The year our little brother went to kindergarten, our mom got a job and handed my sister and me a list of instructions for making supper for the family. “Put the meat on to boil, add salt, pepper and an onion. Peel potatoes. Make a chocolate cake from the mix.”
I figure my 11-months younger sister and I were around 10 years-old when mom turned the gas range, the dirty dishes and the table setting over to us.
My dad never made my brothers help. They stayed in the barn milking and tending cows. All the men expected us to have supper, dinner or lunch ready at the appropriate times. And this was not the Great Depression. This was the 1960s. While other teens were off having fun at Woodstock, N.Y., we stayed home on the farm in Woodhull, N.Y., fixing meat and potatoes for the family.
Of course, my mother found a way to justify breaking the child labor laws. She said that she couldn’t boil water when she got married and she wanted to make sure her children knew how to cook.
“One of the first items she bought me for my hope chest was a Betty Crocker cookbook. Once Mom had shown us how to cook or bake something, she expected us to know how to do it on our own. It really taught attentiveness and attention to detail – besides all the math skills of measuring and doubling recipes,” my sister said.
Not that we always got it right. We all grabbed baking soda instead of baking powder when making Johnny cake. (That’s cornbread for those of you not from the hills of New York.) “That one little ingredient mistake turned our favorite dish into a food so bad that the dogs wouldn’t even eat it,” she reminded me.
My sis and I both remember the day we decided to make a cake for Mom’s birthday. She was hanging clothes out on the line, when sis “casually” asked her how to make frosting. “When I think about it now, she stayed outside in the wintery weather, letting us make the cake, not even calling us to help with the laundry,” my sis recalls that day exactly as I do.
We mixed, baked and decorated the cake. And then, as my sis says, “Mom acted SOOO surprised when we presented it to her at supper. That cake was the first one we decorated using drops of food coloring which we swirled into feathery designs on top of the cake. We were so proud of it.” In time we moved up to a cake decorating kit.
Yep, Mom stayed out of the way while we learned how to cook. And we did learn – we had to do so to get anything to eat and because our mother’s mantra was to “just follow the directions.”
“I’m not afraid of very many recipes today,” my sister says. “People will ask, “is that hard to make?” and I tell them to ‘just follow the directions.’”
We learned how to make many foods and added variety to our meal selections that way.
“We also all had our specialties. Mine was a baked version of Swiss steak. I always made a real mess pounding all of the meat with flour, and it made my eyes water slicing the onions, but I loved it,” my sister recalled.
I don’t remember any specialty I liked to make. I know I enjoyed eating homemade macaroni and cheese baked in the oven – believe me it is not the same as the kind in the box.
And, I made so much Johnny cake I memorized the recipe. Without using a mix, we made enough batter to fill two loaf cake pans, opened a couple quarts of canned peaches, set out a gallon of cooled milk, fresh from the cows and a dish of raw green onions and salt. That served as supper: Johnny cake, peaches and milk with a side dish of green onion dipped in salt. Not exactly a gourmet meal, but by the time I married at 20, thanks to Mom’s going off to work and leaving the cooking to her daughters, I could move confidently and expertly around a kitchen – that was enough to satisfy every hungry person I’ve ever served.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)