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

My mother’s idea of a great meal was one that could be cooked in 10 minutes. She’d come breezing into the apartment, throw her hat onto the kitchen table and the cast-iron skillet onto the stove. Then she’d dump a can of peas into a pot, salt the skillet, take the lamb chops out of the refrigerator and the Minute Rice down from the shelf. The meat would hiss as it hit the hot salt, sizzle as she set the table. As she called out “dinner” she’d glance at the clock and peel off her gloves. “Eight minutes,” she’d say with satisfaction.

The books piled on top of the refrigerator--where the cookbooks should have been--all had titles like “I Hate to Cook,” and “No Fuss Food.” My mother felt that she had better things to do with her life than spend it in the kitchen. My father, apparently, agreed. “Your mother,” he’d say solemnly and often, “is a marvelous cook.”

I think he really believed it. Fortunately for him, he was blessed with an iron constitution. In our family you needed it to survive. My mother certainly thought she had better things to do than clean out the refrigerator. And she definitely didn’t believe in the concept of spoilage. “Just a little bit of mold . . . “ she’d say, scraping it off.

My mother was equally blase about what went into the pot. I once watched her construct a casserole for dinner. It began with leftover turkey and broccoli. She found some ancient stewed prunes and plopped them in. Then she unearthed a little leftover rice. “This might be interesting,” she mused, adding some cottage cheese she found floating on one of the lower shelves. By now she was happily dumping everything that was in the refrigerator into the casserole. “Mom,” I said finally, stopping her, “you just threw in half an apple pie!” She looked disconcerted. “I did?” she asked. Then she shrugged. “Who knows,” she said, “it might be good.”

I don’t think it was--to anybody but my father. But then I can only remember one time when my mother made something that even my father could not swallow.

It was early one Saturday morning. Early for Dad and me--late for my mother who, at 7, had already been up for at least three hours and greeted us with disgustingly cheerful smiles. All either of us ever wanted to do in the morning was to be left alone. In our house, that was impossible. “I need you to taste something,” said my mother to my father. He followed her, groggily, into the kitchen. She held out a spoon. He obediently opened his mouth. But as he closed it, a look of absolute horror spread across his face. He stumbled to the sink and spat it out. “That,” he said, gasping, “is the worst thing I’ve ever tasted.”

“Um hum,” said my mother, “just as I thought. Spoiled.”

My mother might have been bored by everyday cooking, but parties were different. She entertained eagerly, often--and eccentrically. Her main objective was to be creative, to feed her friends something they had never had before. For my mother, this was no problem; she was the first on her block to serve mussels, to serve wild rice, to serve kiwis. While ordinary cooks were concerned when people looked up from their plates and said, “This is so, er, unusual,” my mother took it as a compliment.

Occasionally, however, she accidentally hit on something really good. Like her baked corned beef. It was so good that when I was in college, I actually wrote and asked her for the recipe. “Your friends will love it,” she wrote back, “it’s so different.”

MIRIAM REICHL’S BAKED CORNED BEEF

1 (3- to 4-pound) corned beef

Few bay leaves

1 onion, chopped, or 1 tablespoon onion flakes

1 tablespoon prepared yellow mustard

1/4 cup brown sugar, packed

Whole cloves

1 (1-pound 15-ounce) can spiced peaches

Place corned beef in pot. Cover with water. Add bay leaves and onion. Cook until meat is very tender, about 3 to 4 hours.

Remove meat from water. Skin off all fat. Make paste of mustard and brown sugar and cover meat with paste. Insert whole cloves as desired.

Bake at 325 degrees 1 hour, basting frequently with some syrup from spiced peaches. Serve with drained spiced peaches. Makes 6 servings.

Styling by Minnie Bernardino and Donna Deane