Jelly jars just a stop on the throughline of culinary story.
I have a postcard that my grandmother wrote to her sister in 1922. She was a young mother at the time, with three kids under 4 years old, the youngest not yet 3 months old. She lived on a ranch in western Nebraska then; her sister was almost 300 miles away. There was no Facebook then or Instagram, no email, not even a telephone way out there on that wide empty prairie. So she used a photo of her two older children and their cousin to thank her sister for a birthday gift and to give a brief update on her growing family.
Depending on what’s happening in my own life, different things strike me about my grandmother when I visit that old postcard.
How gracious she was: “I’m a little (late) with my Thank you,” she wrote, “but never-the-less I tho’t my birthday hanky very pretty.” The card was postmarked Sept. 14; her birthday was Sept.12.
How proud she was of her new baby: “Billy is growing so nice. I am so anxious for everyone to see him.”
How hard she had to work. “I canned two bushels of tomatoes last week,” she wrote. “I have about 90 quarts of stuff. That’s a lot for me.”
Do you know how big a bushel of tomatoes is? Fifty-six pounds.
So canning two bushels just weeks after giving birth and while caring for two toddlers seems a Herculean task. And, I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that, considering she lived out in the country, she also grew all of the produce that she put in all of those jars.
Recently I made jam: Honey-Bourbon Peach.
People in Colorado — myself included — love peaches. Palisade peaches to be precise. We kind of consider them our own private manna from a high-altitude heaven. So at summer’s end, we buy more peaches than we can eat and we make things: pies and crisps and cobblers and clafoutis. And jam.
I peeled and chopped and weighed the fruit. Added the sugar and the honey and the bourbon. Sprinkled in the gelling agent. Watched as it slowly came to a boil. Roiling and foaming and then thickening. Then I put it in little jars — six of them, or seven. It was delicious and I was all proud of myself.
But honestly, I was humbled when I remembered that my grandmother, eight weeks postpartum, with an adorable new baby in her arms and two chubby blonde toddlers hanging on her skirts, canned 90 quarts of food to see her family through the winter.
***
In her lifetime, my mother made north of 45,000 meals.
That’s a staggering number — but a conservative estimate.
I did the math the other day.
My mother got married when she was 26 years old in a little white church in Prairie Home, Neb. She was working at the time as a switchboard operator-slash-bookkeeper but quit a few months after the wedding so she could go to Texas and other exotic locales with my father who traveled extensively in his job as the secretary-treasurer of the Red Poll Cattle Club. They were married for 56 years. On average, I figured she made six dinners and five lunches a week and, for the 23 years that she had children in the house, at least five breakfasts. (She wasn’t really a breakfast eater once her kids had grown and gone.)
Just that is 38,012 meals.
And there were more: My mother left her childhood home when she was 18 and, before getting married, she lived in a string of crummy apartments with a revolving cast of roommates. If you add the meals she made during those eight years, she’s probably up to 44,096.
That startling tally doesn’t even count the weeks when she didn’t go out to eat or the breakfasts she made when her grandchildren visited or, you know, the midnight snacks and potluck offerings.
Numbers that high are inconceivable to me, unbelievable, breath-taking.
But my mother, like her mother before her, was a hard worker and a good cook.
She tested new recipes.
She watched cooking shows.
She collected cookbooks.
She made a beautiful, flaky pie crust.
I don’t think she would have ever described herself as someone who loved cooking and often dreaded the repetition of daily meals, but she became an accomplished cook in spite of herself. A young wife and mother in the late 1950s and early ’60s, she was justly — although sometimes grudgingly— proud of the home she made and the meals she fixed and the tables she set for her husband and children. She grew to enjoy cooking when she had time and receptive dining companions.
She liked to make things her loved ones considered a treat, like Christmas cookies and caramel apples and homemade ice cream flavored with fresh Colorado peaches.
She liked to make desserts, even though she herself didn’t have a very defined sweet tooth; and a bite of something sweet or rich or gooey capped off many ordinary days. (In their later years, my father made her a mug of hand-stirred, slow-heated, not-quite-boiling, marshmallow-topped hot chocolate nearly every night, the gift being that someone was cooking for her as much as it was the treat itself.)
