A Recipe

I didn’t know just how many recipes my mother had collected.  I rarely recall her poring over the New York Times  food section or Sunset magazine.  Like I do.

 After she died, Charlie and Kathryn and I oriented ourselves to what was left behind, exhibiting the pieces of our parents’ lives. The three of us deciding what we did not want to forget or leave behind. We oriented ourselves to their estate and what we would each decide to keep or offer to another. For some reason, I ended up with the red, striped Saks Fifth Avenue box full of those recipes I didn’t know existed. We divided up the well-worn cookbooks including the New York Times menu cookbook,  “Thoughts For Food,” and McCall’s.  I also had the Saks box which included lots of cards from Phil’s Poultry where Mom shopped more than weekly for poultry and fish. No, not meat.

On the counter at Phil’s  there were stacks of recipe cards. Index size in pink or blue. Not to designate male or female. Maybe for phish or fowl? They always spelled fish starting with a “p.” The humor of Phil’s. The consistency in my mother’s life. Sometimes I went there with her. Just tall enough to look into the refrigerated display case while Mom talked to the Phil of the moment. Whoever was available to answer questions and wrap her choices in white, butcher paper. But Phil’s wasn’t a butcher. Not really.

I didn’t know I would find so many of those recipe cards in the Saks box. I also found clippings from magazines and newspapers. Beef barley soup, sole meunière, Italian bread salad, Aunt Sue’s coffee cake, hors d’oeuvre with cream cheese that I wouldn’t make today. But I make that sole often. Friday night we eat fish. As if we are Catholic. I always open the large, black looseleaf to read the recipe. As if I haven’t memorized it. It is in my copy of the three books I made after Mom died.

I took those recipes, the Phil’s ones and the other tidbits, and made a recipe book for each of us: my sister and me and my sister-in-law. It took months to xerox copies and to evenly divide up the originals so each of us would have some. Copies and originals were affixed to the large, black pages in the albums I made. Pages protected under plastic.

My mother never put plastic on the furniture, unlike some strange habit of a few St. Louis relatives. But here plastic signified my promise to protect. When Covid struck I spent a lot of time making food for us. Lots of baking. Rediscovering Mom’s recipes. I think of them as hers, but really they were for us, she made them for her family. As the world shut down, I became focused on deciding what we would eat so I wouldn’t have to go to the germ filled grocery store very often. Mom’s recipe collection includes too much fish for Robert’s taste. Though I would eat it much more often than on Catholic Friday.

Dad recommended fish as often as possible. His research on cholesterol and heart disease didn’t necessarily lengthen his life, but we all benefit now. My brother has segued from full-time doctoring to fishing as often as he can. My father would be proud of how much fish they consume, even if my sister-in-law would occasionally prefer to make Mom’s beef barley soup. She wondered some time ago if I had the recipe. I was happy to remind her it was behind plastic in her black binder.

Tomatoes. I could never eat enough. Mom’s recipe for Panzanella. I made it all through that first Covid summer, and have done so during each one since. On New Year’s Eve Mom and I would eat tiny white toasts topped with sour cream and caviar. Her last one too. She wasn’t speaking, but she grinned as I offered her another and another. Each New Year’s Eve I still buy myself a package of those toasts, a somewhat affordable jar of caviar and crème fraiche. I don’t think Mom knew about crème fraiche. She would have liked it, I am sure.