WHAT'S COOKING?

My mother was a beautiful woman who relished nothing more than dressing up, going to a party and having fun, and no one deserved it more than she, but, cooking was not high on her list of enjoyable activities. However, she did make delicious chicken soup.

“When I was a child every skinned knee and sniffle was soothed with a cup of Mama’s chicken soup, and later, in college, dreams of home and soup gave me incentive to study at final exam time. So, when I asked my Mom for the recipe, I was shocked at how easy it is to prepare. Incredulous, I asked, ‘Are you sure this is all there is to it?’ Although she had never written down the recipe, she swore by the ingredients. After the third, ‘Are you sure you haven’t left something out? This is too easy.’ Dad, finally interrupted, ‘Daughter, if you want to complicate it, you can always throw in a dead squirrel.’”
(Mama’s Cooking, Celebrities Remember Mama’s Best Recipe, Blumenfeld and Alpern, c. Blumenfeld 1985)

Escaping to the United States from Fascist Nazi Germany, my parents loved the United States of America, and Mother wanted nothing more than to be able to cook like a real American. No longer did she want to cook Wienerschnitzel or Sauerbraten, but she wanted to prepare American meals. Unfortunately, it took her awhile to learn which dishes complemented one another, and how to prepare them. For instance, she took a liking to crab apples, but they didn’t quite taste the same on top of a fried steak, and in Germany corn on the cob was only fed to farm animals. Also, to my dismay, she couldn’t stand the smell of peanut butter. Salad was always a hunk of iceberg lettuce with French dressing, because bottled French dressing had to be American, because surely the French would never serve it. And, cold cuts on rye bread had to be American (except when salami was served with chicken fat slathered on the bread.) Obviously, my family was blessed with good genes, because her cooking did not kill us, and my parents died of old age, and my brother and I are on our way there.

When the United States entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, many food stuffs were rationed including butter. So, when baking a cake, which Mother planned to serve to a small group of Mahjong playing ladies, she had to supplement cooking oil instead of butter. Happily, the creation looked beautiful coming out of the oven, but when she sliced it at the table, the center sported two perfectly formed sliced hard boiled eggs. One of her surprised guests gasped and said, “Ruth, How did you do that?”

I always thought that my Mother learned everything she knew about cooking from her mother who was even a worse cook than she. The best dish that Grandma made was a concoction of whipped egg white, and the rest of the egg stirred at the bottom of the glass with sugar and whiskey.  It was supposed to cure a cold. I remember that I would tell Grandma that I thought I was coming down with a cold, just to get a teaspoon of that stuff. Tasted pretty good! Did not cure anything.

Grandma was a bit of a mischief maker (that’s a nice way to put it) and had a way of getting under Mother’s skin. One evening my parents were hosting a very fancy cocktail party at our home. Mother had prepared an assortment of hordoerves. On one tray I spied a lonely cracker with cream cheese, topped with a lonely sardine that Mother had discovered nesting in back of our refrigerator.

Grandma, the fastidious kvetcher was the first person at the table. She spied the sardine cracker, popped it into her mouth, spit it out and shouted, “No one eat anything. The appetizers are poisoned.”That was when Mother discovered the joy of catering.

Esther Blumenfeld