My husband chuckles when he sees a café that claims to offer home cooking. Says if you want home cooking then stay home, but I argue there’s an exception to that. Go eat at the local sale barn café and tell me where you can get a better meal. Plain country fare, like liver and onions, hot beef sandwiches with real mashed spuds, taco salad, sloppy joes, chicken fajitas, and pie. Always plenty of pie and strong coffee.
Bruce and I, along with one of my sons, were enjoying comfort food at the Valentine Livestock Auction Café recently. While the guys polished off their plates of liver and onions, I headed back to the counter, asking if anyone else wanted pie. “Pie and coffee,” my son remarked. “It’s a generational thing.” A polite way of pointing out that I was the oldest member of our party, I guess, but he’s probably right. A little mom and pop place on the corner of downtown Valentine has a steady afternoon string of older folks who meet over pie and coffee. Mostly, the waitresses know what kind of pie each one prefers, but they ask anyway.
Something about memories of food unites us in singular ways. Your mom’s chicken and noodles, the neighbor’s burnt sugar cake, and Grandma’s biscuits. And it goes beyond the actual food to the containers that get passed down. On my kitchen counter is a small crock that mom used for beating egg whites for pies, and whipping cream. All of that done with an egg beater, because we didn’t have electricity. The crock holds my most used spatulas, serving spoons and such. Next to that is the green milk pitcher that was mom’s, and her mother’s, before her. I have a cup and saucer that graced my maternal grandma’s kitchen table and a butter paddle and press from my dad’s mother. A friend recalls angry words exchanged with sisters after their mom’s passing, over the pan that was used to make those light, and luscious cinnamon rolls.
The most smudged recipe cards in my kitchen carry memories of the people who used to make those dishes and passed the instructions on. I mostly know the recipes by heart, but get them out to look at anyway, enjoying the careful handwriting of aunts, neighbors, and even my daughter and daughters in law.
My first husband’s mom made pie crust to die for. Her secret weapon was lard. Her donuts were light as air. A couple of years ago, Bruce went on the hunt for a good recipe for kolaches. A sister in law’s mom made the best ones, so I asked Mary Ann if she had her mom’s recipe. “Nope. Never made them, and Mom never wrote the recipe down.” But I do have a divinity recipe written in Mary Ann’s mom’s hand.
Those old recipes can become a secret weapon too. Back in the 90’s, my family were all involved in digging a trench for a corral water line. My sons got to going on about donuts. “I remember donuts. Mom used to make great donuts. Haven’t had a donut like that in ever so long…”
I laid down my shovel and turned toward the house. “Wait—where are you going” they asked. “To make donuts.” I answered. “This shovel doesn’t fit my hand all of a sudden.”
That’ll teach ‘em!