Picnic tables and meeting hall counters heavy with stick-to-your-rib casseroles, myriad pasta salads and seemingly unending sweets were a staple of my childhood, planned for and parsed after. It was a church thing, a school thing, a work thing, a 4-H and family thing. Was there ever a potluck (and she went to a dizzying number of them) that didn’t contain a can’t-walk-away-from-this delicacy baked in her kitchen? Unlikely.
My mother set a lovely holiday table with a hand-embroidered table cloth and fine bone china, crystal water glasses, sterling silver flatware, cut-glass serving dishes. Even for a middle-class family in the middle of the country, it was a more refined time. On Thanksgiving, my mother roasted a turkey; on Christmas, she made standing rib roast, on Easter, a ham — each always accompanied by a creamy potato dish, a green bean casserole made from a recipe in a cookbook and not on the side of a can, dinner rolls with real butter, and a Jell-O salad that is so delicious we still have it every holiday even though Jell-O salad isn’t really a thing these days.
Sometimes, she tried something fancy, like cheese soufflé or baked Alaska or profiterole swans. Mostly, though, my mother made the kinds of foods that efficiently fed four growing kids and a husband raised in the Midwest on meat and potatoes: pork chops (sometimes with sauerkraut and applesauce); meatloaf with mashed potatoes; tacos — or, more likely, tostados with a fried egg on top; stew which was usually potatoes, carrots and onions boiled with ham hocks; hamburger with country gravy; fried chicken and apple salad; spaghetti. Sometimes we had steak.
As she got older — and as the world and women’s place within it changed — she got out of the kitchen more often, for dinner at some nearby restaurant, for breakfast pastries served by a German baker, for a fancy coffee at a trendy chain shop. She always liked that fancy coffee.
***
My own cooking journey has been, well, circuitous and sporadic.
My mother wasn’t all that intent on teaching me to cook. I guess she thought I’d learn when I needed to, and turned out she was right. I mastered Divinity and French toast in junior high home ec, and ventured tentatively into omelets and box cakes in high school. When I was in college, like everyone else, I ate a lot of frozen pot pies and Top Ramen but also impressed my friends with manicotti and Elegant Peanut Butter Pie (a recipe that I found in a magazine and thought was really cool because it came from a New York pub). After college, since my first solo place didn’t even have an oven, I experimented with stovetop cooking using some pretty white-and-blue pans that I bought at the grocery store. Then, and in
subsequent years, I worked nights — lots of nights, an inordinate number of nights, years and years of nights — and I packed a lot of brown bags, bought too much fast food, frequently ate vending-machine crackers.
When my mother died, I worried that my dad would eat nothing but fried egg sandwiches for the rest of his life if someone didn’t fix him a balanced meal. So I got out my mom’s “Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book,” (first edition from 1950, probably a wedding gift, used so much it no longer had a spine) and dusted off her recipe box, and I figured out how to make a pork roast. And fluffy white rice, all manner of potatoes, Jell-O (because he loved it) and a zippy cheese sauce to use in mac ‘n’ cheese, on bacon and tomato sandwiches, over cauliflower and broccoli.
And I mastered the art of a beautiful flaky pie crust.
***
My nephew makes jam.
He’s been making jam for a few years, only a few years.
Each year, in the waning days of summer, he makes a batch — maybe two — and then cans it with some fancy equipment his sister-in-law gifted him. He uses peaches, Palisade peaches to be exact, because people in Colorado are genetically predisposed to love, covet, wax poetic about Palisade peaches. Then he gives the pretty little jars of fruity goodness to “some of (his) favorite people.”
He first stepped tentatively into this new hobby when he was waiting for his first child to be born. He said he was trying to figure out what kind of father he would be. Would he be strict? Demanding? A taskmaster with high expectations? Or lenient and permissive? He imagined himself a “whimsical dad,” he said in an Instagram post, “in the kitchen, grinning ear to ear over some seasonal this-or-that, wearing an apron, sharing little bites with the family (I would have a little spoon for taste testing), there would be some soft classical music playing, and the light pouring into the house would be soft, gentle.”
I don’t know if all those sweet imaginings came true, the tasting spoon, the soothing music, the apron, but some of it did. He makes jam.
