Salon Mothers Who Think | Recipes make the woman

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R E C E N T L Y

Conception by deception
By Tracy Quan
Why do women get away with "accidentally" getting pregnant -- when if a man tried to pull the same manipulative stunt, he'd be Bobbitted?
(09/23/98)

First Pick by proxy
By Carol Snow
A toddler fulfills her mother's gym class dreams
(09/22/98)

Time For One Thing: Fly-Fishing
By Karen Laws
Rollin' on the river with Dad
(09/21/98)

Who needs experts?
By Beth Kephart
"The Nurture Assumption": A controversial book makes headlines, not sense
(09/18/98)

In defense of parenthood
By Katie Allison Granju
Nature? Nurture? Whatever
(09/17/98)

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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My mother wasn't a very good cook, but she hoarded recipes anyway. Maybe they symbolized what she thought a good mother and wife ought to be, but all she really wanted to do was go on a cruise to Hawaii. BY SALLIE TISDALE | Since my mother's death several years ago, I've gathered a pile of hundreds of recipes from the derangement of papers every death leaves behind. I added a few hundred more when my grandmother -- her mother-in-law -- died a few years later. This last cache of papers surprised me; I don't remember my grandmother ever cooking a meal for anyone. She lived next door to my mother and father for the last 20 years of her life, a perpetual guest in my mother's living room, subsisting mainly on cigarettes and beer.

My mother cooked a lot, though. In spite of working full time outside the home most of her adult life, she cooked two and three meals every day for a family of five. She hated every minute of it, and was thrilled by the frozen, the canned, the microwavable, any way out of the endless labor of the stove.

Still, here they are: recipes, hundreds of recipes, cut out of newspapers and magazines, from the bottom of advertisements and off can labels and on index cards and notepaper. Some are in my grandmother's crabbed, backward writing, but most are in my mother's meticulous schoolteacher's penmanship. A few are in mysterious hands, gifts from long-gone friends and neighbors, scribbled on the back of envelopes, bits of stationery handed on, copied again and again.

These aren't lost classics, or great secrets. Here is "Vegetable A La Supreme," requiring cream of mushroom soup, frozen broccoli, Minute Rice and an entire bottle of Cheez Whiz. Here is "Tomato Soup Salad," with canned soup, Knox gelatin, cottage cheese, mayonnaise and stuffed olives. Here is "Easy Deviled Ham 'n' Cheesewich," "Celery and Brussels Sprouts Casserole," "Saccharin Pickles," "Chicken Spaghetti." There are a great many recipes using zucchini: zucchini with tomato juice, with fried onion rings, with cream cheese, with whipped cream, with cream of mushroom soup, with nuts and crushed pineapple.

Most of these recipes share a particular quality, and that is convenience, the speedy "ready-in-a-minute" approach that so marked the cuisine of the fast-moving '60s. What she wanted wasn't food, but time -- time out of her labor, time off in her armchair reading romances and drinking coffee, smoking while she watched Mike Douglas cook something with Carol Channing on television, while she did desultory isometrics with a rubber-and-spring gadget bought from an ad in the back of Good Housekeeping. But she didn't do that very much. What she did was work -- work, laundry, shopping, work, cooking, work.

She kept these slips of paper, with something on her mind, but she didn't cook this food. We had a roast-beef-on-Sunday and hash-on-Thursday routine, with few variations -- proper foods at proper times and meat at every meal. We never had sandwiches for breakfast or scrambled eggs for lunch, never ate cold leftovers or dessert first. Roast beef and hash, chops and bologna, potatoes and noodles and canned vegetables: a palette of earth tones, brown, white, pale green, pale red.

So her recipes don't fit; they are a missing puzzle piece, and seem to me more effort than intention. They are the outward signs that she was trying, not the real preoccupation of the mother I knew, who loved to read and dreamed of going on a cruise to Hawaii.

I asked my sister, Susan, what she remembered of the suppers of our childhood. She was quiet for a long moment and then said, in a very small voice, "What I remember is that she wasn't a very good cook." She said this as though she were speaking betrayal. Our mother was easily hurt. She knew she wasn't a good cook -- and she knew she was supposed to be one.

Why in the world did she keep a recipe for eggplant stuffed with luncheon meat, something our entire family would have loathed? Why so many plans for time-consuming multilayer tortes when she never baked? Why appetizers and party foods and coffee klatch ideas written carefully in the hand of a woman who rarely went to parties and never entertained? She was supposed to be a good cook, a good wife, a good mother; these are marks of what she thought that person might look like.

When she did cook, on rare occasions like birthdays and Christmas, she used her "Betty Crocker Picture Cook Book," the first edition from 1951. (The only cookbook I saw her read with real pleasure was Peg Bracken's "I Hate to Cook Book".) I still have her "Betty Crocker"; even as a young girl, I looked at it far more than she did -- especially the photo spreads of all the cakes and cookies and fancy party foods we never ate, laid out on linen tablecloths by candlelight.

Life wasn't, isn't, will not be like that, nor do I want it to be, but this heresy remains, embedded. A part of me still believes that life should be like those photos, that mothers should behave a certain way, that children should smile adoringly at their mother as they sit happily down to a dinner table set just so.

So I collect recipes, too, many for food I'm never going to make, for elaborate desserts to be served on linen by candlelight, for hearty family suppers no one in my family would ever have touched. I'm caught, like her, between what's imagined and what is real, what's given to us and what we can take -- should take -- for ourselves. I left her canned peas and frozen macaroni and cheese to join a past never actually lived, one of farm communes and long skirts and fresh-baked bread. I traded that fantasy for the reality of struggles more like hers: the compromises we make rearing children, working, trying to decide who to be for ourselves and who to be for others in a contradictory world of too many choices and not enough room.

I hold her life in one hand and my own in the other, and even now hers seems orderly and transparent in a way mine is not. My life is spacious and mobile, unpredictable, built on shifting sands. She was held in place, leashed down -- I strain to throw out anchors in the shouting wind. We were so far apart, so much alike, becoming women and mothers in such different worlds, but I think, perhaps, with not such different pain in the becoming.

One of her old recipes is on a bit of stationery from a hotel in Reno. I don't remember her going to Reno, and when I found it I was really happy, unreasonably pleased that she went there even once. I imagined her drinking martinis, all dressed up, playing slot machines, staying up late. And then I was struck by a sudden small grief that she spent even one minute there copying down a recipe. When she comes to my mind, I never remember her in the kitchen. I remember her loafing around the living room before my father got home, putting off supper for a few minutes more, and I wish I could take her right now onto that cruise ship and watch her dance the night away.
SALON | Sept. 24, 1998