So often do I chance on blogs that are dedicated to a mother's cuisine, proudly displaying the recipes, boasting about a wonderful childhood with delicious aromas wafting non-stop from busy kitchens. I never really pondered about such matters before, but now it hit me - I don't have such memories...
I grew up in the post WWII's darkest Stalinist communist era. Ingredients were scarce to start with, plus I had a gradmother who never really stepped into a kitchen before the war, she had "staff" to take care of the household. My mother had ambitions for a professional life, studied medicine, and luckily so because even though she worked around the clock alongside her husband in small town hospitals, and it seemed to us kids that the results were a more bountiful life compared to other families around us, looking back now I realize how meager it was.
My grandmother was the one who ran our house. She was a very smart woman, educated, well read, but she wasn't used to do any kind of work, let alone manual work. So our house wouldn't have been well kept if it weren't for my mom, who on the other hand was a neat-freak, for whom everything had to be organized and sterilized. As a result we witnessed lots of mini clashes, and we learned to cover for our grandma by helping her clean up (by often sweeping stuff under the carpet if time was short - and I mean this literally) before our mom came home.
Our grandma wasn't a very good cook, either. She tended to just slam together meals in the last minute, using whatever was available, guided by instinct, the result of which sometimes was all right, other times... not so all right. We even re-wrote the grace we said before eating to fit the occasion. When the meal did not turn out well, instead of saying (translation) "Come, oh Lord, be our guest, Please, bless the food you provided", we said "Come, oh Lord, be our guest, Please, eat the food you provided..."
On the other hand, our grandmother was a great storyteller. We could listen to her for hours as she was telling us among other things about the parties they used to have, she described the magnificent dishes that were served, so well in fact that we could actually taste them in our imagination. This in turn developed in me the ability that whenever I read a recipe I can accurately "taste" it.
My mother cooked very rarely, but when she did - it was wonderful. She acquired somehow a few really good gourmet cookbooks and she prepared the dishes from them precisely, with great care. During holidays, when she usually took over the kitchen, we were overjoyed. There were exotic dishes, in spite of using the most ordinary ingredients, we had guests over, and she prepared a new menu every time. My father grumbled once in a while, he was the type who didn't mind having the same dishes over and over again. But then, when I started to cook as a teenager and tried unusual stuff, he was the only one who found even my atrocities praiseworthy. Like the time when I finally understood enough English to try a recipe from an old Good Housekeeping copy that a kind neighbour gave me for language practice. It called for cream cheese, and for me that meant those small "La vache qui rit" type triangles. I made some cookies using those salty little cheeses. Everybody thought they were horrible, except my Dad. He said they were the best cookies he ever tasted!
When we finally managed to leave for the West (wow - 37 years ago!), I threw myself into "discovering the World". New ingredients, new recipes day after day. To this day I rarely cook or bake anything repeatedly unless by request. My kids were so spoiled from this point of view that I even had to put up with such criticism occasionally: "But Mooom, didn't we have this already two months ago?" My cooking used to range from Chinese stir fries to Argentine empanadas, from Arabic kibbeh to Norwegian lefse, and so on, sampling from every cuisine on Earth. Nowadays I am forced to hold back, partially because I am very busy and I often only have time to just "slam together" something quickly, but also because we have my 87 year old mom-in-law living with us, who is very conservative in her tastes and who cannot chew because of her full double dentures. But even within these limits I do try to change things around, to create new taste combinations. Looking through my archives, this aspect doesn't seem to come across here very well. But writing these entries and then looking through them occasionally, not to speak of visiting the ever increasing number of great food blogs, inspires me to push those limits, to get more adventurous again.
