My brother Peter enlisted in the US Navy at the age of 17. World War II was nearing its end and Peter spent his career at the naval base at Geneva, NY. He immediately gained some fame for his sincere enjoyment of Navy food.
Family stories enjoy a generational life, changing in each repetition. One of our favorites remains Peter’s description of his first “dinner” in the Navy mess hall. In his letter home, he said, “I was sitting with some new recruits. We had just gone through the food line and I quickly realized I was the only one eating with vigor. They just sort of picked at the food, pushing it around with their forks. I finished quickly and asked the person next to me if I could have his leftovers. They were substantial. I was still hungry and devoured it immediately as he looked on in horror and said, ‘That’s the worst food I ever tasted. How can you possibly eat two whole portions?’ I shrugged and said, “You never tasted my mother’s cooking.”
What more appropriate title for a book starting with a family whose roots were mired in a tradition of bad cooking measured by its innocent victims on a scale of bad, dreadful and terrible? But there is a life after years of inedible food.
This a simple story that seeks to encourage readers to embark on their own cooking adventures. Cooking does not have to be complicated and it can easily be molded into whatever you care to make it—a career, a hobby, a daily challenge, a rewarding accomplishment.
I will start with Lena. What made her such an impossible cook? I flatter her with the word cook, she had no aspirations in that direction nor did she apologize for her culinary transgressions. It was years before my two brothers and I realized that people did eat well.
The stories are true and in no way does it mean that Lena was not a good mother; she was just different. The recipes are what developed as I went along, burdened down with an incredible lack of knowledge but still rising to my husband’s challenge, “Never the same thing more than once a month.”
Some of the recipes are original, the majority were passed along from unknown sources, added to and subtracted from, to please me, my family, my friends. I strive to make cooking as easy as possible. Many times I have been turned off by recipes covering a page or two of ingredients, steps, and directions. Have heart, changes and shortcuts can be made. Perhaps the end result is not what the author had in mind, but with practice, it will be good and it will be yours.
This is a book of stories about cooking as they happened to me. It’s about growth, and coming of age, and survival. It’s about the tremendous upheaval in cuisine and food, an era where even Lena might have developed some culinary skills (maybe). Whether you are a “foodie” or a “non-foodie”, join me in recollections of food, from the year of my birth in 1925 or today.