Enthusiasm

My kitchen and I took a day off. When you cannot remember the last day you had discretionary time on your hands, it’s time to back away from work and go somewhere, preferably outside, and sit. Unfortunately, when I am in the middle of a project, it is practically impossible for me to turn my brain off so I had no choice but to compromise. I headed for the deck, the sunshine, the fresh air, loaded down with my laptop and a stack of cookbooks, among them my mom’s Magic Chef Cooking.

I have very few things left to actually hold in my hand that belonged to my mother but the faded blue clothbound book, pages yellowed and fragile, some loosened from the rotted binding, back long since gone, is the best possible thing that could succinctly represent what I remember most about being my mother’s child. I’m certainly glad I have it but it turns out that henceforth it will always represent something more to me.

Ninety percent of the memories I have of my mother take place in the tiny breezeway kitchen of our post WWII suburban frame home. I have vivid recollections of the blue cookbook, propped open on the white tile counter top as she deftly moved back and forth from stove or mixing bowl to recipe, checking and rechecking the ingredients that would eventually become a culinary work of art, like, for example, lemon chiffon pie. There was always a faint fog of flour dust in the air whilst she worked her magic, her fingers wearing dough like gloves. My mother prepared meals for her family with the same earnest whole body involvement as an artist plans and executes a sculpture.

My mother cooked. Of course, being a full time housewife, she also washed and ironed clothes and cleaned house, though I honestly have no solid specific memories of her dusting, vacuuming or scrubbing the toilet. This is possibly because I was up and out of the house as quickly as I could to avoid being tagged for one of these jobs. You cannot remember that which you were not around to witness. This speaks volumes about my lack of housekeeping skills. No early childhood development practice.

I could not recall how long it had been since I last looked at the cookbook, forty years maybe, but motivated by the mood I was in and my desperate need for mindless downtime, I was questing for ways to do something and yet do nothing simultaneously. I opened it up and started reading. The first thing that caught my attention was the language of the text. In some ways it seemed a stilted translation of foreign language instructions. You know, the kind you might find accompanying products you must put together with directions written by a Taiwanese copywriter who learned English from TV. Beneath one of the handful of photos distributed throughout the book a caption read, “A Brown and Juicy Turkey Necessitates Lots of Accompaniments.” Others claimed “French Pastries Wear a Professional Look” and “Hot Muffins For Breakfast Are Enticing.” But the best “Lemon Pie is the Acme of Deliciousness” made me laugh out loud. I needed that laugh. It made me relax and pushed my project to the back burner for awhile.

Doing a first leaf through, I skipped to the back and found that every page of the entire last chapter titled “Lorain Oven Canning” had been hand stamped with a big purple “VOID.” I dredged up a deeply buried recollection of asking my mother what “void” meant, and with her customary unflappable confidence, her reply that it meant, “don’t do it.” It was answer enough for me.

My neurons tossed that back and forth for a while. First of all, I pondered on how different the world is today. Imagine picking up a cookbook and finding the last chapter voided. It wouldn’t happen, but if it did, we, spoiled consumers that we are, would expect the book to be marked down as a “second.” We’ve come a long way from the days when things were not discarded merely because they weren’t perfect. Secondly, I considered how much more personal responsibility individuals were expected to practice. Liability had a much less sinister connotation. Instructions voided meant, “don’t do it” and that was that. No worries that someone might ignore the warning and then later sue for irreparable damages done.

As I turned the pages, loose newspaper clippings emerged, like unearthed scraps of ancient papyrus. There were also pieces of lined notepaper with handwritten recipes scripted in unfamiliar cursive. Others were distinctly my mother’s back slanted handwriting. Speedy Taco Bake, Banana Sauce, Lasagna, Apricot Nectar Cake, Prize-Winning Recipe for Pear Preserves. On the reverse side of the page that recorded the New Rice/Broccoli Chicken Casserole, there was a cryptic single column of numbers totaling up to $69.50. Fifteen, nineteen, eleven, ten and fourteen-fifty. What did these represent? Our house payment was $63 so fifteen dollars was a lot of money in 1950. It was probably a list of monthly bills, an important, must-be-paid group of numbers; sums my mother likely anguished over. The faded ink held tight its original purpose but gave up a greater fact: all things of eminent importance eventually dissolve into benign unimportance, don’t they?

One clipping seemed out of place. The headline read: File New Appeal for Rosenbergs. It was dated May 27. This sent me to the Net to search the trial of the century to pin point the year. The famous convicted spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in June 1953 so dating the news story put it sometime between 1951 and 1953. I puzzled over why this information was significant enough to earn a spot of honor in my mother’s cookbook. Was she particularly interested in this trial, these people? I flipped the brown scrap over and found a recipe for Home-Made Ice Cream. Mystery solved.

Eventually, with tender care, I returned the clippings and loose pages to their final resting place and closed Magic Chef Cooking. Holding it reverently in both hands, imagining that I could be touching lingering traces of my mother’s DNA, I shut my eyes and thought about all the years that had passed from the time that the book was an active, vital contribution to family life to its retirement in my possession. A slow rising realization settled in on me. Another mystery materialized and began to resolve itself as I held the aging physical link to my beginnings and the memories of experiences that forged who I have become.

My mother did not teach me how to cook, per se. She never said, “do it this way” or “here, you stir.” I learned the mechanics of food preparation while simply watching, filing away for later the “how-to’s.” What I learned about cooking and life in general while dodging the flying elbows of the woman, who did everything with gusto, was that anything worth doing is worth doing with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is never half-hearted or lazy. It is the drive that compels one to toss in a few pecans or cayenne pepper when the recipe doesn’t call for it, just to see what different taste might happen. It is the inspiration for risking substitutions instead of abandoning a recipe for lack of the ingredient called for. An enthusiastic cook will fearlessly experiment with the chemistry of food for no other reason than to explore and reinvent, to push the envelope in the interest of variety and fresh experience. Enthusiasm is the secret ingredient in problem solving, the foundation for innovation.

Interesting how something, so imperfect, such as an old blue cookbook could make me understand the best recipe for living that I ever learned from my mother:

Anything we do with shear enthusiasm is well on its way to becoming the Acme of Deliciousness.