Epilogue, January 2022

This is not a cookbook in the way that most cookbooks are intended. It’s not pitching a great new way to cook or even the best recipes of a past era. A lot of our family recipes came out of the Joy of Cooking and are no longer included in the latest edition of the Joy of Cooking. Times change. So do our tastes, our aspirations, our values. What in the 1950’s built bodies eight ways was assumed to be a good thing. Today white flour Wonder Bread is synonymous with everything that’s bad.

I stopped working on this cookbook for about 8 months because I felt guilty. I felt that I was making fun of my mother’s cooking, and my mother. That was not my intention. Then she died, and I started thinking about her cooking again. Not so much in a nostalgic way as in an analytical way. What made her life so vibrant, so adventurous, so engaging to be a part of?

My mother created a unique world and cooking was a component of it, one major prop in the theatre production of her life. Much like the set of a play, cooking was the background to the presentation. The meaning of the drama relies on the set as much as the lines and the actors.

Our mother was a good cook, but as she said, “Anyone who can read can cook.” She never taught her four daughters how to cook because she had already made sure they knew how to read. Her mother didn’t teach her to cook because the cook did the cooking, and when the Crash of ’29 put an end to the cook, so did it put an end to cooking.

By the 50’s, reinterpreting life post-war, the woman, wife, and mother had to take on cooking, on top of values, principles, rules of cleanliness, politeness, culture, training, breeding, education, and a new world order. Cooking became an essential way to express those values. Today, some seven decades later, we’re shouting cooking shibboleths louder than ever: Meat-free! Sugar-free! Fat-free! Gluten-free! Hormone-free! Import-free! Package-free!

We are so caught up in the rallying-cries that we forget to enjoy the meal.

My mother’s time was different. My mother’s message was different. It had to do with healthy kids, of course, so of course we ate Wonder Bread sandwiches. And it had to do with modernity: Tang, Spam, Jell-o. But there were other subtler themes, some common to all in the 50’s and 60’s, some unique to my mother. They had to do with a more grounded life, less excess, more play. There were themes of egalitarianism (instant mashed potatoes), but also sophistication (red wine). There were themes of Americanism (hamburgers, no reduced fat), but also worldliness (yogurt, known as “yaourt” in France and not known at all in the USA).

Back then, we ate every dinner together, all seven of us, and the dinnertime was the opportunity for discussion, story-telling, elephant jokes, and news-reporting. The table was set hastily by one of us four girls, never my brother, always with a folded napkin to the left of the plate, knife and spoon to the right, salt cellars with tiny spoons in the center, and never EVER a carton or a jar on the table. Perhaps no life lesson was more impressed upon me than that: nothing with print will ever appear on the dinner table.

The flip side of dinner was that it was cacophonous, boisterous, kids with clean hands and dirty faces, stains on the tablecloth, chipped dishes, mismatched glasses, and periodically my father shouted over us, “COULD WE PLEASE HAVE SOME SILENCE?” That lasted about a minute and then the kids whispered, then giggled, then talked, and shortly the noise level resumed its natural pitch.

Ah, but I’m drifting into nostalgia. This is supposed to be a sociological analysis, full of empirical evidence, devoid of data. You may conclude by the end that you were fortunate not to have been there, but you’ll never convince a single one of us kids that we weren’t extremely lucky.