Stirring Up Memories: What Cooking Taught Me About Time

Family recipes have a way of carrying more than instructions—they hold the quirks, shortcuts, and “heaping tablespoons” that define the people who made them. This post follows Jean’s attempt to recreate her mother’s cooking, from tapioca pudding once known as “fish eyes” to Depression‑era mock apple pie. Along the way, it becomes a reflection on memory, legacy, and the bittersweet moment when you realize you’re the last keeper of certain stories. It’s a journey that’s part kitchen experiment, part time travel, and part reminder that the flavors we miss most aren’t always about the food….AI

When I was growing up, my mom didn’t call foods by their proper names. “What’s for dinner?” my dad would ask, and she’d answer, “An old dead cow,” or “an old dead chicken.” One of my favorite desserts was “fish eyes pudding.” I don’t know how old I was when I finally learned those chewy, translucent little balls I loved were actually tapioca. We had it often because it was a good way to use up milk or eggs that were about to spoil. My mom was the queen of using leftovers. If she boiled potatoes on Tuesday, the extras became sliced and fried potatoes on Wednesday. Her soups were never the make the same twice because any left-over vegetables or starch went into the pot.

Mom didn’t follow recipes, which made it impossible to learn to cook from her. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it, even though I can hear my brother’s ghost laughing somewhere in the Great Unknown. As a teenager he took an interest in cooking and was often looking over Mom’s shoulder...or vise-visa as Jerry tried his hand. I don’t have to tell anyone who knew the two of us that he turned out to be the better cook while I turned out to be a five‑trick pony. I can make scrambled eggs, grill a steak, make chili, bake bread and order pizza.

When I was a teenager, Mom would warn me I’d never find a husband if I didn’t learn to cook. I’d tell her I planned to find one who was rich enough to take me out every night—or one who liked to cook, like my brother. It was hard for her to argue back when she herself had broken the norms of the ’50s by teaching a boy—gasp!—the secrets of marinating, roasting, simmering, sautéing and frying.

Circling back to tapioca: I loved the way Mom made it, and when I was living on my own I tried to recreate it, but it was never as rich as hers. One day I went to her house and asked her to make it while I watched. “You just follow the directions on the box!” she insisted. But the problem was, she didn’t. Her tablespoons were heaping, not leveled off like I’d learned to do in high‑school home‑ec. She added extra egg whites and more vanilla than the side‑panel recipe called for, and she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

Recently my youngest niece made a batch of chili sauce using Mom’s recipe and she gifted me some. The sight of those jars brought back such a nice memory of Mom and me standing side-by-side chopping red and green peppers and onions, and of the sweet aroma that filled the cottage as the chili sauce simmered on the stove. My husband’s favorite Christmas gift was a dozen jars of Mom’s chili sauce, a tradition that lasted between them for years. When she died and our stash came to an end, my chili was never the same because my “secret recipe” was simply a jar of her sauce, a pound of hamburger, a can of Bush's red kidney beans in mild chili sauce and a can of Hunt's basil, garlic and oregano diced tomatoes. And a tablespoon of sugar. One thing mom did drill into me is you always add a little sugar to anything with tomatoes in it, "to cut the acid." 

My niece’s chili sauce planted a seed: maybe I could replicate a few other family favorites using the box of stained and yellowed recipe cards written in Mom’s handwriting. And then serendipity stepped in. While I was looking through the recipes, one of my neighbors here in the independent living building stopped by with a half‑dozen peanut‑butter cookies that tasted exactly like Mom’s. She bakes often, but this was the first time she’d given any to me. The serendipity didn’t stop there. That same night our chef served barbecued spare ribs that almost matched Mom’s. So I checked the ribs off my list—too messy to clean up afterward, I remembered—and I moved making cookies to the bottom.

I also crossed off her baked beans, a favorite with any kid who tried them. Reading the ingredients, I can see why. No one today would use a pound of brown sugar for every pound of beans. Would they? I could feel the fat jumping onto my hips just reading the recipe. That narrowed my list to tapioca pudding and mock apple pie. If you’ve never heard of mock apple pie, it’s made with Ritz crackers instead of apples, and as I remember, its taste and texture fooled everyone. A Google search surprised me: this Depression‑era favorite is making the rounds on TikTok! I decided to make it sometime when I need a dish to pass.

