fondue craze in the sixties. Find a fondue pot in a thrift store or on Ebay and make the classic cheese fondue recipe, you will not regret it.
On the cookbook shelf next to Julia Child and multiple James Beards and the various entertaining cookbooks was a book that made a big splash in the sixties, Peg Bracken’s
I Hate To Cook Book
This was a seminal cookbook for women of my mother’s generation, since it acknowledged that sometimes cooking is a chore and drudgery and wouldn’t it be nice if you could make good stuff with less effort and have time to do the things that otherwise interest you? Truly, this was right up my mother’s alley and I feel sure she was not alone.
When I went out into the world on my own, I was immediately confronted by the fact that I personally had no clue how to shop and cook. I had never stood by my Mommy’s side as she made the treasured family recipes. We didn’t have treasured family recipes. We often only saw something once; even if everyone really really liked it, it would remain an elusive memory, like a beautiful woman glimpsed once in a passing train car, never to be seen again. Remember that great thing Mom made that time? The thing with the chicken and the grapes? Or that incredible Mexican casserole with the olives and the steak? What else was in that? What cookbook did it come from? Oh well.
So I had to find my own way. My first cookbook was The Good Housekeeping Cookbook circa 1973
The very first dinner I ever made for my husband came out of this cookbook. It was called California Beef Stew and was a basic stew but with peas, onions, black olives and used wine and grated orange and thyme in it. It was and is yummy. I have made it occasionally ever since that first night lo those many years ago. We do have a library of tried and true recipes that we see again and again like old friends. My husband’s mother cooked every night from scratch for the entire family and over 18 years of Sunday dinners with her, I came to learn to make almost all of her dishes her way. Not a cookbook, not a recipe, ever.
But for those of us who do cook from recipes or would like to self-teach the culinary arts, here is someone's list of the best cookbooks ever.
So, what was food like in your family. Were there any particular cookbooks or recipes that you remember as creating the taste profile of your life?
