Foodie
My mother had always considered herself something of a gourmet. She bought the monthly food magazines and tore through them all in one sitting, dog-earing articles about clarified butter or the newest braising techniques. On our trips to the bookstore, I could always find her sitting in the cooking aisle, knee-deep in new cookbooks she didn’t yet have stuffed into the shelves at home. Instead of Wuthering Heights or Sense and Sensibility, Sonoma Dining and Thomas Keller’s Kitchen were my mother’s literature of choice.
Whenever she would drag me along for a trip to Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table, I would recognize that same glazed-over expression on her face that I would get, even as a child, when standing in front of the handbag display at Neiman Marcus.
“Silicon spreading knives!” she would gasp, clutching me to her side. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted one of these?!”
No, I didn’t, nor could I fully understand why.
My mother has always been an excellent cook, as far back as I can remember. It must have been hard for her, those twenty years in Knoxville, Tennessee where green bean casserole and chocolate icebox pie passed for extravagant eating. But even in a town where the only lettuce was iceberg, my mother happily cooked five-star meals for her family every night, with what gourmet ingredients she could find. Raised as a food snob, I knew at a young age the difference between béarnaise and beurre blanc. I could appreciate the complex flavor of a balsamic reduction sauce over a fresh, ripe strawberry. While friends had Chips-Ahoy for an afternoon snack, I had homemade biscotti.
Such an upbringing did have its drawbacks. At school, I found it difficult to choke down the rubbery chicken nuggets and canned vegetables in the cafeteria when I was being served molasses marinated pork loin and lemon zested mint peas at home.
When I was six years old, I threw a fit at a friend’s house when her parents served us Hamburger Helper for dinner. My mother sat me down and explained that not everyone ate the way we did, and there was nothing wrong with that at all.
“Hamburger Helper can be very tasty,” she offered. “Did you even try it?”
“They put Velveeta on it,” I countered, knowing the very mention of this substandard cheese would get to her.
Mt mother winced quickly, then wiped her face with a smile. “You should try everything once. All true gourmets do.”
Apparently, Hamburger Helper was much more typical as a dinner food than I thought. Whenever friends would come over to my house for dinner, their eyes would register panic at the sight of rosemary lamb chops and leek-gruyere tartlets. “Do I have to eat this?” they would always ask. My mother starting buying frozen pizzas whenever I had sleepovers.
After we left Knoxville, the food world opened up a little bit for my mother. There were more fine dining experiences to be had in San Antonio, and even more in ritzy, cosmopolitan Dallas, where we visited my grandparents frequently.
To this day, some of the clearest and most pleasant memories I have of my mother are of seeing her across a white linen tabletop, eyes lit up over a menu, anticipating the shared experience of an exciting trip for the taste buds. It was always a treat to go out and splurge on a meal that cost as much as a month’s worth of groceries, and my mother always took it as her chance to show off for anyone within hearing distance.
She grilled the waiter on menu specifics. “Now, it says here that there are sweet onions in the remoulade. Do you know if those are Vidalia or Bermuda onions?”
The waiter rushed back to the kitchen for an answer to my mother’s slightly inane question. Appearing a minute later he offered, “They’re Bermuda onions, ma’am.”
My mother clucked her tongue and nodded, throwing her hands up as if she’d won a bet. “See, that’s what I thought!”
As soon as the waiter was gone, she whispered to the rest of the table, “Vidalias are sweeter. A little milder, too. I wouldn’t order that dish, if I were you.”
At the restaurants, my mother took the opportunity to demonstrate her food knowledge in a more public arena than our home, even if few people cared to listen. It was here that my mother first taught me the concept of name-dropping, as well.
“Your dessert menu is exquisite,” she’d gush to the patient waiter. “You know, I took a class with Thomas Keller—“
“Oh, he’s great.”
“And he told me that the pastry chef here used to be his sous chef.”
“Really? Would you like to come back and meet him?”
My mother would emerge from the kitchen a few minutes later, absolutely delighted with herself. “They’re going to send out some desserts that aren’t on the menu for us to sample.”
If she especially enjoyed a meal, she would ask the waiter for a copy of the menu. If he declined, she would enlist me or my sister to slip one into her purse when no one was looking. We found this particularly humiliating, but always shared in her excitement afterward if we were able to get away with it.
“I’ll have to experiment,” she would say later, “but I’m gonna figure out how they made that ganache.”
