LONELY? LEARN TO COOK.

Fannie Merritt Farmer (L), a disabled person, master cook and female business pioneer. 

My mother had a caustic personality. One her deathbed, she introduced me to hospice workers as  "my knucklehead son, the nurse". She had been raised by overworked peasants, Eastern Europeans who had left the farm for factory floors here in America. Alcoholism, illiteracy and violence were everywhere in her childhood environment. As a first-generation American woman, she chose to work her way out of poverty to middle class status. It was not an easy path, even for someone who was fluent in three languages. 

My father was handsome, congenial, abstemious and morally upstanding. My mother and he met at a ballroom where they relaxed on weekends with hours of intricate dancing. Like today, they lived in a socially connected society of young adults. They went to ballrooms on electric trolleys with their respective same-gender groups of peers from two neighboring cities. They left with their groups as well. Dating was a formal business which occurred over time in the company of others.

My parents' Great-Depression poverty was equivalent to today's Third-World poverty. My father's parents got by on my grandfather's disability insurance, acquired after both of his legs were badly broken when a car ran him over. They ate oatmeal, cheese and canned vegetables, acquired from food pantries and government surplus hand-outs. 

My mother's parents knew better. As former farmers, they quickly found a Boston street market, where they went by trolley late on Saturdays. They found free produce which was being discarded because it was just passing its freshness. They bought bones and off-cuts from butchers. They bought live poultry, older birds which the vendors were eager to unload. As poor as my mother and her two siblings were, they were well nourished and strong.

My parents married months before my father went away to fight in WWII. My mother was pregnant with my older brother when my father left. She realized that my father's hunger for good food, hers and her mother's, had been a factor in his attraction to her.

She wanted to keep him happy when/if he returned from war. She enrolled in The Boston Cooking School (formerly Fannie Merritt Farmer's). She took night classes. She worked day shift at a munitions factory. All her commuting of scores of miles across the metro area was done on electric trolleys. She used that time for reading. She studied bookkeeping on her own. This skill eventually got her a good job in a department store. 

My childhood diet was amazing. My peers today wonder at my descriptions of my mother's everyday cooking.in the 1950's and 1960's. Her peers were eager to accept any invitation to eat at our house, despite the inevitable criticisms my mother served with her plates. She was the culinary star of her poker club. Sunday dinners for extended family and poker nights, some for women only and others including husbands, were a constant social stream through my family's home. But our daily diets were phenomenal as well. 

Almost every weekday of my childhood featured a different cuisine for our supper, which we ate in our small kitchen at a round table. There were five, sometimes six, people in our household over those years. My mother always had a day job and still managed to cook supper every day. There were always great leftovers in our refrigerator.

She cooked Chinese, Italian, Russian and Anglo-American favorites. She did deep fry and occasionally made her own doughnuts. She had insisted on my father installing a stove with a deep-fryer, double oven and overhead exhaust fan when he built our house in 1955. He eagerly complied. 

Each birthday in the household was celebrated with the honoree's favorite layer cake. A box, filled with her various cookies, was never empty. Holidays meant fusion meals. My Russian-born grandmother, who lived with us, baked braided egg bread and cooked farm-style pork roasts. She made sausage from scratch, borscht and her own horseradish condiment. My mother excelled at turkey and scalloped potatoes. 

My mother's life, and my life, would have been very different without her cooking. After my father's death, she stopped cooking as she had done for decades. She lived alone in her house for another eight years. As her cooking diminished, she withdrew from people as well. In the end, she ate little and, with the exception of visits from me and my brother's family, she spent all her time alone.

She cooked oatmeal for herself each morning and made a bacon sandwich each evening. It is somewhat poetic that I realized that she was having serious brain issues when she melted a tea kettle which she had forgotten on the stove. That led to her diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, which killed her rather quickly. She was 91 years old.

My enthusiasm for preparing food of all kinds stemmed from my happy hours watching the activity in that childhood kitchen. I have lived with half-dozen domestic partners over the years. All smart and quite attractive men. I learned with my first great love, a gregarious musician whom I met in 1971, that cooking generously was a key to a man's heart and to an active social life. I attribute part of my ability to form satisfying domestic relationships with interesting people to my cooking.

Peter and I have been together for over fifteen years now. His love of my food encourages me to cook and bake regularly, despite aches and pains that occasionally daunt me. Standing back from a complex layer cake after a couple of hours of intense concentration brings a deep feeling of satisfaction. Watching Peter eat the first slice is like Christmas morning ever time.