I baked an apple pie last night. I’d bought some apples to do a demonstration as part of a talk i had to give. They weren’t the kind I’d normally get, but I had to make a point and do so with apples that are uniform in shape and size, bright and shiny, and hard: red delicious did the trick. I added a couple of Granny Smiths for variation on color. But both performed the same function in the talk which was about the way we engineer all sorts of things, including food. and even if we didn’t purposefully engineer apples, they are nevertheless engineered in a way.
But I don’t like red delicious for eating, nor does R. The Granny Smith I do like to eat, but these were sour, having been picked far too early — which was another point I’d made in my demo about the engineering of food: how uniformity in shape and size, color, hardness for ease of shipping, and so forth are engineered, often at the expense of taste.
Looking at the apples on the counter that evening, after I’d given my talk (which didn’t go particularly far with people who’ve never read about these issues, natch), I said, “I’ll make a pie with them.” R brightened up at that. A rare thing. There’s nothing I love to do more than feed people. But there’s nothing R likes more than to not be much of an eater, it’s a rare treat that he wants something homemade. After a lifetime of cooking for people who love what I cook and passionately ask, pretty please, for more or who just give me that look, “oh my god! homemade bread. heaven!” it’s been a little disconcerting to live with someone who could not care less about food. If I’m not around, the guy will just subsist on slices of cheese, some garlic olives, pepsi, and beer. Maybe some rye bread, plain.
I pulled out my Betty Crocker Pie and Pastry Cookbook, a slim little volume, published in 1968, and given to me by the wasband’s mother, my ex-mother-in-law. For whatever reason, I get along with the mother’s of my partners. No matter how irritating others have found them, I just usually dig them. Probably because I do not notice the little jibes, the guilt-tripping, etc. that children do. One of the reason Julie and I broke up, I think, is that she just couldn’t stand it that I loved her mother so much. She wanted someone to bitch about her mother with; not someone who would defend her. Alas.
Flipping through the book, I was reminded of Eddie saying when I shame-facedly showed her a cookbook I had. It was all gunked up with spills and some pages glued together by spilled batter: “That’s how you know which are the best recipes,” she said. To her mind, if you flip through a cookbook or through an index file of recipes, the best ones are filthy with spills. Now, obviously, Eddie must have lied a bit because her recipe books are not strewn with raw pie dough smattering, nor can you shake them and find granules of sugar or salt… or something… falling from between the pages. YOu certainly can with mine. But her books? No. Not gunked up.
But what you can find are her little notes all throughout the book, where she starred the recipes she liked best or where she adjusted measurements. Her crooked little handwriting, the result of a childhood spent learning to write cursive like they used to teach you in the olden daze and a case of early-onset arthritis, probably from years of hard work cooking for other people and then raising five kids, the last one born when she was 44. When she was sixteen, she was shipped to the big city by her family sent to Pittsburgh because was a burden on her farm family, a mouth to feed. Better to pack her off to work as soon as possible. She worked for some rich industrialist family with a galley of servants. She started out as a general laborer and eventually took a shine to cooking pies and cakes. She was taken in by the cook and taught what he knew. She graduated to pastry cook.
She gave all the up when she married and started having kids, but she still baked and cooked. She mostly cooked to feed the kids and her husband, as well as any relatives or helpers on a farm they rented near a big old slag pit — a pit which, I believe, killed most of her kids, since all of them got or died of cancer before she passed away.
Later, she sold pies on the roadside and at farmer’s markets to supplement the income her husband made working in the coal mines. She would have been raising kids through the depression and WWII. Many many years later when her youngest son, a cook at a diner, was convinced to take over the payments of said diner and pay off the mortgage out of the monthly proceeds generated by the diner, she became his cook and number one pastry maker.
In my hometown, while i didn’t know her personally then, growing up, I did know that whoever baked in that diner was famous for the bear claws. Bear claws are yummy cinnamon bun confections. Canoodling couples would order one toasted and slathered with butter, slicing it in half to share. They consumed them, washed down with coffee or cokes. In a big display case, there were slices of cakes and pies you could order, either with your meal or to have packaged up to take back to the office after lunch or back home. I was just a little kid, but it was with big wide-eyes that i’d see those high pies and cakes, looking so yummy.
