When I think of all the aunts, mothers, and grandmothers in my life, most of them had a signature dish or a meal they made that was a family favorite, held in such high esteem you were afraid to try to make it on your own because you knew your version of “Grandma Cec’s Lemon Meringue Pie” or “Aunt Edna’s Swedish Meatballs” would pale in comparison.
If you were lucky and they actually did have a written recipe for the specialty they were known for, it might be missing an ingredient or two, because back in the day, it turns out, there was a rivalry between your grandmother and the neighbor whose lemon meringue pie recipe was winning the hearts and minds of the local church potluck, so when the neighbor finally agreed to share the recipe, she left out a few of the ingredients just so your grandmother couldn’t win.
I do have Grandma Cec’s lemon meringue pie recipe and it is missing a few ingredients for those very reasons, but if you were to travel back in time with me to the 1970s and have a slice of it in her tiny kitchen in Waukesha, Wisconsin, it would taste fantastic, because she eventually figured out, through trial and error, what was missing in the recipe. But she didn’t bother to write it down because by then it was stuck firmly in her head.
Luckily, years later, when I decided to make her pie, I knew the story, so I looked up a few recipes on the Internet and made my best guess about the missing ingredients. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the instructions to bake the pie shell first, so my first version was a delicious lemon meringue pie in a raw crust. I’ll never make that mistake again.
When I married my French-Canadian husband, he would rave about his mother’s wonderful desserts. Exotic French names like “Bonbons aux Patates” and “Pets de Soeur” translated to slightly less appetizing names of “potato sweets” and “nun’s farts,” but I thought I’d try making them anyway.
The potato dessert sounded easy – just icing sugar plus a peeled and cooked potato, mashed and mixed together, flattened onto waxed paper, slathered with peanut butter, rolled up, and cut into swirly no-bake refrigerator cookies.
I boiled and mashed the potato and started adding the icing sugar, but the mixing bowl turned into a soupy mess. The entire bag of sugar was almost gone with no dough in sight. “Call your mom and ask her what I’m doing wrong,” I begged. Mike relayed in French what I had been doing and I could hear the laughter over the cordless phone. “She says only use a quarter of the potato, not the whole thing,” he said. “But she appreciates that you wanted to give it a try.”
I took some of the sugar soup out and put it into a smaller bowl and kept adding sugar. Eventually, it turned to dough and finally, cookies. Mike picked one off the tray in the fridge to sample it. “Doesn’t taste quite like my mum’s, but it’s good this way too.”
And that’s a great thing about life. You can take the ingredients passed along to you and make your own recipe. Two cups of your mother’s love of reading, a half cup of your maternal grandmother’s artistic talent, mix gently with a sprinkle of your paternal grandmother’s boundless energy, a pinch of your great-grandmother’s legendary terrible cooking, and voila!
On Mothers’ Day, think of the women you know and have known–family, friends, neighbors, coworkers –and what they’ve added to your life. Each of them has contributed something important to the mix and without them, you wouldn’t be quite the same person you are today. And maybe you could have lived without a few of the ingredients or wished you had slightly better instructions, but the result is uniquely you. And that’s worth celebrating.