Sometimes on Sunday mornings after church, my mother would whip up a batch of oatmeal muffins as a treat to accompany the scrambled eggs, sausage, canned orange juice, and coffee that were the more regular features of our post-fast spreads. The muffins were large and solid; pried from their tins with a knife, each one could take command of a plate in its golden brown majesty, flecked with nutty specks of warmed oatmeal and exuding a buttery moist and crumbly charm. We ate them lathered with still more butter and dolloped with the homemade raspberry jam that my mother made from the berries we picked in the overgrown alley behind our suburban house. Eating one felt like encountering the answer to faith’s mysteries, coming home to the holy grail of satiety, ultimate pleasure, comfort, and hominess. They felt healthy even though we seven children had only the vaguest sense of what healthy meant; we only knew that feeling of solid well-being we got from eating them.
Years later, when I moved across the country to graduate school, my mother sent me the
recipe:
experiences had stayed with me on my solo travels into the foreign worlds of higher education.
She always wrote them out carefully in her looping left-handed script and frequently enclosed
them in a care package of homemade cookies and fudge, so I could have an immediate tangible
link to the family source while trying my uncertain hand at the baking process.
My mother lumped muffins somewhat dismissively into the category of “quick breads,”
breads you tossed off on the fly without really thinking about it, breads you slammed together
with a few practiced strokes and hurtled carelessly into buttered tins or deep, rectangular bread
pans, breads that obediently plumped and browned and scented the kitchen on demand. Her real
glory as a baker was in yeast breads, and in the year before I left for graduate school she tried to
pass the kneading art along to me.”You have to feel the bread,” she’d say, humping up the mass
of dough and patting it like a loved baby, “feel when it needs more flour or a dash of water. Pull
it toward you and turn it like this,” she’d say, expertly pressing the mass away and back, fort and
da. Although I tried to learn, yeast breads never took to my unpracticed caresses, but I did learn
to make passable imitations of her quick breads: zucchini bread, banana bread, cinnamon crumb
coffee cake, apple cobbler, popovers, muffins. In the last year, when she knew she was dying,
she tried to teach my father how to cook his meals as well. Carpenter that he was, he took readily
to the measuring of precise ingredients but, like me, failed at the Zen of production and ended up
eating mostly out of cans.
In the years after my mother died, my three sisters and I gradually discovered that her
muffins, like many of the recipes she had carefully written out for us over the years, were
basically plagiarized from the Betty Crocker Cookbook.
and transported across country to make a home for a stressed husband and a big family, she
turned to the reassuring cookbooks being pumped into the market and directed to the woes of
beleaguered housewives. Betty Crocker was the staple but there was also The Joy of Cooking, Peg
Bracken’s I Hate to Cook for the bad days, and later, post-Sixties infiltrations like The
Vegetarian Epicure, which recommended a toke of pot to stimulate guests’ appetites, and
Laurel’s Kitchen, which extolled the pleasures of baking, canning, and vegetarian cooking as a
holistic lifestyle. Through all these mentoring influences, vegetables remained for my mother the
ideal accompaniments to butter, mayonnaise, or best of all cream. She had grown up on a farm
with cows, whose cream provided the sweet base for life; for us that meant creamed corn,
creamed spinach, fresh cream poured over ripe tomatoes, creamed eggs on toast, even oysters
cooked with butter and cream on Christmas Eve. In her suburban Seattle yard, she created a large
garden and culled every last treasure she could from the surrounding brambles of undeveloped
plots. As part of the same philosophy of practical household management, when she shopped for
our family of nine at grocery stores, she bought everything big and cheap, the cheapest cuts of
meat turning blue under their frost, the value-sized bags of flour, rice, and cornmeal, the
gargantuan boxes of cornflakes and cheerios with no prizes tucked away at the bottom.
I wondered at first why she had taken the trouble to write everything out rather than sending
me a copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook in a Christmas care package, but I gradually realized
that the small changes she had made from the original recipe were, in her mind, the key secrets
she was passing along. For example, she was immensely proud of the household management tips
build into her version of the muffin recipe, letting me know that I could substitute margarine
(cheaper) for the half butter mixture, that I could let the oatmeal soak a bit less if I ran out of
time (which I always do), that I could sour regular milk with a little vinegar if I didn’t happen to
have sour cream or buttermilk in the house (which I never do). She loved, as I have come to love,
being able to whip up a dinner out of nothing, to make something edible out of whatever staples
were in the house—a talent she drew upon frequently (corn meal mush and raisins with rice
became our favorite pre-paycheck meals). Adding the decadent suggestion that I could throw in
half a cup of nuts or raisins and telling me to fill the muffin cups three quarters full rather than
the two-thirds specified by the stingy Betty Crockerites was also typical of my mother’s
abundant spirit. She understood on some fundamental level that cooking was about love and
generosity and family warmth, never to be stinted in terms of time or portion size.
All this helps to explain the resonance of those faded, batter-spattered recipes I treasure,
but a wonderfully rich essay by social anthropologist Jack Goody, “The Recipe, the Prescription,
and the Experiment,” adds another layer of insight. Digging through the history of recipe use
from the earliest Sumerian medical prescriptions (turns out that RX like the word recipe means
“to take”) to the Egyptian alchemists encoding their secret potions, through the first cooking
recipe in 1500 for “brede graytd, and eggis,” up to modern bourgeois cooking, Goody arrives at
the point that middle class family cooking frequently relied on tradition above and beyond the
written recipe: “Knowledge of cooking acquired by participation rather than by instruction is
necessarily conservative (in one sense of the word) and tied to the ingredients readily available,
placing less emphasis on the fulfillment of a set of written “orders” and more upon the utilization
of the contents of the cupboard in an improvisation upon certain recettes de base (base recipes)”
(Goody 83, 86, 87). This attitude gets at the heart of my mother’s understanding of recipes. In
the end, they only provided a set of proportions—dry ingredients, wet ingredients, fat, and
leavening; once she understood those proportions, the oatmeal muffins could become zucchini
muffins, banana muffins, apple cornmeal muffins, and so on. While she knew with the certainty
of an artist how to riff, ripple and play at the margins of recipes, how to make them serve her in
feeding a large family from the contents of a lean cupboard, she was also well aware of my
limitations as novice—her careful instructions in this recipe were bolstered by numerous verbal
instructions to sift and measure flour precisely and Depression-era reminders to scrape every last
bit of margarine from the wrapping. Goody’s history also helps to pinpoint the mysterious
alchemy that arrived in the mail along with my mother’s recipes and baked goodies. He gives as
the fundamental definition of the recipe “a written formula for mixing ingredients for culinary,
medical or magical purposes,” and looking back, I think my mother’s recipes played all those
roles for me (Goody 84). She wanted me to be safe, happy, and healthy in the strange new place
I had chosen for myself, and she knew that her recipes, written out by hand, contained an elixir
of family identity and certitude. There were not just recipes but talismans that would protect me
from the surrounding evils of New Jersey, and even perhaps from myself.
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