In the kitchen, my mother followed the rules — straight from her sister
Back in the day when my dear departed mother wore white gloves to High Holiday services in Jacksonville, Florida, women gave luncheons. Even the working moms, of which she was one, took pride in marking special achievements with a conference-table soiree.
Her go-to contribution began with a can of pink salmon and ended with the thwuck of a chilled mousse decanting from its mold. It was shaped like a fish and curved like a snoozing cat. The dish delighted me, as did most foods that were poured in and set up firm, Jell-O and tomato aspic at the top of the list.
This was 3-D art you could eat! She mostly decorated around it with overlapping slices of cucumber, leaving the mold's topography unadorned to show how creamy smooth the mousse was. (Or so I thought.) Upon closer inspection, one could discern specks of dried dill and onion. Triscuit was the accompanying cracker of choice, lined up in a paper-napkin-lined gold-colored wire basket.
Thing was, it was not her recipe. The 5-by-7-inch card was written in her hand, all right — straight-up-and-down lettering, curlicues at the start and finish of the capitals, arrow indicating more on the flip side. But it was from Aunt Sally, my mother's oldest sister and Russian firstborn of the Canadian family Fages.
Sally ruled her five siblings way into adulthood. She remained the only one who could get away with calling my mother by her first name decades after “R. Laurie Benwick” appeared on Mom's calling cards. At some point, after Aunt Sally became a bubbe, she proclaimed her own culinary prowess, as in “Recipes From the Famous Kitchen of Sally Malt,” the subtitle of her stapled photocopied booklet.
Dutifully, my mother would make the recipes that came by mail: blueberry muffins, the Jewish cookies called “nothings.” She was never one to freewheel it on her glass cutting board. If it came out right and was sanctioned by Sally, that was good enough for her.
And so the few recipes I have from her are keepsakes with an asterisk. She got dinner on the table on most nights with help from her canned-food pantry and me, once I was old enough to follow the prep directions she delivered by phone from work. Meat, veg, starch. Box-mix angel food cake. Nothing else so memorable that I would re-create it today, I'm sad to admit. As my older and wiser brother says, nursing — not cooking — was Mom's passion.
How I wish I could cook for her now.