So my legacy‑cooking experiment began with tapioca. Here’s a mini history lesson: tapioca originally came from Brazil, where Indigenous tribes harvested the tubers of a shrub called cassava. The extracted starch (the tapioca) became known worldwide, especially as “poor man’s food” during the Great Famine of 1876–78. Fast‑forward to the 2010s, when tapioca became internationally popular again as the key ingredient in bubble/boba tea. Tapioca is sweet and savory, and here in the U.S. it comes in pearls, flakes, and flour. The flour is gluten‑free and is used in baking as well as to thicken soups, sauces and gravies.

At the store, I chose a bag of instant tapioca (by mistake) for my adventure back in time. My first batch was a control batch, made from the recipe on the bag. The main difference from Mom’s recipe is in the modern version you no don't have to separate the eggs and, of course, she didn't use instant. I was pleasantly surprised, however, at how good it tasted. Next I went to Trader Joe’s and bought a bottle of pure vanilla and a bag of small pearls tapioca for my second batch, which I made following Mom’s “enhanced” recipe with its heaping measurements, extra eggs and vanilla. I loved it.

The only downer in my tapioca experiment is that since my brother passed away there is no one left who is old enough to remember my mom's and my arguments over me learning to cook. It’s a strange place to be in life, isn’t it. To realize there’s no one left who shares the memories of large chunks of your life. We can write about our memories. We can even tell them so many times that a loved one can fill in the details we leave out. But it’s not the same as having a sibling who speaks the shorthand of a shared childhood, who can laugh and cry over the same moments.

If you still have siblings… I’m just sayin’. Time doesn’t stand still. ©

 See you next Wednesday... 

The Bacon Edition and More Newbies on Campus

When I sit down to write a new post I quite often do a search of my blog to make sure I won’t be repeating myself. This blog goes back to 2012 and my life experiences aren’t that broad that I’ve still got a lot of untold stories left---even less than when I started because I’m old and my memories are fading. Today I used the search term ‘bacon’ and I’ll explain why later on. 

One of the first posts I found was written in 2014 titled The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and it started out, “I’m having a hard time deciding if I have anything left to say that hasn’t been said in a million different ways about the topics I usually write about.” Do you see a pattern here? And I went on: “I need a new life! Either that or I need to start making stuff up…like fictitious trips to the Amazon---the river not the online store. I’ve been to Amazon.com more times than I care to admit and while I enjoy shopping there no one cares where I get my books and finger puppets. Note to my heirs: those plush little puppets would make great places to hide things. Be sure to check the panda’s butt when I die.” It might contain the password you’ve been looking for.

My search of posts where I mentioned ‘bacon’ was surprisingly long and I quit counting at fifteen. I skim-read through a few looking for what I hoped I wouldn’t find (and didn’t). Those I read ranged in topic from different things to put on peanut butter sandwiches to snacks my dog loved to freezing bacon. Since it’s been awhile I’ll repeat that handy little freezing tip: The idea of rolling your bacon one piece at a time (see photo above) came from a Food Network Magazine article. You freeze them not touching each other, then put them in a covered container so you can defrost one or two pieces at a time which takes about 6-7 minutes. I have a microwave bacon baking dish which is the only way I’ll cook it. And that leads into why I was searching to see if I’ve ever written about my fear of frying bacon in preticular and frying foods in general.

After the anniversary party that I wrote about in my last post a woman who is well known around here for being a prolific and great cook (and a ride-or-die Trump supporter) asked me to come to her apartment because she had some party leftovers to give to me. While I was there she wanted to know my background, how I got through life without much experience in the culinary field. I blamed it on my mother, of course, and told her about the day she left me unsupervised while trying to fry bacon when I was 12 or 13 and how I got splatter burned on my face, eyeball and neck. After that I refused to fry ANYTHING until I turned 75 and I happened on an issue of the Food Network that was entirely devoted to cooking bacon. (See why my mom called me stubborn?) I read that issue cover to cover and challenged myself to get over my fear of cooking bacon. I followed the directions faithfully and made a perfect batch of bacon then I decided never to do it again. 1) I’d conquered my fear, 2) I didn’t like the cleanup for just one person, and 3) I proved what I used to tell my mom when she’d nagged me about not learning my way around the kitchen. I’d tell her, “If you can read you learn to cook and when I need to learn, I will...” That probably worried her even more because she knew I was a poor reader.  

