My Mother in the Kitchen: Unearthing Family Stories

I come from a long line of women who enjoy feeding people.

My late mother, whose birthday is today, was an excellent cook and hostess. She turned out creamy seafood lasagne for twenty without a hint of anxiety that the shrimp might be overcooked or the cream sauce curdled from sitting too long on top of the stove. Hors d’oeuvres for 50 were passed around by my sisters and I, my mother reasoning that she could provide a better end-of-term party for her school staff on a slim budget than any local restaurant.

Not infrequently, she served both a turkey and a large ham, which had jockeyed for space in the oven (or required usurping a neighbour’s), for Christmas dinner. She and my stepdad welcomed all of the church congregation members who had nowhere else to be.

Cooking for just family was less interesting to her, unless it was something that, in the early 80s, was vaguely exotic, like sukiyaki with thin slices of marinated beef and cubes of tofu, still a novelty in Ottawa, and more fun because it was cooked on the tabletop grill and eaten with chopsticks.

Or the fragrant shrimp curry, redolent of ginger and fenugreek, that a Guyanese friend had taught her to make, served with the flakiest of rotis.

Everyday meals were often forgotten on the stove or in the oven while she taught elementary school, conducted choirs, played the organ, or shepherded piano students through learning their notes. Beef stews stuck to the bottom of ruined pots; meatballs blackened on the tray. We learned to scrape off the top layer or keep an eye on the stove while we did homework and the babies played at our feet.

She was a person of enormous energy and charisma. A storyteller. But also distracted, always on the move.

Some of my mother’s stories were a bit suspect. It’s a family trait that’s been passed down through generations of raconteurs. As I work on creative nonfiction, I struggle with the voice in my head that tells me I’m not remembering every detail perfectly. Truth is important to me, even in story. Or perhaps especially in story, if the focus of the narrative is mysterious, the relationship intense, but intensely fraught? So many beloved but complicated people who remain always out of reach, never quite knowable.

In my final project for my Creative Writing certificate, my lovely external reader had one major criticism: she didn’t feel like, in my set of connected lyric essays, she ever met my mother. I described my mother; she featured in scenes. But she never came alive.

So as i think about the way to tell my mother’s life that will give her back the vivid intensity she merits, I think of food, of cooking.

My mother loved her kitchens, her dining rooms. She decorated and refurbished them, carefully pasting a border near the ceiling over the wallpaper that I’d helped her align on the walls.

She wanted kitchens that were roomy enough to fit a large table, or the custom-built booth that she lugged to three houses, its benches opening up to provide storage space for extra tablecloths.

Her restless ambitions meant that we cycled through houses every few years. Her ideal was to be the first owner of a brand-new house, the first cook in each kitchen.

But my mother insisted that, with a few exceptions, she hadn’t learned to cook from her own mother, and she wasn’t, perhaps as a result, especially keen to teach me. I learned later, from friends’ mothers and from cookbooks. I didn’t live with my mother after I was twelve, and this is part of my gap in recipes and kitchen knowledge.

Food was comfort. For me, still, each day includes a substantial amount of time planning for culinary pleasures, and cooking and baking soothe me more effectively than meditation.

My mother’s upbringing was painfully ruptured by my grandmother’s alcoholism. There were stories of violence, abuse.

A picture that haunts me: my mother, aged five or six, in a black and white studio portrait where both her eyes are blackened. She had fallen out of a moving car a few days earlier, but the family photo session was already scheduled, so the pictures were duly taken and printed and shared with relatives.

My mother learned to cook from her own grandmother, Charlotte, who cherished and protected her, passing on German family recipes for sauerbraten and cabbage rolls, for thick borscht with spoonfuls of sour cream.

There were chicken soups with dumpling batter ladled from a sticky bowl straight into the simmering broth. By the time they reached my generation, and my busy mother, the soup was a tin of Campbell’s, dumped into a pot, but still with the homemade flour, egg, and water dumplings.

Except for baking cookies or the occasional loaf of whole-grain bread together, during the late 70s when she spurned supermarket bread and made her own yoghurt, my mother didn’t want us in the kitchen.

In the way.

Cooking was her reprieve from a house of children, which included both four biological children and a rotating crew of foster children.

All of her treats, her Swedish berries and her emergency chocolate stash, were stored out of reach of these ravenous hordes. The birthday box of Laura Secord French and Frosted Mint Chocolates was tucked behind a row of cans, above the fridge. My sister, an antic monkey, clambered up and retrieved them for us.

