My Mother’s Kitchen
October 19, 2018
TODAY is the first anniversary of my mother’s death.
I think of my mother, who died at the age of 86, pretty much every day, but I thought of her more this week, not just because of this significant anniversary but because I have been cleaning out her kitchen. My father died in April and we are now packing up their home.
My mother’s kitchen was a workshop, a laboratory and a command center. She was an energetic, industrious and talented cook. From this kitchen — and the one in our childhood home — she prepared thousands of meals for her seven children, her husband, friends, and relatives. This was no secondary occupation, not simply the setting of a beautiful hobby, it was the center of life. It was reality.
We almost never ate in restaurants and hardly knew what take-out was when we were growing up. Despite the large demands on her kitchen time, my mother cooked for strangers too. She regularly made casseroles for a soup kitchen. Her kitchen was filled with her tools — hundreds of humble objects, many of them now battered and tired-looking, as if they belonged in a history exhibit where implements dug up by archaeologists are displayed to illustrate the course of human history. But they resonated with her personality and memories of the simple and indispensable chores they executed. From the baking sheets to the frying pans to the metal bowls and spatulas and knives, from the casserole dishes to the nut crackers to the potholders and candy thermometers, from the bean pot to the bread plates to the cooling racks to the stand mixer, they all seemed like friends I have known — and extensions of her.
I found the Sunbeam “automatic” egg cooker she used to make soft-boiled eggs when we were children and recovering from illnesses. It is an ugly little gadget — unnecessary really for boiling eggs — but now it seems like a small but important character in an absorbing and moving play. When we were sick, it was no logistical catastrophe, as it so often is for today’s over-burdened mothers. My mother was always home.
She was a cook during a period of great American kitchen inventiveness. When she began, a food processor didn’t even exist. She would work with many of the novelties, including a food processor and a “breadmaker,” but her cooking depended mostly on variants of tools that have been around for centuries.
The interesting thing about so many kitchen tools is that they still require human hands. The dream behind all that inventiveness is that cooking will become effortless, but it never will be. The dream is an escape. And it’s good that it is. Manual labor helps us think. Feminism doesn’t aim for women to think for themselves and that’s why it systematically disparages manual labor.
I found a couple of small, wide, metal tongs that looked familiar, but I couldn’t, just couldn’t, remember what they were. And then it came to me hours later — they were strawberry hullers! Other important characters in our story. When we ran an ice cream parlor at the Jersey Shore, my mother would buy huge flats of strawberries from farms and we would hull them by hand, cutting them in half, adding a little sugar, and putting them in bags for the freezer. They were then used all summer for strawberry sundaes. Hulling them was tedious. It was slavery, pure and simple. We could have been doing other things (preferably nothing at all) like normal children and teenagers, but instead we had to sit slumped over delicate, fragrant strawberries for hours. Couldn’t farmers find a way to grow them without stems?
Fortunately, my mother had many hands to help her. She was affectionately known as the “Big Banana” for her managerial skills running this summer business, so much of it done from scratch and with homey flair. The big cookie sheets she used to make “Plantation Crunch” — toasted coconut and almonds to be placed on top of vanilla ice cream and butterscotch sauce (homemade) — were also among the objects in her kitchen. We would wake in the mornings in the summers to the smell of Plantation Crunch drifting through the beach house or of brownies for Brownies A La Mode. The pans for those brownies were still in her kitchen too.
My mother became more of an adventurous cook when we got older. I found among her tools the Asian strainer-like spatula that she used. My mother brought a family of Vietnamese refugees to live temporarily with us in the late 1970s and they used this strainer to make spring rolls, but she also made Asian stir fries in a wok. She also went through a period of cooking inspired by Julia Child. A crepe pan and the pots in which she made a delicate French poached chicken were a testament to this phase. The world came to our house.
I opened an old, grubby plastic container and inside was a stack of scallop shells. For special meals, usually for guests, my mother would make Crab Imperial and place it in these shells to bake and then serve. My parents would have formal, small dinner parties — strictly for adults — when we were growing up and these shells with crab would sometimes be served on the table set with china, silver and crystal — formal things, testament to the “rigid” ways of the past, which no one wants anymore (styles naturally change) and which are far too much effort to maintain. Their friends would come for these occasions dressed up — the men wore suits and the women wore dresses. Only later did things get more informal. Children like it when adults do these things. It makes them feel part of something important. My parents didn’t hover over us and one of my happiest of all memories is doing the dishes for those dinner parties. I wanted my parents to feel like they were in a fancy restaurant with a kitchen staff.
My mother’s kitchen was the heart of a small society. Her meals, her great aptitude were a civilizing force. Domesticity, its routines and its drudgery, potentially elevates human affairs from an animal-like existence. Domesticity is an art form which simply cannot be mastered by women with busy careers. We are seeing the draining away of manners and dignity, of beauty and social harmony in large part because women are not able — or willing — to flourish at home as she did. Feminism was largely promoted by neurotic, insecure women who made lousy cooks and lacked the inner graces to serve others well.
I went across the street to visit one of my mother’s friends after I spent the afternoon in her kitchen. She was just returning from a game of mahjong with a cane and two neighbors helping her up the walkway. She faltered a bit. Tears appeared in her eyes when she saw me. She is 95 years old and misses my mother very much. “It’s hard when you’re an adult to make new friends.” she said later. “But your mother and I hit it off right away.” They lived across the street from each other for 28 years. She remembers my mother’s great hospitality. “She enjoyed it,” she said. By that, she meant that my mother enjoyed cooking for others. “That’s the first requirement,” she said. “You have to enjoy it.”
I don’t know about that. Cooking is hard work. I think my mother enjoyed the results of it, more than she enjoyed the tedium and labor. Her kitchen was a hearth. It warmed others, but it required great time and effort.
The glass salt-and-pepper shakers, with dented and discolored stainless steel tops, that had been passed back and forth, back and forth, across the table for decades were also still in her kitchen. Humble things. Meaningless. But they were characters in the story too and though they were made in a factory somewhere, they had lost everything impersonal about them. A home is not a factory — or it shouldn’t be. Its most important feature is personality. Offices often undermine personality, not homes. My mother had loads of it. She was irreplaceable and no one will ever be quite like her. I will miss her for the rest of my life.
These objects were packed in boxes and taken away. I’m still not done, but soon her kitchen will be empty. It is sad, but not hopeless. She is gone, it’s true. But the story is not over.
