WEThurs Cooking – According to My Family

Today’s challenge: By the rules or by the seat of your pants? Tell us your approach.

• Write about your comfort level with following the rules and guidelines. Do you kick at the traces or are you happy to pull the cart as commanded?
• Write about your cooking style. A dash of this, and handful of that? Or is it all about precision in your kitchen?
• When it’s time to prepare a dish, what is your specialty? Bonus marks for recipes!

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Maggie, I am so glad you posted this challenge because it gives me a chance to introduce you to my form of civil disobedience — I don’t always follow the rules. Any rules. Including challenge rules.

After writing that I started thinking about the cooking done in my family over the years and the difference in styles and abilities.

My mother cooked good, wholesome meals for our family: most were boiled or roasted. She made a few things that were really great.  I can particularly remember her spaghetti and meatballs, chop suey, and tacos. She always had me in the kitchen helping her and I learned all the basics of cooking from her.

My dad never cooked until we moved to San Bernardino Road where we had a brick barbecue. His menu on that consisted of only hot dogs and hamburgers. I don’t remember him ever cooking a steak or chicken on the grill and I have no idea when he started cooking for real. When mom got too sick to care for herself he evidently picked up the cooking tasks. He concentrated on meat and potatoes in nearly every meal. He also bought a lot of frozen dinners that he could just heat and eat. He cut out recipes from papers and magazines all the time and collected over a thousand recipes. He was not an experimenter; he followed the recipe exactly. As a result he had a lot of variety in his diet, but he could never make something without having the recipe in front of him.

Grandma Webb never let anyone in the kitchen while she was cooking. Even Mom would ask before venturing into Grandma Webb’s kitchen and then she would rapidly come back out. I remember that I liked everything she cooked, but can’t remember exactly what she served. Being a farm household, the table was always loaded with meat, potatoes, veggies, and dessert.

Grandma Maxwell, however, held more to Pennsylvania traditions in that the kitchen was the center of the family. Her kitchen/dining room was larger than any three other rooms in the house combined. Again I can’t remember anything in particular that she fixed, but I do remember that I liked most of it.

My first wife, Robin – what to say about her expertise? When we lived together in Paris she was attending the famous Cordon Bleu and each night she would experiment on me by fixing whatever she learned in class that day. She had also lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and learned a lot of Brazilian and Portuguese cooking. She was great at fixing gourmet dishes. When we lived in NC, however, she was not up to fixing daily meals for just the two of us and she got bored easily. I’m ashamed to admit I was a typical male-chauvinist when we were married. I worked, she didn’t, so when I came home from work I expected to be fed. I honestly don’t remember ever cooking while Robin and I were together.

My middle wife, Mickey, like mom, cooked good, solid, “stick-to-your-ribs” meals. She made more Mexican food and was willing to experiment occasionally. When she did that it was either great or – well, like when made tacos using beef tongue – YUCK! For whatever reason, I don’t remember her ever teaching the kids how to cook. The times I remember the kids helping in the kitchen were those when I was cooking. Mickey and I did NOT cook well together. Any time we were in the kitchen together we got in each other’s way and usually ended up in an argument.

My last wife, Debbi, got off work at five and her old boyfriend got off at seven or eight and she was expected to have dinner ready. When we got together she was shocked the first night when she got home from work and found dinner ready for her. We traded off cooking as long as we were together. She was not really into gourmet or “fancy” cooking but she had an extremely wide array of items she could prepare. She also experimented a lot in the kitchen, sometimes mixing a bunch of things I would never think of and ending up with something really great. I don’t remember ever seeing her use a recipe, she just thought about what she wanted to fix and did it. She and I worked well in the kitchen together and could both work on different things or even help each other with one thing with no arguments.

In case you haven’t noticed, there is a National Family Day each year and there are usually ads all over the radio about the family eating together on that day. That made me start thinking about the following comparisons.

At Grandma Maxwell’s house everyone sat down to eat together. If there were a family get-together there would be one big table for the adults and one or two smaller tables for the kids. I remember when I graduated to the adult table and was soooo proud that I even stuck out my tongue at the kiddies at their table. (Yeah, I’m really a nice guy.) Dinner was always at six o’clock and everyone was expected to be there. If you weren’t there – you didn’t eat!

At Grandma Webb’s we all ate together. The time wasn’t fixed, but it was usually about an hour after Grandpa Webb, dad, and I returned from working in the fields. It just dawned on me that mom must have been bored silly during those summers. The men would go away during the day and she’d sit at home with Grandma Webb. Hmm, guess that’s pretty much what women did all the time in those days, huh? But mom was used to working and I now wonder how she spent her time and whether she ever got tired of doing “women’s” stuff.

When I was growing up mom and dad both worked. Mom eight to five and dad on rotating shifts, so he was there for dinner only about two-thirds of the time. Even though mom worked she, as the wife, was expected to fix dinner and have it on the table at six each evening. When she was late dad would fret and stew until she either told him to shut up or, “If you want this on the table at six, you get out here and fix it.” That always shut him up.

When dad wasn’t home mom usually let me sit in the living room and watch TV while eating dinner on a TV tray. TV dinners were a new thing and we ate a lot of them when dad wasn’t there. I remember dad making a big deal out of not eating TV dinners. I can’t remember what it was, but there was a time when one TV show attracted him and he actually sat in the living room one night a week and ate a TV dinner on a TV tray.

Mickey and I tried to have dinner each night with the entire family at the table. Easy when the kids were younger, but progressively harder as they grew up.

After I finished this I sent it to my oldest son, Greg, for his thoughts and he responded with:

I read that cooking document you sent. That’s cool. I never bothered to think about what our family’s eating habits were. Not only was it informative for me on a personal level, but it shows how the disintegration of evening “family time” has progressed and what has replaced it.

Start-Full sit down meals, then women in the workplace-quicker meals with flexible dining room time, television technology-brings less hearty/healthful meals to living room and dining room time is lessened, junk food and mass media-makes sit down meals special occasions, cyber space-too busy to eat, let alone set a table.

It was a little slice of Americana.