When I was young I used to watch the Galloping Gourmet with my dad. It was on tv from 1969-1971 so I was pretty young. We also watched Julia Child along with any other cooking shows first on PBS then later on the Food Network. My dad loved to cook, but not regular supper type food. He loved to make gourmet dinners and desserts. I remember my dad going to the big public library in Elizabeth, NJ where we lived and he would come home with arm loads of cook books. He worked nights then and didn’t start work until 3 pm. He used to sit and pick out what recipes he liked and ones that he wanted to try to make. Of course, there were not Xerox machines to copy the recipes he wrote them all down in his own cookbook that he made.
The book is huge with hundred of hand written recipes. I remember him making many of them. I also remember watching him prep all his ingredients on our kitchen table since we had literally no counter prep space. He was doing his mise en place like he saw on tv! His cookbook was so organized he had different sections with an index for each one. Every recipe was numbered in the index so recipes were and are easy to find.
Who did he cook for? Well not for me, I know that. My parents liked to entertain and so did their group of friends. They had a supper club that they would take turns each month and go to each others houses and basically out do each other and even themselves year to year. My dad always picked October since he was German since he liked cooking German food and March because that was what my mother wanted since she was Irish. He really didn’t like that he always ended up making Corned Beef and Cabbage. Not a culinary challenge or fancy, but he did whatever made her happy. I think one year he made a Guiness stew along with the usual dishes and she refused to eat it. Funny the things we remember.
I mentioned that my dad didn’t like to cook regular old week night food, so that was up to my mother who hated to cook. I am adopted so its funny that I got my love of cooking from my dad, along with a lot of other things as well. What did someone who hated to cook make? I grew up on frozen, canned and boxed meals. Lots of meals with Campbell Soup. I only had real mashed potatoes at other peoples houses or on Thanksgiving. To be perfectly fair my mother put a balanced, good tasting dinner on the table every night. Not everyone enjoys cooking, planning, prepping so I get that. She would eat out or take out every night if they could afford it. I’m not saying that she didn’t make anything from scratch. She made things she liked, shhhhhhh but not well. Sorry its true. I didn’t realize how bad they actually were, until I began cooking. Meatballs and sauce, beef stew, lamb chops obliterated beyond any mint jelly could help and london broil. Besides chop meat & cube steak that’s the only cut of meat I think any of us had.
My dad was a fun guy. He liked to cook and drink. He was a bartender for a caterer and made some mean ass drinks. Everyone liked him and his easy going way and funny stories and sayings. He passed away in April of 2000. I still miss him greatly and think of him so often when I am cooking or mixing a cocktail with one of his glasses or drink stirrers. I am so grateful that I have that cookbook in my possession. I cherish it and really feel like I should keep it in a safe. I looked through it this morning and picked out a bunch of recipes I want to make.
Ok, so I wasn’t going to write about this. I even said out loud that I wasn’t going to write about this, but the more I thought about it, the madder I became. So fuck it, I’ve decided if I am going to be honest on here, I should be honest. Here is book that someone put hundreds of hours into creating and treated it like a bible. I can still see my mother with a cigarette dangling from her lip on the phone and needed something to write down a phone number and some other information. She used his fucking cookbook! I remember getting up from the smoke filled kitchen and going upstairs to my room and punching my pillow and crying. I couldn’t stop her because that would have had a terrible aftermath, so I never said anything but it changed something that day, how I felt and how I viewed other people. Everything that I learned from watching other people in my childhood did one of two things, I either wanted to be like them or not.