A Time for Cooking (Hogsett)

When it gets quiet, my mother comes back.  It’s quiet now.

Most often, she shows up in my kitchen. In these days of no more spontaneous grocery runs, I’m spending a shocking amount of time in there. Overnight, I was transformed by the new reality from a person who would ruthlessly dump any food five minutes past its “use by” to the fanatic “user-upper” my mother always wanted me to be.

“Are you going to throw that out?” she asks. “That’s a perfectly good [fill in the blank.]  Cut that part off. It’s fine.”

She grew up on a farm in White Oak, West Virginia. (Don’t bother checking the map.) Everything in that kitchen was “from scratch” because “scratch” was what they had to work with. Nothing was wasted.

“Don’t be silly, we’d let that sit on a table for a week,” she used to tell me. “We never got sick.”

She cooked her way through depression hardships and wartime rations. Widowed at thirty-eight—I was not quite two—she taught high school English for three decades and, in spite of her claim that she had only wanted to “keep house” and raise the baby she and my father had waited ten years for, she went ahead and made a life which, from where I was standing—close, very close—looked rich and full.

For years, her students would stop me on the street. “Your mother made me go to college,” they’d say. “Your mother wouldn’t let me quit high school. The book your mother told me about changed my life.”  

In these strange times, at unexpected moments, I’m seeing her differently. New. As if we’re getting better acquainted. Grown-ups together for the first time. Facing a global crisis, I’m the novice. She’s the pro. I think to myself, “I’m feeling what she felt. Knowing what she knew.” Both of us living in unknown territory, in a world turned strange and dire. She did it more than once. A thought both unnerving and encouraging.

I realized in the last couple of weeks that my mother, who was eighty-eight when she died twenty years ago, hasn’t aged a day since then, and I’m catching up. As I pass milestone years and decades, I hear her more clearly, understand her better. I always loved her, now I’m beginning to get her. I’m seeing more clearly, from my present location, how young thirty-eight was. How scandalously quick seventy is. How the person inside the age is always saying, “but not me.”

Although my mother taught me many useful skills, she didn’t teach me to cook. While I was growing up, she was grading papers, preparing lessons, earning a master’s degree in counseling, playing the organ at church because her first love was music. Covering all the tasks my father would have done for us—"If your father were alive,” she’d say.

Now, though, in this alien, unnerving stretch of time, she and I are talking in my kitchen and the subtext is “how do I survive in uncertainty? Will I? Can I do this? Will we be okay? ”

I have her recipe box, and one of the first things I went looking for when the fear and the cooking started in earnest was “Margaret Snider’s Cucumbers & Onions.” What I learned was how dear her faded handwriting on the cards is. How much I wish we could be laughing on this summer afternoon about the way she spelled chow mein noodles “Chalmane.” How much, in later years, she worshipped Julia Child. I was surprised, too, to see how many of my recipes she’d copied for the box.

I found the one I was looking for. It’s a keeper. Stupid easy. Cucumbers. Onions. Sugar. A lotta sugar. White vinegar. Water. It always tastes fresh and crunchy. Goes with almost anything. Gives leftovers a lift.  Keeps forever. I’ve left it in the fridge for a couple of weeks sometimes. So far we’re fine.

“Don’t be silly,” she says.

My wish for everyone right now is that you may find joy in a moment or a memory, and that sometimes the joy is enough.

Margaret’s Cucumbers & Onions

1 English Cucumber

1 Medium-size Onion

1 Cup Sugar

1 Cup White Vinegar

1 Cup Water

Dissolve a palmful of salt in a big bowl of water. Peel and slice the cucumber and onion very thin.* Let the cucumbers and onions soak in the salted water at room temperature for a couple of hours. Rinse well. Drain.

In the meantime, combine the sugar, vinegar and water in a bowl and stir—or let stand—until the sugar dissolves. Add the rinsed and drained cucumber and onions to the bowl. Stir, cover, and chill. They’re ready to eat in a couple of hours but they get better over time.

*Annie’s note: If you have a mandoline slicer, use it. I recommend a Kevlar glove, no kidding. My mother would agree about the glove. She’d think the slicer was lazy.

Annie Hogsett is the author of a mystery series set in Cleveland and is currently working on a stand-alone set in Cleveland and another dimension. She lives and writes ten yards (make that eight yards) from Lake Erie with her husband and a cat named Cujo.