It’s a Wonder I Learned to Cook at All

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My collection of cookbooks is vast and expansive, encompassing four shelves on the bookcase in our kitchen. The titles read like a travel guide (Under the Magnolias, Bistro), or they reflect a fleeting nutritional chapter in my never-ending search to lose those last fifteen pounds (The South Beach Diet, Southern Keto). Their colorful spines serve as souvenirs and mementos of vacations and meals experienced throughout a lifetime (The Columbia Restaurant Cookbook,  The Silver Palate Cookbook). Periodically I consider discarding or donating aged and tattered volumes that contain enticingly retro-sounding passé recipes that I would never dream of cooking, like tomato aspic and canapés. 

But I can never bear to part with any of them. 

I collect cookbooks like a squirrel hoards nuts for the winter, both of us meticulous and proud of our treasures, organizing them and guarding them against threats, both real and imagined. 

In contrast, my beloved mother has only a handful of cookbooks in her own collection. The battered Better Homes and Garden 3-ring binder with its kitschy red and white checked cover occupies a place of prominence on her bookshelf like a sentinel, managing and overseeing the goings-on of the kitchen as it’s done since the 1970s. The white squares on its cover are slightly stained from use; its pages contain my mother’s beautiful, tightly-scripted notes in the margins, encouraging the use of more oregano here or less sugar there. 

For my mom, cooking was mostly a chore, an energy-sapping exercise to be done after work so that her stick-thin daughter would get enough nourishment. An act of both necessity and love. Dinners included the requisite meatloaf, stuffed bell peppers, pan-fried hamburgers. Spoiler: they were all really good (except the veggies). I ate virtually everything she put in front of me, save the liver and onions. And for some reason, the 1970s demanded that suburban moms boil vegetables to death. I can’t help but think how roasting vegetables with extra virgin olive oil would have been a game-changer for my mom’s opinion of the meals she created. 

It’s a wonder I learned to cook at all, now that I think about it.  That I count finding and executing the perfect recipe both creative exercise and therapy is even more miraculous. 

I remember painstakingly copying my grandmother’s recipes onto crisp white index cards to while the time away in West Virginia summers. I worked to emulate my mother’s perfectly formed letters. Invariably my handwriting was looser, loopier, and inconsistent, an imperfect imitation. My mother expressed no more than a passing interest in my endeavors. 

Maybe it was having watched her own mother cook three homemade meals a day for fifty years that ruined any possible pleasure she could have derived from cooking. Or maybe it was her own subtle rebellion against the repressive expectations of the age that women enter the workforce and put dinner on the table every night. 

My grandmother was a home cook of the highest degree. Fried chicken sizzling in cast-iron skillets, fluffy biscuits accompanied by thick, homemade breakfast gravy. Tasty and tender home-canned (jarred) green beans from the garden. Feather-light dumplings and chicken. Pieces of the past that my mom and aunt never forgot when they left home but never wanted to replicate in their modern, city lives either. 

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And yet. My mother managed to create a unique family food culture in spite of her aversion to cooking. Polished, wooden salad bowls accompanied by the “fancy” Good Seasons homemade dressing in the glass cruet signaled a special Saturday night dinner. Most likely there was wine or sangria. Guests were usually invited. James Taylor and Carole King provided the folksy, upbeat soundtrack for the evening. 

For some reason, these meals were even more outstanding than holiday dinners. Maybe it was the candles or the warmth of the season. These repasts often happened in the summertime with the windows open, my parents casual and relaxed, waiting for our closest family friends to arrive. Or at least that’s the idealized version I remember. 

In addition to the iceberg lettuce salads, the menu invariably included teriyaki grilled chicken or lasagna. Mom’s recipe for homemade lasagna came from an Italian friend. Authentic, delicious, multi-stepped, and labor-intensive, it was always reserved for a special occasion. I loved the way our house smelled when the pan of lasagna was in the oven, and I couldn’t wait to scoop up a corner with its melted cheese and crispy browned edges. 

My mom underestimated her own culinary prowess and the impact our family’s food history would have on me, urging me towards finding fulfillment and happiness in cooking.  

A few years ago, inspired by the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, I purchased Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The film details Julie Powell’s quest to cook her way through Julia Child’s quintessential guidebook to French cuisine in just one year while trying to hold onto her sanity and her marriage.

If Powell could make all 524 of Child’s recipes, surely I could manage one or two. After all, Julia Child proudly proclaimed that she had experimented, tested, and written the book for the “home cook.” I sure hoped so. This super classy French cookbook was a far cry from my mom’s time-worn, homespun Better Homes & Garden volume packed with recipes for comfort foods. I guess just like my mother before me, I had to forge my own culinary path. 

I decided to try the classic Bœuf Bourguignon. The end result? The juice was just not worth the squeeze. Batches of simmered onions that disappeared into nothingness. Meat browned and shriveled up to half its starting size.  Exhaustive step after step for a tasty dish that, heresy so it may be, would have been just as delicious with a few shortcuts. 

Recently, over an incredibly delicious meal at a chic Atlanta restaurant, one of my best friends said she wished she could just take a pill instead of eating. What blasphemy, I thought!

But her sentiment rang true after my four-hour travail of preparing Bœuf Bourguignon. If I had to do that every day, my family and I would surely starve!

Though my skills don’t rival those of Julia Child or other culinary legends, bringing happiness to my friends and family through good food provides instant gratification, a transcendent dopamine rush. The patchwork quilt of my gastronomic past, woven with hand-written recipes and generations of good cooking, will, hopefully be passed down to my daughter, who even now scours TikTok for recipes for us to try for Sunday family dinners and creates her own charcuterie boards that rival those found in gourmet glossy magazines. Instead of being driven away by the cooking I’ve done, my daughter seems to be following in my footsteps of culinary experimentation. 

Though I can’t bring myself to throw out any of my cookbooks, I do find myself texting Izzy to ask her if she wants some cookbook or other as I (failingly) attempt to “purge” the collection. I recently passed off Glamour’s 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know. It seems fitting as she embarks on her adult life that my collection launches her own assemblage of recipes for every occasion.

And my own bookshelves continue to groan under the increasing weight of new additions. I just can’t help myself. 

The one cookbook I don’t have in my collection, however, is Better Homes & Garden because,  honestly, why would I? Purchasing a sterile, clean, impersonal version would add nothing of value to my shelves, nor would it enhance my abilities or skills in the kitchen in any way.  One day in the future, I’ll ask my mom for hers and slide it into the prime position in my own kitchen, allowing it to serve as keeper of memories and sacred heirloom and testament to our family’s food heritage.