09/25/2024
Sharing this as Cindy Wall — one of the trio who's created Dirty Pages (along with my bff's Erin Byers Murray and Jennifer Justus)... I've heard so many glorious stories and memories from people who've grown up with the tastes and smells from a mother’s, aunt’s, grandmother’s much-loved recipes — but I've always been a little jealous.
Growing up as a military “brat” (aka my dad spent his entire working life in the U.S. Army), we moved constantly — and quite simply, I didn’t see my older relatives often enough to truly know/appreciate my dad's mother's rural North Carolina's cooking or forge any memories around the meals of my mother's rural northern Ontario upbringing.
And my mom herself? Well, I’ve never been sure if she really liked to cook. After all, she moved a household of four kids around the country (and the world) almost every other year — including spending a year on her own with us, when my dad went to Vietnam, leaving for that ill-fated war when my baby sister was only less than two old. Truly, all my growing-up food memories are consistently unexceptionable — mostly characterized by their un-remarkableness. Think fish sticks, Kraft mac n’cheese, Campbell’s tomato soup, Jello, frozen vegetables — and sometimes meatloaf with ketchup.
But paradoxically, my mother DID have cookbooks — and I have a lot of them now.
These days, my mom’s in the twilight of deep dementia. And I’ve been perusing those cookbooks of hers. There are no “dirty pages” — but every one contains a voluminous amount of my mother’s handwriting from years past. Handwriting that (curiously) has little/no relation to a particular cookbook’s particular recipes. Instead, she wrote out entire (VERY long) recipes in the front and end papers, even on the table of contents — as if that particular cookbook was just a place to note other recipes from other places, memo-style. (I mean, I write in my cookbooks too — but I don't transcribe an intense fudge recipe next to Julia Child's beef bourguignon.)
But my mother DID have many skills, even if they weren’t on display in the meals I grew up with. She excelled in the proverbial written word for sure. She wrote letters, a family history, notes on historic houses (which she loved) — and absolutely in copious notes in most of her books, including those cookbooks.
Before dementia changed everything, my mom used to say “Cindy’s the cook in the family.” That always made me kind of puffed-up (even though it’s actually not true — despite the copious amount of boxed mac n’cheese we ate, all my siblings know their way around the kitchen for sure — and when we gather, we cook). But when my mother said that about my own kitchen prowess, when I emailed her a recipe she'd asked for, or when I made dinner for her — I wish I’d asked her more about her own cooking, about why and when she filled the endpapers of Joy of Cooking with handwritten recipes for the likes of “Lawsuit Muffins” and “Chicken Noodle Casserole.” And more than anything, whether she actually liked to cook…
