No Cook Measures
Up To Her Mother's Cooking
Holidays then meant relatives
at my grandparent's home with my cousins and I upstairs watching the
scene through the ventilation grate in the middle of the bedroom floor,
wondering if we saw what our prairie God saw, who gazed benevolently
down over us all from heaven.
In the kitchen, we could hear the floorboards
groaning in protest beneath the accumulated heft of my broad-beamed
and lovable aunts, who as they prepared our meal, and could see the
dark lines twisting up the back of their nyloned legs, as they all
steering judiciously clear of that queen of her kitchen realm, Grandma,
known for her sharp tongue and her insistence that only the green
bowl be used for mixing.
Through that grate, in
the living room, we could look down on uncles with weathered tanned
cheeks, and immaculate white foreheads that they hid under work caps
in the farm fields all week, and thinning bald spots in the middle
of their heads, fringed by a halo of hair -- as in their Sunday best,
and from a mixture of German and English they choose the most expressive
words to comment on the weather, crops or that second cut of alfalfa
they'd gotten the past summer.
Rolling out dough -- working
with their hands -- brought to my aunts memories of harder times,
of the proper way to rub a child with whooping cough, but always as
they prepared the food, as they slid casseroles and greased trays
into the oven, as they turned their faces away from the oven's heat,
in their high-pitched, sing-song voices they'd always predict culinary
disaster:
"Yah, gott das willa, I
chust can't coog anymore..." one of my aunts might say. "How my mother
ever made do, ay...she didn't even haf an electric mixer or a recipe
like we haf nowadays...yah, they had that ungefahr cooking then...a
little of this, a little of that...ay, yah yi noch a mal anyhow, this
chust won't taste gut at all...tststastssts..."
But it always turned out
wonderful, as we found out soon enough when those cooks, like a choir
of chubby angels, called out to us, sometimes in unison, their words,
along with ascent of their foods, floating through the ventilation
grate to us upstairs: "Yah, kinder, Kumm und essen" they'd call --
and so we'd thunder down the narrow, painted steps, seat ourselves
on the bench, alongside our uncles, in their long sleeved Sunday shirts,
still creased and crisp from the hot irons of their hardworking wives,
our aunts, still fussing over the final preparations, and just after
grandpa prayed his longer prayer in German, on of my uncles might
say, quickly, "and now pass the wascht, the sausage" --and so we'd
eat.
Author
Ron Vossler
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