This picture, of my mother (right) and her friend Dorie May, taken probably in 1946, is where I started out from in the kitchen. True it was taken 14 years before I was born, but it shows the sarcasm and contempt my mother had for cooking and homemaking in general. In 1946 she was 23 and had been living in New York for a year with Dorie May, a childhood friend from Fairmont, Minnesota. She was getting her masters in social work at NYU and was working at Bellevue. It was there that she met many lifelong friends: Marge and Wally Richman, Thelma Schorr, and Peaches. Thelma (known as Mermel), was a nurse and Peaches a doctor.

They worked on the same ward at the hospital. To these women, working and living on their own in the city, cooking was a ludicrous chore. My grandmother had a degree in home economics. I remember my mother making fun of her. “Sister Sue,” my grandmother’d  yell, “put on your hairnet, it’s time to bake bread.” They baked bread on Sundays. My mother was much more interested in having a good time. She loved to entertain. She loved to drink and smoke. I think her efforts in the kitchen were a mixture of low self-esteem, passive aggression, and resentment, but she also wanted to succeed, wanted to please my father who had conventional 1950’s expectations.

The revolution in convenience foods was certainly one my mother welcomed. If she had to wear the ball and chain of traditional motherhood it was going to be with a box of Hamburger Helper  in one hand and Stovetop Stuffing in the other. She roasted turkeys in paper bags, and later, in plastic bags. We ate instant mashed potatoes and always had powdered milk on hand. A special meal was an avocado with cottage cheese and French dressing. If my father was away it was breakfast for dinner everytime: hard scrambled eggs and withered sausage. She did make a mean mess of home fries, and learned my Jewish grandmother’s brisket recipe, which was made, of course, with Lipton’s Cup of Onion Soup mix, and utilized the ubiquitous roasting bag.

She could be sensitive about cooking too. Decades later, when she was back in the city and I was an adult, we had Christmas dinner together with my friend Mike, in her apartment. Usually I cooked but I was coming in from Ithaca, thinking we would go to a restaurant or get take out. But when I got there she had proudly roasted a large whole chicken in an oven bag. I think it may be one of the only times she used the oven. Mostly her kitchen was for boiling water for instant coffee and pouring drinks. The drawers were stuffed with junk piled on top of the 60’s and 70’s silverware and utensils. The chicken was actually delicious. It had all the hallmarks of her food: McCormick Season Salt…stuffing mix, canned gravy and a ridged cylinder of cranberry sauce. Food of course is love in the end and she did love us, abundantly.