Cooking with Mom

Misleading image alert: I was not a cute blond child delighted at ‘helping’ my mother in the kitchen.  First, I was a moody brunette child (the cute blond one was my younger sister).  Second, domestic tasks were not then (and are not now) of any particular interest to me.  Third, and most significant to this Mother’s Day post, Mom was a rather schizophrenic cook.  For family dinners, she had a circumscribed repertoire that she assembled quickly without needing or wanting her daughters’ assistance (our jobs were clearing the postprandial table and rinsing the dishes). Simultaneously, her reputation for delicious cocktail party hors d’oeuvres was sterling (perhaps because she pulled out the wedding-gift sterling silver pieces for these occasions; polishing silver was a kitchen-related job her daughters were allowed to do). 

Re family dinners:  as was expected of middle-class wives in the 1950s and 1960s, my mom put ‘home-cooked’ meals on the table about five days out of seven.  (The exceptions being Saturday, when my parents ‘went out,’ leaving us with TV dinners, and once I was a teenager, Friday, when we migrated to the neighborhood bar for fish fry.)  Our family repasts were edible but not good.  Entree staples included pan-seared-to-the-point-of-leather-shoe-soles pork chops, chicken baked in cream-of-mushroom soup, and the much-hated-by-me mushy meatloaf.  (Actually, meatloaf prompted whatever I can claim as very early cooking experience, as I learned to purloin unadulterated hamburger to make myself a patty more to my liking.) Sides ran to instant mashed potatoes, canned peas, canned fruit cocktail, and store-bought applesauce. 

As unappetizing as these dinners sound today, we certainly didn’t starve (my father actually liked most of these meals, something I can’t say for my sister and me).  We appreciated that Mom didn’t fuss in the kitchen, giving us more time together during the all-important cocktail hour, and that she simply put food on the table without expecting commentary from us or offering any of her own.

Cocktail parties were a different matter.  In true Mad-Man-era fashion, these events demanded lots of labor-intensive hors d’oeuvres.  One of Mom’s specialties was Shrimp de Jonghe, a garlic-and-butter-laden Chicago area dish that took hours to make.  Another was Swedish Meatballs, which were basically small globular meatloaves smothered in the ever-useful cream-of-mushroom soup mixed with sour cream and grape jelly, then impaled on cocktail picks.  There were onion dips, (canned) crab spreads, and chipped-beef-and-cream-cheese-logs.  And cheese: this was, after all, Wisconsin.

I got to help with the cheese.  It was de rigeur to have all cocktail party food presented in bite-sized morsels, so a block of cheddar or a round of gouda had to be cut into spearable cubes.  That got to be my job, along with arranging the cubes and Triscuits on a platter.  I was also entrusted with pouring peanuts into a bowl.  I presume my younger sister eventually had similar duties, while it was up to Dad to set up the bar and make the cocktails.  My sister and I helped distribute the Old Fashioneds, Martinis, and Scotch-and-Sodas to our parents’ thirsty guests.

What did I learn from these early brushes with the culinary arts?  From the family dinners, it was mainly what not to do . . . such as not buying thin-cut pork chops and choosing instead thick-cut ones, then baking them, rather than frying them, adding a savory sauce to keep the chops moist.  The fact that fresh ingredients became available year-round allowed me to graduate from fruit cocktail to actual fruit, from canned to fresh vegetables.  From the cocktail parties, it was to have plenty of food although it did not all need to be in one-inch squares, brown-colored, or artery-busting.

Mom’s most memorable cooking lesson occurred during a church supper for incoming college students (our church abutted my town’s college campus).  My best friend and I, still in high school, volunteered to be servers in hopes of meeting some cute boys. Our mothers were in charge of the food, and for some reason decided on tuna wiggle (a horrible dish involving canned tuna, egg noodles, canned peas, and the omnipresent cream-of-mushroom soup), probably because it was Friday and our Episcopal church observed dietary customs as rigorously as our Roman Catholic church neighbors.

The tuna wiggle was baked in huge casserole pans.  When time came to remove them from the church kitchen oven, the pans were so heavy and hot that our moms dropped them.  The tuna wiggle steamed unhappily on the floor tiles.  “Get some plates, girls,” our mothers commanded.  They then scooped up the wiggle and piled it onto the plates, which my friend and I blithely ferried out to the dining area.  There was no subsequent outbreak of ptomaine poisoning.  Indeed, the tuna wiggle probably got a much-needed flavor boost from its brief sojourn on the kitchen floor. 

This drastic instance of the-show-must-go-on approach to food was but an extreme version of my mother’s cooking philosophy: serve it up with no apologies.  If a dish didn’t turn out as nicely as one would have wished, serve it anyway and serve it with a smile rather than explanations of its imperfections.  I have never offered guests food that I’ve scraped off the floor but I have scraped off burnt edges and disguised unsightly dishes with an extra sprinkle of cilantro or a sizable garnish of grapes.  I learned from Mom that most guests are more interested in a convivial evening than in the food itself.

Thanks, Mom, for valuable lessons in hospitality, even if actual cooking apprenticeship was limited.  I love you and miss you.

Georgiana Mewhirter Baker, 1923-2005

Social worker, opera singer, Apple Blossom Princess, hostess extraordinaire, and wonderful mother.