~a column by Colleen O’Brien
When the food season hits, I think of my mom, the first cook I knew. She was a plain cook, nowhere close to cordon bleu status; and it was the 1950s, a plain-food, Jell-O era in America. But her pork roast gravy . . . mmm . . . delectable. A taste heaven. And I spooned it over the sliced pork, the mashed potatoes, the green beans and the green salad on my plate, making islands of them all. Then, like Dad, I mopped up the remains with buttered bread.
I salivate at the memory. My pork roast, or anyone else’s for that matter, never met the Mom mark.
Her pork roast makes me think of her pork chops. That gravy was also worthy of licking the plate, not that we ever got to do that; although come to think of it, we were allowed to pick up the pork chop bone in our fingers and gnaw all the meat off after we’d eaten most of it like ladies with knife and fork. This gravy was creamier than the pork roast gravy, milkier I guess, and thicker. She boiled the potatoes in their skins, fried the chops crisp and brown, and stirred and stirred the gravy to a texture smooth as taffeta. We got only one pork chop apiece, however, which for a teenager never seemed enough.
But we always had dessert and never went away hungry. Mom was the pie maker supreme. Her crusts were so light, so perfect. I can picture her, apron on, flour all over the counter, often humming as she held the pie plate up on the finger tips of her right hand and almost twirled it around as she cut the edges off the dough she had just flattened with the rolling pin. It’s a trick I’ve tried and never been able to master. She was more adept than I at many things, and this one I quit trying to duplicate decades ago.
All of her pies were my favorite except for mincemeat, which I couldn’t bring myself to taste because of the name. But the pecan, the raisin, the rhubarb — oh, so pretty, so melt-in-my-mouth, so worthy of savoring, so impossible to eat slowly. I did become a good crust maker, but unlike Mom’s, my pecan pie crust rises up through the custard, making the whole thing difficult to serve neatly because the sugary goo sticks to the bottom of the pie pan. Tastes good, looks like pecan stew.
Sometimes when I’m sick with the flu I still want my mom. I know it’s because she brought me buttered toast and hot sweet tea on a tray when I stayed home from school with a cold. I know it was the love she was serving up that I still crave. Such a luxurious piece of business, that special tray brought out for Mom’s sick girls.
One Christmas when we were home from college, instead of making her pumpkin and pecan pies, Mom made a complicated six layer torte for dessert. It was something she’d seen in a magazine and thought we would appreciate, so sophistique had we become. But I was dashed. It took her three days to make the thing, it was pretty, dripping cherries and sprinkled with powdered sugar. It tasted great. But it wasn’t pie. Mom’s pie.
And it taught me a lesson for my own family’s meals — give ’em what they’ve always had: they’ll eat it. Even though my daughter’s a gourmet cook and my son married a good cook, from me they want the same old same old. Suits me fine, though I’m always crossing my fingers they won’t want my chicken and noodles — way too much work. They want the homemade noodles, the not-too-mashed lumpy potatoes, the chicken cooked all day; it’s a culinary project, believe me. I learned the recipe from my mom — she called it “chicky noods” — and I can’t imagine serving the canned version from the store when I know it’s the love as much as the homemade that they look forward to.
If Mom came back for a day or two, she’d probably like to go out to a restaurant, even as I would beg her to make a pork roast with the heavenly gravy, raisin pie for dessert; and the next day chicky noods. Oh, and did I mention her after-Thanksgiving turkey tetrazzini?
