Things I Have Inherited from my Mother

During the first three or four years of my parents' marriage, my father was chronically unemployed. 

We subsisted.

We had "hot dog goulash," as we called this, many times when I was a toddler.  You can tell by how well-used this recipe card is.  We also drank a lot of green Kool-Aid because a ten-cent packet, or whatever it cost in 1974, made half a gallon. 

Eventually my father got the call and was hired by the first of a series of congregations.  My mother spent the next twelve or thirteen years being a dutiful minister's wife and homemaker as we moved up and down the east coast - a new church every year or two - and she put a tremendous amount of effort into feeding us creatively and well on the pittance my father allotted for household expenses each month. 

She had dinner (meat, starch and two sides) each night at five o'clock sharp so my father could get to his recliner for the six o'clock news.  This was the playbook:

I don't know which edition it is, since the publication pages are missing, and the original binding was replaced, but judging by the Mad Men illustrations...



...I would guess we're talking early sixties.  Probably the first cookbook she got when she went off to college at 16.  It's very well-used. 

Here's a bonus:  A pie crust recipe written out by my grandmother.

The rest of the story goes like this.  Sixteen years in, my father soured on the whole monogamy thing, and the shock of the separation and divorce drove all those recipes and carefully crafted meals out of my mother's head. 

Ever after she loathed domesticity in general and cooking in particular. 

But she kept the cookbook.