MOM FOOD : Remembering the women who shaped our tastes. The recipes are the least of it. : We Remember Mama : An American Supermom

The PBS documentary series, “An American Family,” raised my family to the status of a recurring question on “Hollywood Squares.” But when it first aired 20 years ago, it was frostily received by critics. They complained, in part, about how the Louds barely left the kitchen table, except to get more food or freshen up a drink. We Louds were horrified: the critics were absolutely right.

Sitting around the kitchen table, talking and eating, was what we had always thought family life was supposed to be about. We’d done it for as long as we could remember, and it was fueled by the never-ending stream of meals, snacks and treats devised by my mother. Her basic philosophy was simple: The dining table is the heart of the household, where solace can be taken from the world. Naturally it always needed good things to be put on it. That was my mom’s job and she answered the challenge heroically.

“The haute cuisine of Momfood,” is how a friend recently described my mother’s culinary output. It’s not quite home cooking--that’s a little too rudimentary a term. It is a food that is as wide-ranging as the tastes of the woman who created it.

She might make something as simply healthful as a green salad, accented with orange and avocado. Or her freshly roasted chicken, its golden brown skin crackling with fresh sage and rosemary, in a sauce full of butter-soft garlic cloves that are so good you won’t mind your friends asking what you just had for lunch for days afterwards.

Her talent can also send dietitians into conniption fits with such hellishly tasty creations as her tomato and mayonnaise pie or melted Brie with toasted almonds, either of which can clog arteries on sight.

In Santa Barbara in the late ‘60s, our family’s rancho suburban house was the scene of many a Wagnerian eat-a-thon. On any given Sunday morning, at about 9 a.m., the ear-numbing chorus of pots, pans and multiple metal utensils crashing together was the overture announcing Mom’s return to her kitchen. (It also served as a final wake-up call to anyone still in bed--to ignore it was to risk a visitation by a motherly terror in a terry-cloth housecoat.) My brothers and sisters each had their own jobs to do. Delilah and Michele would put away last night’s dishes and then set the table. Grant would feed the animals, Kevin would later wash the dishes. I was supposedly sweeping the pool but was more probably taking the world’s longest shower.

Moving about the kitchen, silent and purposeful as a shark, Mom did everything else. Sometimes the menu would include huevos rancheros , sometimes eggs Benedict, sometimes just something that looked good in that Sunday’s paper. In addition to the main breakfast course there would be enough food for several other meals. I think we must have been the only teenagers in the ‘60s who knew what a brunch was. There were salad bowls filled with chunks of honeydew and watermelon, Pyrex dishes laden with home-fried potatoes cooked with scallions and coarsely ground pepper, and, of course, my mom’s famous breakfast crepes.

As with any expert Momchef, it’s not how she followed a recipe, it’s how she improvised her own dishes--tailor-made for her family’s consumption--that warrants the SUPERMOM trademark. Her breakfast crepes were an excellent example. A variation on an invention created by her own mother (who taught her much of what she knew), they combine light, French-style crepes with not-so-light American-style mega-portions of melted butter, powdered sugar and cinnamon.

Along the kitchen drain board she’d set up a crepe production line of kids, one to handle the making of the crepe, another to ladle the calorie-rich ingredients inside it, and another to roll it up and drizzle still more butter and cinnamon over the top. As each of us reached crepe-making age, she’d teach us her technique, effortlessly flipping the thin crepe in the pan. It was a trick that took her children many a blackened attempt to perfect.

Though our family had to watch finances, she always made sure that even the most low-rent repast bore a reminder of her love. Meat loaves were sculpted into human heads--pimento olives for eyes, mouths open for dramatic impact when it was taken out of the oven. School bag lunches would not only contain the usual sandwich/piece-of-fruit combination but also a note, usually written on a napkin that was wrapped around one of her dessert delicacies. She had taken the time to write a little joke or make a funny drawing, and always included a reminder to the child who would discover it at lunchtime that wherever he was at that moment, she loved him.

And then there was the mysterious, delicious and ultimately dirt-cheap Beyond the Reef Soup. We’d often come home from school to find it cooking away in the blue tureen on the stove. It was a perfect snack served with fresh-baked bread, and we kids marveled at it because it never tasted the same! Sometimes there was chicken in it, sometimes beef, sometimes . . . well, we didn’t know what was floating around in its murky russet depths. Only recently did she finally divulge the secret recipe: one can of corn, one can of tomatoes and “anything in the refrigerator that didn’t have green hair growing out of it.”

