My Mother's Recipes Hid A Deep Hunger
(Page 2 of 3)
May/June 2001
By Sallie Tisdale, Utne Reader
So why did she keep a recipe for eggplant stuffed with lunch meat, something our entire family (and perhaps the whole human race) would have loathed? Why did she save how-to plans for time-consuming, multilayer tortes when she never baked? Why menus for party foods and coffee klatches written in the careful hand of a woman who rarely went to parties and never entertained?
I wonder if my mother indulged in what writer Rosalind Coward, decades later, called "food pornography." "All the women I have talked to about food have confessed to enjoying it," wrote Coward. "Few activities it seems rival relaxing in bed with a good recipe book. Some indulged in full-color pictures of gleaming bodies of Cold Mackerel Basquaise lying invitingly on a bed of peppers, or perfectly formed chocolate mousse topped with mounds of cream. The intellectuals expressed a preference for erotica, Elizabeth David’s historical and literary titillation. All of us used the recipe books as aids to oral gratification, stimulants to imagine new combinations of food, ideas for producing a lovely meal."
I too keep a thick folder of untried recipes, torn from the newspaper and various magazines, handed to me by friends or scribbled from conversations. There are elaborate desserts meant to be served on linen tablecloths by candlelight, and hearty family suppers for a family I no longer have to feed. I’m still caught, like my mother, between what I’ve imagined and what I’ve known, what’s been given and what I’ve been able to take. I rarely use any of them. Like impulsively chosen lovers, a lot of my recipes look less appetizing in the cold light of day.
One of my mother’s old recipes is on a bit of stationery from a hotel in Reno. I don’t remember her going to Reno, and when I found it, I was suddenly, unreasonably glad that she went there. I could see her, laughing, drinking a martini, playing slot machines, staying up late with other secretly dissident women, smoking cigarettes, and not missing their husbands. But I was struck as well by a sudden small grief that she spent even one minute in Reno copying down a recipe.
I asked my sister, Susan, what she remembered of the suppers of our childhood. She was quiet for a long moment and then said, in a very small voice, "What I remember is that she wasn’t a very good cook." Susan said this as though it were a betrayal, and I know how she felt. Our mother was easily hurt, and she knew she wasn’t a good cook—which to her somehow meant she wasn’t entirely a good woman.
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She did her needlework in the weary evening hours while my father slept stretched out loosely across the couch. Women’s work is all details, a lot of small stitches put into life one at a time. Needles keep the hands busy while the heart stirs in its difficult sleep; they weave a hypnotic and deliberate calm. Women have always done these things, made scarves, gloves, headdresses, quivers, swaddling boards, vestments, moccasins, veils, christening gowns, beaded necklaces to rattle in the dance––inner turmoil brought to ground and herded into pattern.
Women rein in their sorrows, their loneliness and denial, and make it into beautiful things bursting with erotic, joyful color, beautiful things not called art because they happen to be useful. My weary, educated mother not only collected useless recipes but also bought craft kits and sequins and felt and fabric paint and Rit dye. She took up embroidery in middle age. I was
disappointed in her when she did, of course. I was too restless for needles, too mad about the world. I wanted her to complain––not cook and clean, not sew.
I was a fool.
I believe now that my mother’s life was one of wrenchingly difficult choices. Only the fearful need courage, and only the lazy need discipline. Her courage was to go on, day by day, in spite of hungers buried deep. The needlework she tried (and failed) to master may have been a last-ditch attempt to be what she was not, what she could never be but still spent her whole life trying to become.
After dinner she cleared the table, put away food, washed the pots and pans, wiped the counter, and then closed the kitchen door against the sloshing roar of the dishwasher.
Such discipline––day in and day out, for many long years.