What Great Cooks Do

Here's what was prominently featured in the grocery store where I went for a few things tonight:

 

If you look closely, you'll see that it is a display with large bags of whole dried chilies, piles of cleaned corn husks, big cooking pots, and just behind the corn husks are bags of masa. Because....tamale time!

I've lived most of my adult life in communities where making tamales was a critical part of the Christmas preparation. I've even been the blessed recipient of some of these tamales. It just isn't Christmas without tamales. And believe me---it is no small thing to make them! It requires hours of work and many hands. And love and devotion to your family, because it wouldn't be the holidays without this traditional food.

Which is why I am writing this tonight. Today is our mother's birthday. She would have been 86 years old. I'm pretty sure that she wouldn't have been actually still cooking all of the bounty that came out of her kitchen when I was living there at home, but I imagine she may have been directing others in the "right" way to prepare these foods that we all associate with Christmas and our mother's kitchen.

We didn't make tamales in that kitchen, but we did make hand-dipped chocolates. She made a variety of fondant centers---cherry, mint, maple, orange, lemon, vanilla. She would also wrap some of it around a Brazil nut and then all of the centers were dipped in chocolate that was gently melted in the top of the double boiler. When she used up all the centers, she'd pour raw Spanish peanuts into the remaining melted chocolate, stir it around until they were all coated, and scoop little heaps of them onto the waxed-paper covered cookie sheets. These trays of bounty were then carefully carried into her room where they were lined up on top of the chest deep freezer that stood along the wall. [There wasn't any other place to put that behemoth.] Our house didn't have the greatest heating/insulation and so that corner of the house was cool enough to allow the chocolates to set up.

Another big production was lemon meringue pies. These weren't  specific to Christmas, but were regularly served for dessert, usually on a Sunday. Now, as an adult, I've become quite skilled at baking lemon meringue pie, and I still marvel that she whipped out two of them on those Sundays. It's not like she had extra time. There were many small children to dress, feed and whisk out the door by 9:50 so we'd have time to drive past an elderly lady's house and pick her up, and yet arrive on time for Sunday School. She'd get up with the milking crew on Sunday, bath and wash her hair, set it in brush rollers, and then make the pie crusts. They'd be put in the oven and she'd brown the beef roast or the huge chicken that would then be set to roast while we were at church. [This was back in the days of one hour Sunday School, and then you went home and came back in the evening for Sacrament meeting.] After the pie shells cooked, she would kneel on the floor in front of the open oven door and let the warm air flow over her hair to dry it in the curlers. Then, the roasting pan lid went on, and on the other front burner, she made the lemon filling. As the filling cooled slightly in the sink, she'd beat the egg whites into meringue, dribbling in the sugar just soooo, in order to dissolve it completely. The warm filling was poured into the cooked pie shells, the meringue quickly swirled over it--ensuring that it was smoothed right over to touch the pie crust so there'd be no gaps---and a sprinkle of coconut flicked over the egg-white peaks. Back into the oven for 15 minutes to brown the meringue, and after the pies were set to cool on counter top trivets, she shut off the oven, but again...leaned down to dry her hair a bit more in the still warm air.  By the time we finished Sunday School, the roasted entrée was finished, the pies cooled enough for dessert and we'd feast.

I could go on and on: scratch Angel Food cake for every single birthday.  Fruit cake at Christmas (and it was delicious -- I don't know why fruitcake has such a nasty reputation). We ate cherry pie for Washington's birthday and three birthday cakes within a ten day period in February. She made outrageous fresh strawberry pie in the summer. She cooked ridiculously delicious fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. I don't even make fried chicken because I don't want to be disappointed. Homemade root beer, cinnamon rolls, fudge, and ---twice a week---six loaves of bread. I'm drooling now.

Ask any grandchild and they'll tell you of all the amazing feasts they ate at her table. And the interesting part to me is that many of their favorite culinary memories of Grandma are foods that she didn't even cook when I was child living there. The menu differences between we older four girls, and the younger four children are even startling. But....that's what good cooks do: they change it up. She was a kitchen adventurer. She looked for new ideas as well as using the old standards. I thought of the joyful memories that will be made this year by the Latino mothers and aunties and grandmas as they unite over the tamale ceremony this next week or two, and I remember the joy my family experienced all because our mother was a GREAT COOK.

 

Here's my dad with one of those Angel Food cakes on his 50th birthday.

 

That's my mom (in the blue shirt) with her two sisters. She was the best cook, they all agreed.