Food
I have been working on dieting and exercising since the
first of the year. It is hard going
because I love to eat and I hate the gym.
So much of my life has been about food, that to leave it out is like
taking away a little part of myself. I
look at my yogurt and granola or my wassa bread with peanut butter and harken
back to the days when my family’s kitchen was filled with the smells of
cooking.
“These are people who
like to eat!” my mom always quipped whenever
there was a gathering of my large, noisy extended family. It was true that every family event and
holiday was celebrated with food and beverages.
Family pictures were taken around tables laden with holiday fare. We celebrated weddings with food. We mourned each passing with food. Every holiday had its own set of food
traditions. So it is no wonder that many
of my early memories are about eating.
Even when we weren’t celebrating our everyday activities
were scheduled around meals. Usually my
day started with breakfast cereal and Tang.
I especially relished Cocoa Krispies drenched with the cream which Mom
skimmed off the top of our household milk.
I would eat my breakfast, listening to the radio while Mom drank her
coffee and smoked. Then I would sit on
top of the heat vent until it was time to catch the school bus.
In the summers, lunch was the big meal of the day. Mom spent all morning making it. We always had beef and potatoes, some type of
vegetable and bread and butter on the table.
Mom made a sheet cake every week because my dad liked to finish off the
meal with dessert. My mom, dad and I
were joined by my Uncles Harold and Howard and I remember feeling that I was
competing with them for the food on the table.
And if I didn’t take seconds, I was somehow letting my mother down. On Sundays, Mom made fried chicken, mashed
potatoes with gravy and some special dessert.
My Uncle Dale would join us on Sundays and the men ate heartily while my
mother nibbled on bony chicken backs.
She always said she liked the backs, but inside I knew she was leaving
the choicest pieces for everyone else.
My mother was a great cook and she seemed to enjoy it. She was in her element when she was in the
kitchen. I often joke that she could
serve the multitudes with six loaves and two fishes. It didn’t rattle her when Mary and Walt or
the Martins would show up unexpectedly.
She would just add another can of this or that, and pull out some
pickles and extra bread and we would eat in style.
The same went for holiday dinners. Thanksgiving and Christmas were always
celebrated with turkey. I remember big
birds filling the entire stove. One year
she sold enough Tupperware to earn a double oven range. She kept that avocado green monstrosity going
for days prior to the event. On the day
of the feast, she would rise before the sun came up to prepare all the dishes
for our dinner. She loved having a household full of company.
One of my best food memories took place during a family
funeral. My mother’s brother had died of
cancer and in the way of my large noisy extended Italian family, food needed to
be prepared. The post funeral get
together was being held at the home of my mom’s oldest sister, Katie. Aunt Katie and I shared a birthday and we had
a kind of bond I didn’t have with a lot of the other family. When I told her I wasn’t interested in
attending the funeral she asked if I could stay at the house with her to
prepare the food. While my mom had
always shooed me out of the kitchen, but Aunt Katie let me stay as we fried up
what seemed like a dozen chickens and made several huge bowls of
spaghetti. We chopped potatoes for
potato salad and Aunt Katie even asked my opinion on the dressing. Then we boiled corn on the cob until the
windows wept. Katie was the patient
teacher my mother was not.
I wish I had had the time and skills to share cooking
memories with my children, but I was too busy with life and school. We ate a lot of fast food, because, unfortunately,
I never learned to cook. Probably my
mother’s reluctance to get me involved played a big role in that. She used to shoo me out of the kitchen
because I slowed her down. She had no
patience to teach me anything, so I confined my cooking to mud pies and magical
potions. After I was married, I taught
myself to make a few things. I can cobble
together a meatloaf from scratch and my holiday lasagna is famous, but there
are few things I can make without a recipe in front of me. I don’t find joy in it like my mother seemed
to.
In my family food was the foundation of love. My mother’s family was never people who
shared their feelings but the time and care it took to make those meals was an
external manifestation of their emotions.
My daughters and I have family food traditions, like Thanksgiving turkey
and Christmas lasagna, but my offerings always seem so dull compared to fare my
mother and aunts always had to offer.
The interesting thing for me is that my daughter Robin is
now the family cook. When she was ten or
so we sent her to live with my mother for the summer. My mother, who had no time for teaching when
I was little, taught Robin all the skills she had never given to me. Robin comes up with elegant recipes of her
own creation. I told her that soon she
is going to have to take over the family get togethers because she is so much
more skilled than I am, especially with gravy.
My love affair with food came from heartfelt beginnings and
giving those feelings up to lose weight has always been challenging for
me. Changing food from a loving friend and
companion to something necessary for life and energy is a difficult transition
for me. Each day I have to remind myself
not to overeat and turn away from the goodies which would cause me to
stumble. When a basket of cookies
arrived at the office the other day I had to tell myself that one cookie would
make me feel worse rather than better. I
tried to be noble and set a better example for my employees by declining the
goodies. But I would have killed to have
a cookie.