Culinary Arts and Other Requirements of a Worthy Woman
My father-in-law is so fixated on food that wherever he travels in the world, he must take scads of photos of the food (pictures that never get printed, by the way) either as served on the table or in neat stacks at a market. Meals with my late husband, or anyone in his family, always seemed to end with the question, “What are we going to have for the NEXT meal?”
My response has always been, “You just finished breakfast! Why are you already thinking about lunch?”
In fact, when my children were teens and they’d come home from school or wherever, they’d ask “What’s for dinner?” and my answer was, “I just fed you LAST night! You want dinner AGAIN tonight?”
I simply don’t think about food unless I am suddenly hungry. There are too many other things to concentrate on. It’s not just eating; I’ve treated bumps, bruises, cramps, and menopause the same way. There just isn’t time to stop and concentrate on them. Broken bones, profusely bleeding gashes, and poison ivy that makes me want to completely peel off my skin are harder to ignore.
Mother forgot to teach me that acceptance into the realm of worthy womanhood included certain skills including culinary arts and hostessing. She did make an effort to educate me in these things, but the “Do as I say, not what I do” model is not the most effective teaching method.
The first real “Come to Jesus” moment that proved my unsuitability as a woman/wife/mother happened after my first husband had moved us into a designated Historic District in Lynchburg. After having spent eight years renovating another old house while popping out three sweet babies (via natural childbirth), I was forced to leave behind all I had accomplished to move into an enormous and uninsulated federal-style house where half of the windows were broken and virtually all of the interior doors ripped out and missing. It was a renovator’s dream and a young mother’s nightmare.
My father’s reaction was, “I believe this house has more possibilities than probabilities.” Mother added, “Every one of our friends that took on an old house like this ended up divorced.”
As it turned out, they were both correct, but that’s a different story for a different day.
We were young, idealistic, stupid, had absolutely no budget for renovations, and only one of us knew which end of a hammer to hold onto, and it was not the husband.
What has this to do with food?
I enjoy creative endeavors. I can strip and rehang wallpaper, refinish antique furniture and floors, knit, quilt, make window treatments, lay hardwood and tile, assemble and climb scaffolding, scrape and paint, measure, cut and install door, window, and baseboard molding, sew pinafores, teach oboe lessons, paint commissioned portraits, chair the annual outdoor art festival with 230 artists, teach Vacation Bible School, serve on the Church Vestry, and take 1-2 college course at a time, all in between cleaning up, reading to, and nursing babies. But, by dinner time, I’m kind of pooped.
Except for the squeaky beans (yet another story), Mother was a great cook until she discovered Swanson Pot Pies and TV Dinners in the late 1950s. She taught me how to bake a cake by reading the instructions on the back of the Betty Crocker package. If it didn’t come pre-mixed in a package, we probably didn’t have the necessary ingredients on hand. Margarine (never butter), milk, and eggs we had. I never knew that you could make mashed potatoes from a real potato; those came out of a box mixed with milk – and they tasted just like the cardboard box.
I did manage to pass both the cooking and sewing portions of Home Economics, required classes in 8th and 9th grades, and I did earn my Girl Scout Cooking and Sewing badges, but those were pretty basic. My mother-in-law taught me to bake bread and a couple of other heavy pastries, but time with her was limited.
So when I was unknowingly volunteered to place our house on the Historical Society’s Annual Christmas House Tour and to make something for the bake sale, I put my foot down hard and firm. My husband was mortified that I had embarrassed him, and I had to explain myself to the indomitable Mrs. C. (wife of a retired Colonel). Whoopie-doo, I was the daughter of a retired Colonel and I was not in the least impressed or fearful when she accosted me for my intransigent blunders.
“What? We NEED your house on the tour! It’s the only large house available! The very LEAST you can do is contribute to the bake sale!
“It’s not available,” I corrected. “I have three small children, a dozen projects in process, no budget, no time. I can’t even keep up with the dirty dishes, and no energy to take on such an invasive undertaking!”
“But, you HAVE to! Your husband promised! You don’t have to worry! We’ll help you decorate!”
“Really? You’re going to decorate scaffolding, sawhorses, plaster dust, and rolls of wallpaper? And BAKING? Seriously, don’t you want something EDIBLE to sell? I don’t bake.”
“You don’t BAKE? What kind of a woman ARE you? You don’t bake and you won’t open up your home? What on Earth DO you DO?”
Apparently, I didn’t do enough to qualify as worthy. I checked her off my potential friend list.
I’m not saying that I can’t cook. Pie crusts and pastries aren’t my forte. I made a caramel pie from scratch once, when I was a teenager. Nobody ate it. You could have broken your teeth on the crust and permanently cemented your teeth together on the filling.
But, I can be a pretty creative cook, creative because whatever recipe I pick, there is always at least one key ingredient that I do not have on hand. And so, I pivot and the whole thing changes. I start pulling spices out of the cabinet and sniffing them to determine what magic ingredients might help create something worth eating.
Each time I’ve come up with a winner, my children would ask, “Mom, did you write down what you put in this?”
“No.”
So, reproducing a hit was never guaranteed. But I can make the claim that I raised three healthy children, not fat, not skinny, and never had a case of food poisoning. I would call that success, even if my cookies came out too runny or crunchy, and all of my lopsided cakes were collaborations with Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines.
I have tried to take my family on several healthy eating journeys over the years, blowing the budget on ingredients I’d never heard of and didn’t even know where to look for in the grocery store. How was I to know if a foreign sounding ingredient was a spice or a grain? To go to all that expense and effort and have my children and/or husband say, “I’d rather have hotdogs,” had a way of killing my dreams of chefdom.
Many years later, after Cloyde and I married, he reorganized my kitchen. Since I could never again find anything, I relinquished control to him as well as my kitchen duties. He later complained about this, but it was 100% his doing. Although I still tried to get us into healthier eating routines several times, being married to Cookie Monster….
So, after he died, I had what should be the perfect opportunity to get back into selecting healthy menus. I discovered two things. (1) I couldn’t find my utensils or anything else, and (2) cooking for one is no fun. So, after all the donated dishes were either consumed or turned into large Petrie dishes in the fridge, meals of Tostitos, Fig Newtons, Stouffer’s Spinach Soufflé or Hardees were much easier to handle.
After more than a year of abusing my body, I decided to try again, starting with a 10-day Green Smoothy Cleanse. It required that I give up coffee. The plan claims to make you drop pounds in days and hit the reset button on gut health and metabolism. But with all the huge intake of fruit combined with the spinach, mixed greens, or kale, I think I was actually consuming more calories (fructose based) than I ever had, so I noticed no great weight loss. I was also grumpy. After 5 days, I just had to have something to crunch on besides Green Glop. Tostitos looked mighty good!
I bought Dr. Wallach’s book “Cooking Without the Bad Foods.” Ummmm, I’m going to need a personal shopper and a chef!
Meanwhile, yesterday I thought cornbread would be a better choice than Tostitos, and I LOVE cornbread with melted butter – and a side of cranberry sauce (straight out of the can).
I checked before starting. Yep, I had cornmeal, flour, pink kosher salt, eggs, and butter. After I had everything else measured and mixed, I remembered that I don’t keep milk in the fridge. Normally, I would simply water down my Half & Half, but the last time at the store they were out of that, so I had bought something else that claimed to be real milk and cream, but also with French Vanilla flavoring. Well, I knew I wouldn’t have to add any sugar to the mix.
It was edible, but I’m not serving it to my friends or taking it to any bake sales!