My grandmother, his great-grandmother, was just 32 when she thanked her sister for her birthday hanky and said she had canned 90 quarts of food. Her baby, little Billy, was about 10 weeks old. Sam, my nephew, was a few weeks past his 32nd birthday when he told his Instagram followers that he was canning peaches. His baby, sweet Ezra, was not yet 12 weeks old.
I am struck by the throughline.
As he stood over that hot stove, stirring that sticky delicacy, watching the steam rise and the bubbles, I wonder if Sam felt the ties of history that bind him to that west Nebraska farm kitchen.
***
All this to say, I’ve been examining my “culinary heritage.”
While my sister was visiting this summer, we killed a few evenings watching PBS’s “Great American Recipe.” It’s a low-key fun show, a cooking contest in which all the “home cooks” stay until the end and the prize is a wooden recipe box. It’s an interesting show because it gathers a handful of people with diverse backgrounds and tasks them with making dishes that spotlight their heritage or their journey or, you know, the enduring love of their grandma, nonna, abuela, soba, kui fefine. My sister and I, raised on white bread and “No Frost Chocolate Chip Cake,” marveled at the food they made, recipes like Chilaquiles, Guinea Hen Yassa, Jaffna-style Lamb Curry, Orecchiette, Red Snapper with Kelewele and Chicken Congee.
At some point, we asked each other the same questions the TV cooks were asked. What would you say was a treasured family recipe? Do you ever make a recipe inspired by a friend? What do you consider a special event recipe or the best dish you’ve ever had for a holiday meal? What’s your favorite comfort food?
How do these recipes inform your food journey?
We struggled to answer the questions, both of us — “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything. I don’t know what I’d say.” — agreeing we probably would be unsuccessful in such a contest.
Or we would laugh and joke. Best food grandma made: “Butter and sugar sandwiches on white bread”; best holiday dish: “Jell-O!”; comfort food: “buttered noodles” or “7-Up on the couch watching soap operas and the ‘Price is Right.’”
True — and yet, not really.
Because my mother collected cookbooks.
And my grandmother canned tomatoes with a baby on her hip.
And my nephew finds whimsy in a jar of jam.
***
A final story:
I remember vividly a midday in a humid Nebraska summer, decades past. My mother and her sisters, most of them probably but all of them in my memory, were gathered in the kitchen of my aunt’s fancy Lincoln house. They were middle-aged then, or older, and their children were grown or mostly grown and a long parade of grandchildren kept marching through their lives. Their men had likely gathered in the garage or the backyard, well away from the cooking but within earshot of calls for assistance. These women — my mother, my aunts — were preparing food for a potluck, a family reunion, that would take place later that day, or maybe the next, at the VFW, probably, in the next town over, the little farm town where they had grown up and grown into women.
The youngest of the sisters, a single woman who made an impressive life for herself with a Ph.D., a university career and a home of her own, was making some decadent dessert to take to the party: a bed of chocolate cake, prepared the night before and cooled overnight; a thick, fluffy layer of whipped topping (Cool Whip, probably, from a plastic tub); then a liberal drizzle of caramel syrup, thick and gooey and sweet enough to kiss off sticky fingers; and a final sensuous topping of chocolate-covered toffee, broken and crushed into melt-in-your-mouth pieces.
“What is that you’re making?” one of them asked as the toffee bits, like delicious sand, landed on the fluffy cream.
With a sly smile, the cook said, “Better than Sex Chocolate Cake.”
Someone snickered.
“No, seriously, that’s what it’s called.”
Someone else giggled.
“It’s chocolate cake, Better than Sex Chocolate Cake!”
Then they were all giggling. Then laughing. Then tears were rolling down their cheeks. And then someone had to leave the room so the others could catch their breath.
That, I think, I hope, is the theme of my culinary story, the objective of the journey, the beginning and destination.
The Pie:
‘See You Soon’
Strawberry Pie
with Basil-Infused Whipped Cream
Recently, a longtime, cherished friend moved clear across the country to Massachusetts. We have been friends since about 2001 when she joined the news staff of the paper I was working at, and over the years, we did a lot of things together, both at and outside of the paper: concerts, plays (“Hamilton,” “Waitress”), dog sitting, craft shows, cooking nights, dinners out. But after 44-years of deadlines, she decided it was time to call it a career. There were new babies waiting for her in New England — plus her sisters, childhood friends, and a part of the country that she still loved.