Like any adventurous artist, Mom has had her share of little failures along the path to culinary excellence. Her most spectacular misfire, however, came one Easter in New York during the ‘70s. Attempting to recreate the roast suckling pig of Dickensian tradition she came up with an entree more apropos of Stephen King. Due to what she describes as “those tiny New York ovens,” the baby porker could only be cooked in an upright position. It wouldn’t fit any other way. Several hours later, when the oven door was opened, a gasp went up from the crowd of assembled guests. Still sitting, though slightly withered, the piglet looked less like a succulent treat than like what my mom described as “. . . a little baby with fried skin and an apple in its mouth.” We took a picture of it and stuck to the non-meat courses that holiday.

Though her children are grown, things haven’t changed very much. Today, dividing her time between Hollywood and Bath, England, Mom still cooks up a storm for any of her siblings within reach--as well as our regiment of friends and lovers and sometimes even her ex-husband. The dinner parties she gives today are simple but elegant. And there is never a fear of running out. This is a woman who, after years of experiencing unexpected guests, cooks enough for six when preparing a meal for two.

On her circular table she sets out a buffet that is full of dishes and side dishes. Little bowls of sauces and condiments, which are influences from her mother, dot the tables amid small vases filled with what Mom calls “homely flowers” she cuts from her garden. Grilled vegetables with coarse pepper and olive oil, barbecued ears of corn and tri-tip roasts well-stuck with garlic cloves are some of the reasons that invitations to her weekly soirees are coveted by many, not only her children.

She also runs a little catering service, the Artful Diner, with a friend, Stephan Ellingston. But in her forever mom-ish efforts to bring quality to whatever she is working on, I’m afraid that she spends as much money as she makes.

I asked her recently, “How has your cooking improved over the years?” After a few moments, she answered slowly, “Well, I’ve gotten better . . .” But how? I persisted. She looked mildly exasperated. “I don’t know,” she said briskly, “cooking is not something I think about. I just do it.”

BREAKFAST CREPES

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 cup plus 1 heaping tablespoon unbleached flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

Dash salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

Melted butter

Powdered sugar

Ground cinnamon

Combine eggs, milk, flour, granulated sugar, salt, vanilla and 2 tablespoons melted butter in blender container. Blend well.

Heat nonstick 9- or 10-inch skillet. Add 1 tablespoon melted butter. Pour about 1/3 cup batter into center of heated pan. Tip pan until bottom is covered with thin layer of batter.

Cook until top becomes slightly glossy. Carefully loosen outside rim of crepe with spatula. Turn carefully and cook about 30 more seconds.

Tip crepe onto serving plate. Spoon melted butter, powdered sugar and cinnamon to taste over flattened crepe. Roll up. Spoon additional melted butter, powdered sugar and cinnamon to taste over top.

Repeat procedure with remaining batter. Makes about 6 crepes.

Note: Additional buttering of pan is not necessary after first crepe is prepared. After testing pan with first crepe, additional milk or flour amy be added to thicken or thin batter.

ROAST CHICKEN WITH GARLIC

Olive oil

2 medium bulbs garlic

1 (5-pound) chicken

Vinegar

1/2 large lemon

White wine

1 1/2 teaspoons chicken bouillon granules

Freshly ground pepper

Cover bottom of roasting pan with olive oil. Separate cloves from garlic bulbs. Remove outside layers but do not totally peel cloves. Add cloves to pan and toss until covered with olive oil.

Wash chicken and pat dry. Rinse generously inside and out with vinegar. Cut lemon into quarters, squeeze into chicken cavity, then place lemon peels in cavity.

Arrange chicken, breast side up, in roaster over top of oil and garlic cloves. Tie legs. Pour about 1/2 cup wine over chicken. Sprinkle chicken with bouillon granules and pepper to taste.

Roast at 350 degrees 1 1/2 hours or until chicken is tender. Makes 4 servings.

Variation:

Poached chicken may be made from recipe by sprinkling bird with anise seed and covering roaster to cook.