Is it possible to separate your relationship with your parents and your relationship with food? I don't think so. Working on my new play "Raging Skillet" has made me think A LOT about my parents and food, which is something I think about a lot anyway.
My mom is a very good cook and baker, but she never went too crazy in the kitchen; she couldn't with 10 kids. Meals had to be mass-produced and served on a long table to a hungry pack of mouthy children. She was mainly raised in a convent school, so I'm not sure where she learned her kitchen skills. I could call and ask her, but then she'll be surprised that I'm calling and want to know why I'm calling and then will wonder why I want to share her life story with thousands of strangers.
I cannot recall ever having a meal that was passed down from her mother, probably because it would have consisted of a pack of Virginia Slims and a martini olive. As my Grandmother Baroody wisely remanded her daughter's care to the nuns, I'm guessing that much of my mom's cooking was inspired by her devout Catholicism. The zestiest things we encountered in our diet were oregano on English muffin pizzas, Italian dressing on our hoagies (Mom's from the Philly area) and the Holy Eucharist.
My father is 100 percent French Canadian, so the foods he grew up on were, well ... likely to kill you. He loved his mother's cooking and came to his marriage equipped with her recipes. There were a few "healthy" options — e.g., Bird's Nest, a salty mix of browned hamburger and cabbage — but most were deliciously lethal. My Grandmother Lamarre's famous Holiday Pudding (so-called because we only saw it on Thanksgiving and Christmas) was a traditional steamed molasses-and-raisin bread permeated with suet — beef fat — and topped with a buttery hard sauce. Another favorite was her traditional tourtière, a pie made with a combination of ground meats and spices.
After my father's unsurprising heart attack, my mom shifted to heart-healthy versions of his favorites: Holiday Pudding minus the suet and with a I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Buttery hard sauce, and a turkey tourtière with a less lardy crust. I occasionally will sneak him a childhood favorite, cretons (a fatty pork spread), from Manchester's Chez Ben, and he does his best to hide it from my mother.
Breakfast was cereal, bagels or a homemade blueberry bread set out the night before. Milk was made from Carnation Instant powder and woe to the poor sap who got the unmixed lumps in the bottom of the pitcher. Lunch was a sandwich, a piece of fruit and two cookies. Dinner ranged from open-faced tomato and cheese sandwiches under the broiler to pork chops and applesauce, and my personal favorite: spaghetti with Ragu meat sauce. I remember Mom trying to put over a homemade tomato sauce and facing an insurrection from Ragu-loving philistines. Anytime she got too adventurous, we made sure to make the poor soul miserable.
My arch-nemesis was zucchini and summer squash, the only two items my father could grow with ease and that the woodchucks wouldn't eat. If vermin wouldn't eat it, why should I?? I hated, hated, hated zucchini and my mom found every conceivable way to put it in front of us: muffins, bread, stuffed or, worst of all, hidden in an innocent-looking lasagna. In the never-ending battle of wills, I would stare down that zucchini while my siblings were off watching TV, having finished dinner an hour earlier. I would gag and wretch, delivering an Oscar-worthy performance that has been heretofore ignored by the Academy.
Because there were 12 of us and we lived in semi-rural New Hampshire, going out to eat was a rare treat. The closest McDonald's was a half-hour away in Nashua. Cheese pizza would appear on Lenten Fridays. If it was your graduation, you got to go to the Mile Away, a nearby Swiss German restaurant, for a fancy dinner. "American chop suey" (aka Beefaroni) or chicken chow mein with La Choy noodles were the closest I got to Asian cuisine.
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