A Basic Sauce

An excellent English cook, my mother gave me my first important lessons in making a roux and thickening gravy, but her otherwise delicious food lacked the Mediterranean fever I craved.  Outside her safe, homey arena, I fell hard for the sticky wickedness of garlic.  Until then, my only experience with the witch’s bulb had been the lone clove sprouting a green shoot shrouded in plastic at the back of the refrigerator.  My instinctively big cooking style was all wrong for my family.  I wanted to cook things on high, get the kitchen smoky, splatter tomato sauce, dirty every pot and pan in the house.  I’d been switched at birth and was really Italian, my sisters joked.   And yet, I loved making some of those odd English creations –Yorkshire pudding, bread sauce, liver and bacon casserole, treacle tart, Queen of Puddings. 

These days I dread telling my mother that I won’t be there to cook for a family party. Putting on a brave front, she lists again the food stored in the freezer, anxiety pinching her voice.  While my mother still bakes a stellar banana cake at the first sight of black on yellow peel, exquisite holiday shortbread, and makes her own bread from a 100-year-old sourdough starter, planning meals for guests or family is increasingly a worry.  At 89, she now finds preparing large amounts of food stressful.  She’s lost interest in the whole road show, the menu planning, the shopping, the vegetable peeling, the clock watching.

While I am for the most part a confident, accomplished cook, I still understand cooking anxiety, the way a meal can enter the consciousness and sit there, stirring up worry.  What if it doesn’t get out on time?  What if it isn’t good?  I have new respect for the way my mother got food on the table for a family of seven all those years, night after night.  A joint of meat for my father to carve, two “veg” side by side in Blue Willow bowls on cork mats for her to serve, always a dessert.  Only now can I appreciate what it took to wrest that order out of a day.  These days she’ll cook for weeks beforehand for a crowd, and still “get in a flap,” as she calls it.  Whenever I’m there to cook, her face floods with relief, knowing I’ll take care of everything.  This I can do for her.  I don’t blame her for passing on the cooking mitt.

I began cooking at fourteen.  It all started when my parents offered to let me stay home and fix lunch instead of going to Sunday school.  My sisters weren’t interested in this Faustian bargain, and I alone eagerly accepted my parents' proposition.  They didn't seem alarmed that I was missing church.  Maybe my father rationalized that learning to cook was equivalent to a religious education, a sacrifice for the greater good.  Soon I figured out that my father looked forward to my lunches, and I withheld my planned menu, shaking my head and acting mysterious when my parents stood expectantly in the doorway of the kitchen dressed in their church clothes.  I had learned culinary power.

            I checked cookbooks out of the library and forgot to return them, woke early on Sundays with menus running through my head.  My mother seemed to believe that throwing me into the kitchen cold, the way you’d toss a kid into a swimming pool, was the best way for me to learn.

I learned a dish from the wife of one of my father’s students, a ballet dancer from Australia who taught me an odd and simple melding of rice, scrambled egg and crumbled bacon, a salty, meaty form of kedgeree, which my family grew to love.  Today the standup comfort of that starchy recipe still reminds me of what it first felt like to cook – the thrill of combining things that didn’t belong together, but then tasted so right (later I would understand:  the surefire marriage of salt, oil, texture, flavor).   

I could easily have been voted “most unlikely to become the family cook.”  I was the “wild one,” without obvious domestic skills, the untidy second child who harbored a row of fugitive coffee cups sprouting mold under her bed and ironed only the parts of her blouses that showed.  I dated men early, inappropriately and with a vengeance, yet I had a careless and focused gift in the kitchen – the ability to toss things together, to make them taste good. 

My four sisters range in cooking ability from competent-but-indifferent to sit-down-in-the-road-unless-it’s-take-out – but they all love to eat.  Whenever I’m there to cook, they regress, comfortable in the knowledge that I am in the kitchen doing my thing.  I use every dish in the house.  A patient helper, my mother never comments.  “I’m happy to top and tail beans,” she tells me.  I send her away, reminding her gently that I don’t do it her way.  When it is all over I can walk away from the M.A.S.H. unit that is the kitchen, ravaged and smeared, and know that I can collapse and not lift a finger.  A crackerjack team, my mother and my older sister do the dishes, preferring to swab the decks alone. 

These days my mother asserts she is just as happy eating scrambled eggs on a tray in front of the TV, or one of her infamous last-all-week-long vegetable soups, but my heart aches, wanting to toss off a tasty elegant meal for her in a way that is so easy for me.  I live three hours away.  When I arrive and whip up a little chicken dish with the fixings, pour her a glass of wine, she sits with it in her lap, tucking in, her cheeks growing pink.  “Scrummy tuck!” she says (a top British accolade).  “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!”  I offer to bring her seconds, and she eagerly accepts.  I know that I am giving her pleasure.  She has so many meals (so relatively few meals, in the scheme of things) left to enjoy.  They should all be delicious. 