She never taught me her tricks directly, though an occasional hint would be slipped my way in phone convos. We’d call every other Sunday that we didn’t visit. The wasband, a total clam who never had much to say except typical mundane conversation, would hand me the phone and then I’d proceed to yak away with her for 45 minutes to an hour. She had all kinds of advice for a young mom. Like this: She trained all her sons to sit on the john. They never stood. I’m not kidding. And you have no idea how much I missed that trait the first time I lived with a man after wasband. She might have done it in a bad way — rolled up newspaper to potty train kids was her secret. But dayum ladies, if there was only one thing I could change about the world, I’d be tempted to pick that. :)
I love Eddie’s notations. Not 3 Tablespoons of sugar, but 1 teaspoon, she noted. It was a recipe for crumb topping of some sort. She noted that she did not like the Dutch Apple Pie direction. She crossed out butter for a pie crust and substituted OLEO. Oh god, do I miss that word: oleo. Oleo. Oleo. Oleo.
When I got married to the first wasband, we were driving through Finger Lakes wine country, along Keuka Lake, in the fall. We passed by all the cottage and homes that lined the lake and I read out some of the more clever names people had dubbed their vacation homes. My favorite?
Oleo Acres. One of the cheaper spreads!
So, Eddie, I haven’t seen you since the day I visited you in the nursing home. You didn’t know me, the Alzheimer’s getting steadily worse. You thought I was your daughter, sometimes. At other times, you were treating me like Bee but calling me by my name, as if I was your daughter. You’d go on about how you hated all of the kids and they hated you. They were all problems, none of them lived up to your expectations, and she’d tick of this and that foible that just irritated her. Little of it made sense.
I was alarmed, but it was the Alzheimer’s talking. My experience had been that the Alzheimer’s often resulted in some hard truth-telling. But I wasn’t sure what to make of this. So, I listened, not sure what to do. Fortunately, she asked me to pluck the hair from her face. Long hairs would grow from her moles and chin and such, and she’d need someone to pluck for her. While I was leaning over her, sonshine, about three or four, sat there and watched, looking up at us. I was holding back tears because I was visiting without sonshine’s father. he’d asked for a divorce. I wasn’t sure what to do. Keep on visiting her by myself? The last thing I wanted to do was look like a fool and keep visiting her, while he was visiting her other times, probably with the New One in tow. And often, as with this time, she didn’t know who I was. Sometimes she did, at other times she didn’t.
As I plucked long mole hairs, she told me a story about her husband. As far as I knew, she had no idea I was in the midst of separating from her son. She just thought I was da bomb, and kept telling me how much she hated her sons. Then she started in on her husband. By all accounts, I hear tell that the father was a get around. So she tells me how Len liked liver and onions. Yep. He liked her to fry up some liver and onions every so often. And the next thing you know, she’s telling me about how he’d clip his toenails in the living room. It made her mad. she thought it was insulting that he’d lift his feet up and clip, right there, tossing the nails into the ash tray.
Telling me the story, she was agitated. It was just damned insulting that he’d do such a intimate dirty thing right there, in the living room of all places, into the ashtray there just for company and show. She’d have to get up and empty it, because he’d just leave them there, not a care in the world about what might happen were company to show up, use the ashtray and find toenail clippings there.
So, she says that one day, she just got fed up. She let that pile of clippings build up and when Len asked for liver and onions, she fried them right up into the onions and served ‘em up piping hot!
I think I ended up crying and laughing as I drove away from the nursing home that night, sonshine all worried in his little Worry Bear way. It was sad to lose that part of my life but something about Eddie’s story — well, it just made me laugh. Whatever happened in her life, Eddie got her small revenge on a man who’d treated her poorly.
so, here’s to you Eddie. Here’s to the legacy of your cookbooks, which you bequeathed to me for better or worse. I can’t fathom getting rid of them, as old and dated as they are, the pages falling out. Will people ever leave notes in their cookbooks again, letting the cooks that follow know which was best, which measurements to change? Will they write in them, the way they write in a bible, dating them and writing down the new address each time they move, like Eddie did. This was how important they were to her. Yes, this little cookbook, purchased as it likely was, through some cookbook promotion where you buy 3 for a buck and then buy one each month for a year. They were books with titles like Casserole Cooking and Cookies: bars, pressed, dropped, and shaped.
She treated them like a bible, as if there was a legacy there, to be passed down through the ages. She’d put her address inside the cover, dating each address with the day she moved.
She starred recipes and marked the pages up, talking to the generations that she imagined to follow.
These days, we just digitally alter the recipe; there’s no record of the scratched out original measurement and the new one scrawled beside it.
Reading history will be much different.
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"You wanna see something really scary?" How about the sight of a blogger regurgitating the same old tired list every Halloween?
