This afternoon a young lawyer with whom we’d had dinner sent me two recipes I’d asked for. One – for a warm mushroom and spinach salad is straightforward. We’ll have it on Thursday when friends are coming for dinner. The other—for fresh rolls – is great but it looks finicky so I’ve already forwarded it to our son who is a drummer, an arborist, a masters’ student in public policy and a cook who can be flattered into making something as finicky as fresh rolls when we have a family dinner.
I like recipes. My memory for many things is less than stellar, but I remember the person from whom and the occasion upon which I acquired every recipe I have.
I’ve been cooking for over 45 years now. Not surprisingly, many of those who gave me recipes have joined James Beard, Julia Child, Laurie Colwin and the other great cooks who continue to be part of my life long after theirs have ended. When I look at my aunt’s elegantly handwritten recipe for Mazola oil cake or my uncle’s assertive script describing EXACTLY how to make Cherries Jubilee or Harvard Beets, these two dear people are with me again.
But recipes are more than a family album, they’re also a record of how we lived. My recipes are a sociology of the changing role of women. I have dozens of cookie recipes that came from the mothers at the lake who all summer long would begin baking on Monday mornings, so that when the fathers returned from the city on Friday night, every possible cookie they might have lusted after during the week was only a finger snap away. I have a dozen recipes for the spaghetti sauce, Jamaican chicken, beans and rice, gazpacho and Greek hangover soup that I cooked endlessly when I was an undergraduate. I have incredibly complex recipes for the six course meals that we used to serve during the seventies when every meal ended with liqueurs and every woman with pretensions had several full length hostess skirts in her wardrobe. I have dozens of the recipes that I cooked when I was doing graduate work and teaching and our kids were growing up – meat loaf, mac and cheese, pot roast, chicken Diablo, lasagna and the recipe for the birthday cake of choice for each member of our family.
Tonight Ted and I are having one of our favourite dishes. It’s one no child would ever dream of eating: angel hair pasta with caviar, lemon zest and melted butter. It’s from the Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, but if you want the recipe, just drop me a line.