On some future day when I am cooking my mother’s mustard sauce from her tattered recipe card, I will fall apart, missing her.  I have already tried to find and copy some of her recipes:  the brown bread she still bakes every week, sweet mustard sauce for ham, her gingerbread.  When she is gone I know I will panic.  What about the steamed marmalade pudding, a long-ago dish made with beef suet which my young expatriate mother requested from the butcher at the A&P, ignoring the horrified looks of the other American housewives.  What about my English grandmother’s chocolate semolina pudding? This benign neglect is how family recipes die.

 Thanksgiving dinner, and I was alone in my mother’s kitchen.  The meal was three minutes away from being served.  Behind me the table was littered with the remnants of an impromptu lunch, the afternoon’s tea.  Someone could have played that childhood “what doesn’t belong here” game with this table.  Abandoned chairs were scattered haphazardly around as though there had been a call to war. 

I had a catering background, worked in a high-end restaurant, but this was long ago.  I didn’t “get in a flap,” but I could have used some help.  The turkey was out of the oven resting, a steaming prince amidst the unholy mess.  No one had offered to carve.  I was making gravy, the metal roasting pan skittering dangerously over two slippery electric burners.  Half naked, my nieces and nephews traipsed through the kitchen, unisex Isadora Duncan’s, trailing scarves.  Since my father’s death, chaos had happily reigned.  Drinks flowed, kids careened, garlic abounded, lap-eating trumped sit-down formality.  Leaning sideways from the stove, I could just see various sisters and significant others sprawling in the living room, sipping wine, devouring cheese and smoked oysters in front of a roaring fire. 

I didn’t ask for help. 

Here is the paradox of the family cook: a good measure of the well-being emanating from the cozy family scene had directly to do with what was going on in the kitchen.  Exchanging stories, catching up on family news, my sisters were blissfully, willfully unaware that I was a clown juggling on a greased mat in a hot kitchen.  The Brussels sprouts simmered on the edge of terminal sogginess; the rolls were singeing from brown to overly crisp in the oven; the creamed onions could have used a last minute punch-up in the microwave; the mashed potatoes were sticking and browning in the old-fashioned metal pan on the old-fashioned electric stove; the plates in the oven had segued from gentle heating to serious baking.  My mother’s timer ticked ominously over all, keeping track of my solitary panic.  Where was the cavalry when I needed it?  Methodically, I whisked and stirred and tasted and seasoned and poked and grabbed and drained.  It was all so familiar. 

I stood in the doorway of the living room in my stained apron, feeling flushed. “Dinner’s ready,” I said, trying to keep the accusation out of my voice.  I felt proud, appreciated, utterly taken for granted.  I saw by my sisters’ guilty expressions and the way they jumped to their feet they had not been thinking about me in the kitchen.  I knew that I contributed something important to a family gathering:  The meal would get prepared and served.  The food would be good.  My elderly mother would not go nuts.  But sometimes it was lonely.

And then at one of these family dinners, my niece Sophie appeared unbidden at my side at the stove at the frantic stage of a meal when it was easier to do it myself than to explain.  My sister had recently told me that she and Sophie had stood at the stove at a family gathering, looking down at a chicken dish with julienned leeks in cream sauce I’d taught her. “This is where Joey would stick her finger in and say, ‘It needs something,’” my niece said.  They both stuck a finger in the sauce, tasted and stared at each other blankly, shrugging.

             “Lemon or salt,” said my niece firmly.  An attentive pupil, she remembered my advice about starting with this trusty flavor duo in the tricky war against blandness.

Because we look something alike – it always pleases me when strangers think she’s my daughter, not my sister’s – I assigned to her my own instinctive, voracious interest in food and cooking. Maybe I wasn’t deluding myself to think that inside her lurked my younger self – an early fascination for things savory and spicy and hectic, an alchemical curiosity that no amount of sugar and flour could appease. A slender savior, she simply picked up a spoon, took over stirring, dipped in a finger, tasted.  “It needs salt,” she said.

Nothing gives me more pleasure when I visit my sister Sarah than to prepare dinner for her family, a task she performs unfailingly (prep time sometimes at three in the morning) so that her family eats a good healthy dinner day in and day out.  I knew that her oldest son, Nicholas, had come to appreciate my cooking over the years.  He’s always loved to eat, and on a recent trip to Ecuador, he emailed his family, homesick for familiar food, saying that he “would kill for one of Joey’s meals right now.” At a recent party, I called him over to taste a few dishes before serving, not just because I know he likes to get his finger into everything, but because I can tell he has a palate.  He doesn’t only shovel down food like any self-respecting 17 year old.  He actually tastes it.  He has an opinion, one that I value and act on.

Nicholas has told his mom that eating dinner at the houses of some of his friends has made him appreciate her cooking.  Faced with jarred sauces and chicken finger dinners, he no longer takes for granted that fresh, delicious meals will simply appear on the table in front of him as he heads out into the world.  He’s thinking that maybe if he wants to keep eating well, he should learn how to cook.  “I want to learn how to make a basic sauce,” he says, and he’s asked to do it here, in New York, this summer, with his aunt.  I’m thinking: a roast chicken, a red sauce, a good steak, for starters.  Secretly, I’ m thinking: family cook?