When we visited my now-proudly sober grandmother when I was eleven, my mother hissed at me not to eat the potato salad.

Her mother, who had nine children but was from a family of thirteen, was known for the pleasure she took in cooking for large groups. A family reunion was her favourite kind of event: she would labour over the food for days in advance.

But because she was cooking for thirty or forty people, gathered to mark her fiftieth wedding anniversary, she quickly ran out of fridge space. My grandmother consigned many of her bowls and pots to the counter tops, sitting out at room temperature through humid July days.

An aunt had tipped off my mother that the enormous cauldron of potato salad had been lovingly prepared on Friday; it was now Sunday. My grandmother believed the preservatives in the commercial mayonnaise would keep it safe to eat.

It was already a rocky trip. We couldn’t afford food poisoning.

A marital rupture followed by a trial reunion and ambitious family trip had my mother fuming. Her patience and forgiveness were rewarded by a man so hapless he ran over his own foot with the car, having stepped out to try to dislodge a sticky brake with both hands while kneeling in the driveway. My grandmother clucked over him and brought him meals in bed; my mother called lawyers.

My cousin in Calgary, a smidge younger than me, was in her final years of life, suffering from an excruciating rare disorder. During our visit, we sat on her backyard swings and I tried not to stare at her blood red lower legs, scabbed and swollen with steroids.

At our next stop, my Edmonton grandmother had taken a frank and bewildering dislike to me. One of her favourite expressions was “A first child is like your first tray of cookies; you should be able to throw it out and start again.”

I was the first child.

She adored my younger sister, spooning raspberries from her garden into my sister’s mouth.

When I asked her how many brothers and sisters she had, my grandmother retorted that it was none of my business.

My mother figured I looked too much like her, while my sister favoured my grandmother, thin and petite.

The first time my mother met her in-laws-to-be was not auspicious: she was still married to someone else, and she was pregnant with me. To placate them, she bought an extravagant roast beef, cooking it to a perfect medium rare. Spotting the pink meat as my mother began to carve it, my grandmother snatched it up from the table, accusing my mother of trying to kill them with under-cooked meat. She marched into the kitchen and put the roast beef back in the oven, standing guard over it until she determined it was grey throughout and thus safe to eat.

My mother fumed about this story for decades: the waste of a good roast beef; my grandmother’s provincialism; her own foolishness, a Munrovian word that my mother would never have employed, in marrying into a working-class family whose home held only Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels.

Her own father had come a hard-scrabble farm but had risen through the executive ranks of an insurance company, snagging a coveted large home on Ada Boulevard.

The Holgate Residence, my mother’s family home in Edmonton.

There were a lot of family secrets.

One that I’ve learned about only recently was that my great-grandfather, this Edmonton grandmother’s father, was murdered the year after I was born.

Distrusting banks, he tended to keep a lot of cash at home, as well as hidden on his person. A teenager in his small Alberta town robbed and killed him, serving a relatively short sentence due to his youth. A few months after his murder, his wife, my great-grandmother, died in a kitchen fire.

My grandmother must have grieved them. The complaints I heard about how the family farm proceeds were divided between her siblings must have had their roots in this double tragedy.

But my grandmother never shared these stories of loss, although she talked non-stop, not pausing for breath or interruptions.

My grandfather was only slightly more forthcoming, offering up a single gruesome story from his World War II experience: he had been in a tank that was blown up by a grenade, losing his hearing and one eye, as well as the best friend, who was sitting next to him.

After each telling, my grandfather would pop out his glass eye to show me.

My point is that I come by interest in the macabre, as well as my preoccupation with open family secrets, entirely honestly.

This weekend would have been my mother’s 77th birthday; she died 22 years ago, at only 55. If I can manage another year and a half of life, I’ll have outlived her.

But it won’t be to my credit, or at least not mostly. I was born cautious, while my mother was, if not rash, at least a risk-taker. She drove fast; she changed course abruptly. I seem to have no propensity for addictions, which made me a perfect girlfriend for undergrad pot dealers, while my mother inherited her own mother’s illnesses, including a need for alcohol in times of grief and despair.

A few years before she died, she moved to Vancouver to be closer to her sisters, but by the time she arrived to be principal of a new school, they were largely estranged.

The family silences, from siblings disowned or denied, echo through my family tree.

There are gaps and omissions, secrets and lies.

I found it fascinating when I was a child: so many people who lived with unbearable amounts of pride and shame.

So many recipes lost.