A House of Many Mothers
Whatever its value as an item of commerce--and they are considerable--Mother’s Day holds on to its originating intentions. No matter how earnestly it is promoted on behalf of candy, flowers, greeting cards and meals out, the day still speaks powerfully of mother, home and family memories.
I have always felt a special closeness to Mother’s Day, I suppose, because my childhood in Upstate New York was heavily matriarchal. I lost my one surviving grandfather when I was 3 and my father at 8, and while I retained a couple of uncles, my immediate world consisted of my own mother, a brace of grandmothers and a trio of spinster great-aunts who fussed over my brother and me so nicely as to qualify as supplemental mothers. There were also spinster cousins and widowed cousins and others I realized years later were honorary aunts with no legal links to me but who were motherly all the same.
I associate Mother’s Day with food, because most of the ladies in my young life cooked and baked, wonderfully well if not fancily. It may be that, like the Frenchman who said the Eiffel Tower reminded him of sex because everything reminded him of sex, Mother’s Day reminds me of food because everything in those early days reminded me of food, including candy bars like the Bunte Tango of cherished memory.
My mother used to dine out, as they say, on the story of her ordeal as a young bride trying to roast a goose for her and my father’s first Christmas. It wouldn’t get done; it kept oozing fat, and company was arriving at any minute. From that low point, Mother became a good and I think uncommonly resourceful cook.
She had two children who could not abide fish (my brother still grows uneasy if he senses there is so much as a shrimp cocktail in his vicinity), and this in an era when fish was still de rigueur on Fridays. Mother solved this by acquiring some small ceramic dishes in which she baked us individual tuna casseroles. These were so heavily lidded with bread crumbs and baked so splendidly crisp that you could hardly tell what lay beneath the crust. Even my brother could not find fault, or identify the tuna.
In those Depression years, Mother of necessity invented food-stretchers that bordered on genius: the masked loaf and the cleverly disguised leftover are awesome as I think of them in retrospect, although at the time I might have agreed with Tom Mix after a banquet at the Waldorf, when he said he ate for three hours and didn’t recognize anything but the olive.
My grandmother’s baked goods were legendary, within the family at least. No one has ever surpassed her molasses cookies and her bread. The aroma of the bread as it was baking was worth bottling as perfume. To the end of her days, my grandmother insisted on shaving the coconut for her superb coconut cakes; pre-shredded coconut was an abomination, she insisted. More than once the physical effort put her in bed with exhaustion, but her pride was great and compromise was not in her soul.
One of the spinster great-aunts, Aunt Julie, did the cooking and baking for her sisters and her brother, my great-uncle Victor. Her treat for sweet-toothed visiting youngsters was what she called kuchen --a generic term, I suppose now, but in Aunt Julie’s hands it was a sweetened dough baked round and level like cake layers and frosted with powdered sugar until it looked like a flattened Alp.
She also took some of the dough, rolled it into strips and twisted it into pretzel-shape, though it was softer than pretzels and, of course, tastily sweet. These were for taking home after lunch with the aunts.
Having a German mother and a French father, she was also a masterful concocter of soups, which began every meal except breakfast. Sometimes, I realize now, what we got came from the pot au feu , the great kettle that simmered constantly on the wood stove the family kept even after they also had an electric range.
My parental impression is that children customarily dislike soups as much as the President dislikes broccoli (which children also tend to dislike). But Aunt Julie made a soup-lover of me while my age was still a single digit.
My maternal great-grandmother’s birthday fell very near to Mother’s Day. She had left us decades before I arrived, but her children and grandchildren observed her birthday with a grand tea party on the lawn, usually centering on the first strawberries of the season, with vast, child-thrilling helpings of golden vanilla ice cream and Aunt Julie’s kuchen in both its shapes.
My great-grandmother’s brother, a stout gentleman who was in the silk business in Paterson, N.J., came up by train for the observance every year, invariably wearing the season’s first three-piece white suit and, to the distress of his sisters, smoking large cigars. He was always seated downwind of everybody else.
The two events, Mother’s Day and the honoring of the family matriarch, fell so closely together that they have melded in my mind in some way, so that the smoke of Uncle Charlie Reinhardt’s cigars forms a kind of aura around the one and several mothers whose faces come before me on the holiday.
Occasionally, Mother’s Day would be celebrated the way restaurateurs would have it, and my Uncle Victor would take his spinster sisters and the other ladies of the family, including my mother and grandmother, plus my brother and me, down to the Hammondsport Hotel for luncheon. The specialty of the house was fricassee chicken with biscuits, which at an early age I prized above all other entrees, and for which I still have a high fondness.
The fact is that among the tumbling rush of memories that Mother’s Day evokes for me are not only those lovely women of my youth, but all the grand things they cooked and baked, and that chicken fricassee which, on one Sunday a year, they let someone else prepare.
Though not the exact recipe used by Aunt Julie, this version of kuchen comes close.
SETTLEMENT COOKBOOK KUCHEN
1 package dry yeast
1 1/4 cups lukewarm (110 degrees) milk
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
Sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
Finely grated zest 1 lemon
4 to 5 1/2 cups flour
Cinnamon, optional
Chopped nuts, optional
Dissolve yeast in warm milk and allow to stand 3 to 5 minutes until tiny bubbles appear on surface.
Cream 1 cup butter, add 1/2 cup sugar and eggs, 1 at time, stirring well after each addition. Add salt and lemon zest. Stir in flour alternately with yeast mixture and mix well. (If dough is too soft to knead, add more flour as needed.)
Toss onto floured board and knead until smooth and elastic (or in mixer fitted with dough hook attachment).
Place dough in greased bowl, cover with damp towel, and let rise until doubled in bulk.
When risen and light, spread dough 1/2 inch thick in shallow buttered pan. Cover and let rise again until doubled in bulk. Before baking, melt 2 tablespoons butter and spread over dough. Season to taste with sugar, cinnamon and chopped nuts, if desired. Bake in 350-degree oven 15 to 20 minutes. Makes 8 servings.
Whose chicken fricassee could be more mom-like than Fannie Farmer’s?
FANNIE FARMER’S CHICKEN FRICASSEE
1 (5-pound) chicken, cut in large pieces
1/2 cup butter
2 tablespoons oil
1 small onion, sliced
2 stalks celery with leaves, in pieces
1 carrot, sliced
1 bay leaf
4 tablespoons flour
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
Rinse chicken and pat dry. Heat 4 tablespoons butter with oil in Dutch oven and brown chicken on all sides.
Lower heat, pour on boiling water to cover chicken. Add onion, celery, carrot and bay leaf. Cover and simmer 40 to 45 minutes. Remove chicken to platter and keep warm.
Strain broth and remove any surface fat. Bring broth to boil and reduce to 1 1/2 cups. Melt remaining 4 tablespoons butter in saucepan. Stir in flour and cook 2 to 3 minutes. Slowly add cream and broth, continuing to stir. Simmer 4 to 5 minutes until thickened and smooth. Add lemon juice. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Spoon over chicken and serve. Makes 8 servings.