Before she left, a group of us decided a good-bye dinner was in order. It was just something simple, a potluck with lasagna, breadsticks, salad and reminiscing on the menu. And pie.
I asked the new retiree what kind of pie she would like for her “last” dessert in Fort Collins; and without hesitating, she said strawberry. I was not expecting that. Until then, I had never made strawberry pie before. Well, once, I guess, but that was, like, a chocolate-strawberry slab pie — and while delicious, I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she meant when she said she wanted strawberry pie.
So I got out a stack of pie cookbooks and set out to find the perfect recipe for strawberry pie. It took some searching, but the one I landed on, originally called “Deluxe Strawberry Pie,” is everything you could want. The fruit is sweet and a little tart; it stays crisp despite it’s time in the refrigerator. Like all good strawberry pies, it’s a little jammy; and the cream cheese, the magic ingredient, adds enough “zing” to keep the pie from becoming cloyingly sweet.
To elevate the pie even further — it was a special occasion, after all — I topped it with Basil-Infused Whipped Cream. Although the whipped cream takes a little extra time, it was simple to do and ultimately that subtle hint of fresh basil made the pie elegant and interesting, an appropriate finale for a meal celebrating an important friendship.
The Recipe
1 9-inch baked pastry shell (recipe below)
1 3-oz. package cream cheese
Cream or milk
5 cups strawberries
3 tablespoons cornstarch
2/3 cup sugar
Prebake pastry shell by rolling out chilled dough and fitting into a 9-inch pie plate. Crimp the edges. Prick the bottom of the crust all over with a fork. Return the crust to the freezer until it is completely frozen, about 20-30 minutes. Line with baking parchment or aluminum foil and fill with pie weights or dry beans. Bake in a low oven (350-375 degrees) for 35-45 minutes.
Cool.
Soften cream cheese with a little cream or top milk, then spread on the bottom of pastry shells.
Remove leaves and hull from 3 cups of strawberries. Slice berries but leave small ones whole. Place about a cup of sliced berries on top of the cream cheese in the pastry shell.
Blend together sugar and cornstarch. Mash remaining 2 cups of strawberries and heat in a small saucepan; thicken with cornstarch and sugar. Cook until clear, about 5 minutes, stirring frequently so that it doesn’t scorch on the bottom of the pan. (It will still be red but will not look cloudy or milky.)
Pour over berries in the pastry shell. Chill until until set, at least four hours.
Garnish with Basil-Infused Whipped Cream, basil sprigs and/or small strawberries.
Basil-infused
Whipped Cream
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup lightly packed fresh basil leaves and stems
2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
Small fresh basil sprigs, for garnish
Heat the cream in a small saucepan over medium-high heat until small bubbles form around the edge. Remove the pan from the heat, rub the basil between your fingertips to bruise the leaves, and stir into the warm cream, making sure the basil is submerged. Cover and let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes. Strain into a medium bowl, pressing on the basil to extract all the cream.
Make an ice bath by filling a large bowl half full of ice and water. Nestle the bowl of strained cream in the ice bath and refrigerate for about an hour, or until chilled. Add the confectioners’ sugar and use a mixer on high speed to beat the cream until it holds firm peaks.
Pastry shell
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
¾ sticks cold unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 tablespoons cold vegetable shortening
2 tablespoons cold vodka
3 tablespoons cold water, plus extra as needed
In a large bowl, mix together flour, salt and sugar until thoroughly combined. Add the butter and shortening and cut together with a pastry cutter until the mixture forms small pea-sized crumbs.
Pour the vodka over the mixture, a tablespoon at a time. Add the water and, using a rubber spatula, press the dough together to form one large ball. If the dough seems dry or does not hold together, add extra water a tablespoon at a time until all the ingredients come together. (Be careful not to work the dough too much to prevent the crust from being tough and add water sparingly.)
Press the dough into a 1-inch disk, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour — or up to two days — before rolling out.
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