I don’t think the restaurants ever had to worry about my mother poaching their recipes and selling them off to competitors. Her emulation was purely out of her love for food, and her creations (borrowed or not) never got much further than the mouths of family members and close friends.
My mother finally took her skills to cooking school, the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, when she was forty eight years old and my sister and I had left the nest. It was there that her ego was deflated a little. She was no longer the star chef she always thought she was, and she certainly wasn’t the youngest.
“I feel like a backwoods Betty Crocker!” She told me one night over the phone, the lonely, middle-aged, homesick co-ed sitting in her dorm room. “There are people here your age who’ve worked under celebrity chefs in New York City.” I pictured these so-called celebrity chefs wielding whisks and spatulas as the paparazzi chased them up the streets.
“Show them your crème brulee,” I suggested. She did make a killer crème brulee.
“That’s a custard dish, Sarah!” she hissed, as if I should have known I was being insulting. “They’ll laugh me right out of the kitchen!”
Even after much attempted encouragement, my mother could never again shake the idea that she wasn’t, in fact, the country’s best undiscovered celebrity chef. She graduated from cooking school, and instead of taking that degree into the work force, she sat at home, collecting new recipes and experimenting by herself in the kitchen.
“I’ve started to archive my recipes,” she reported, after I asked her one afternoon what she had been up to. “If I see one I like, I just clip it and put it in its coordinating binder. I’ve got a whole system.”
“You just…collect them?”
“Yeah. That takes up pretty much all my time now.”
My mother had never worked a paid day in her life. Before she and my father split up, she never had to. She had honed her cooking skills as a housewife, a mother. Her greatest joy was to feed her family; I don’t think she ever really considered where she would go with a cooking degree. So perhaps, faced with the reality of things, the fact that she might never get beyond her own kitchen, she sat collecting recipes and lost the nerve to try.
Without a full-time job, my mother’s one and only big-time cooking gig every year is when she prepares a feast for the whole family at Christmas in Dallas. No one asks her to do this. Each year, just after Thanksgiving, she calls up her parents and volunteers herself to be in charge of feeding thirty-four people on Christmas Day. Each year, the day after Christmas, she complains of swollen feet and a sore back and swears she will never do it again.
She works in a frenzy around my grandparents’ kitchen for two days in a row leading up to the big event, always attempting to outdo the meal she prepared the year before. She’s a cursing, sweating, furious ball of culinary energy. No one is allowed near the stove or oven. No one is allowed to touch anything. Last year, my mother missed the Christmas Eve party because she refused to peel herself away from the kitchen.
“I can’t leave my sauces,” she said.
Just before eleven pm, I brought her the double grande cappuccino she requested and sat with her in the kitchen, me still in my party dress, and she in her chef whites and rubber clogs, rubbing her lower back. In front of us, all the food was spread out on the kitchen counter. There were Cornish game hens, orange glazed carrots, chestnut squash, scalloped potatoes, and the Buche Noelle that was only half-assembled. She still had several dishes in the oven.
“Why do you keep doing this to yourself?” I asked.
My mother looked at me and smiled weakly. “Because I love it. I love cooking for my family.”
She would never tell me how she truly felt, but she didn’t have to say anything. She missed her chance for a dream that developed too late. She would never go out there and hunt down the life she wanted, because she had already lived a life she loved. So she cooked for her family because it was all she had. She was happy to do it because it reminded her, in the best sense, of what could have been.
The next day, the thirty-four of us sat down to the feast my mother had prepared for us. There were handwritten menus and calligraphy place cards. The first course arrived in choreographed time, followed by the second, the third, the fourth. Our usually rowdy crowd fell silent over plates; the food commanded every sense’s attention. Between courses, we could only talk about the food.
“What was in that soup?”
“Have you ever tasted anything so exquisite?”
“She’s outdone herself this time!”
We all could have been sitting in the fanciest restaurant, but looking around the room, I could see these people were experiencing something more than a delicious meal. Watching people’s eyes and mouths as they discussed the food, it was pride I saw. Pride because the woman who had created this food belonged to all of us. We were given the joy of this meal that no other people, no stranger patrons in some formal restaurant, would ever get. We were her family, her most loyal customers, her biggest fans.
After we had all stuffed ourselves on every last morsel of food, my mother, in the monogrammed chef’s hat my sister and I had given her, emerged from the kitchen to check on her patrons. The room burst into applause for the brilliant chef, and my mother beamed.