“How are you ever going to get a husband if you can’t cook?” my mom would ask and I’d reply, “I’ll find one who can afford to go to restaurants or who likes to cook like Jerry (my brother) does.” My brother enjoyed the lessons meant for me---if I’d been paying attention---and to this day he claims I would have starved to death if he hadn’t made the dinners after school when my mom went back to work. To the woman who gave me the leftovers I also explained that before my husband and I were married we lived two miles apart with a dozen or so restaurants in between. He worked nights and I worked days so we’d meet in the middle for lunch. Occasionally on the weekends I'd grill steaks and I could make a good pot roast. And without having kids to feed it just worked for us.

Change of topic: I’ve got six new residents on campus and two of them overlook my deck, a couple and their large poodle named Willie. I don’t know them enough to give them nicknames yet but already I like them for two reasons: 1) I like people who give their pets human names and 2) news on the grape vine is they turned their den in an art studio for the wife. I met her briefly and have seen her twice. She likes to draw mostly and both times I saw her picking up mail she was wearing a painter’s smock and hat like the French painters in the 20^th century. She looked so cute and all she needs is to carry a paint brush around to really look authentic. The royal blue silk blouse I wore to the recent anniversary party was fashioned after those painter’s smocks which is why I bought for the opening of the student art show I was in. 

Something tells me the next time we have a Paint and Sip party around here my painting will have some stiff competition. Great! I’ve always worked best in classes with people who I can learn from and try to compete with. It's like if you were to run a race against people who are 10-15 years older than you, you'd probably win every time but if you run with people who are younger than you, you probably wouldn't win but your time would be faster. That's me in art classes. I run better, so to speak, when I'm trying to keep up rather than 'teach by example' to those around me who've never held a paint brush.

Speaking of creativity, our Creative Writing Group is still a small but tightly net group of four and the round-robin story we’ve been writing is turning it to something we’re all proud of. We’re talking about doing a reading of it some evening by the fireplace, after the holidays with each of us reading the parts we wrote. Nights by the fireplace are things the residents---not our Enrichment Director---put together and they are usually music related stuff that draw 15 or 20 people. But one resident's family did do a poetry slam once. It would be scary to stand up and read our round robin but as Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Do something that scares you every day” and she wasn’t talking about watching scary movies or doing dare-devil stunts. She was talking about going outside of your comfort zone. 

I have zero experience talking in front of groups since college in the '60s when I was a second stringer on a debate team. Two others in my group do public speaking with their church work and the third member of our group was a high school teacher/librarian and she doesn't fear public speaking. She and the only guy are brand new to creative writing, though, so it will be scary for them to reveal their wordsmithing in public. We all have tried our hand at poetry so we’re debating between doing this reading and doing a poetry slam that we can invite others to join in with original poems of their own. Decisions. Decisions!

Until next Wednesday. ©

* Photo credits: Bacon taken by me. The portrait photo was napped off Roseberys Art Auction site and was listed as '20th Century French School.'

Pig’s Feet and Chicken Soup

When I came in from working in the garage it hit me like a pie in the face only better. It was the distinctive aroma of chicken soup cooking on the stove. Homemade chicken soup in the making to be more precise. I had set a picked-over rotisserie chicken in water to boil the meat from the bones which is something I only do two-three a year. For the next seven or eight minutes I stood over the pot, straining and picking bones and skin out of the boiling broth, my cheeks getting red from the steam, my hair getting frizzy. I cut some mini-peeled carrots up like little orange dimes and added them into the pot followed by a couple of envelopes of Lipton Vegetable Soup and Dip Mix. I would have used their chicken soup mix but I’m trying to use up pantry items so my “cooking” between now and when I move will be---shall we say---more creative than usual. I had a third of a bag of Amish extra wide country noodles to use up so they got tossed in the pot as well. Ya, I admit it, I cheat like crazy when I “cook.” And while my soup looked and tasted really good, I’d never serve it to anyone or drop off a container to someone who is sick. I’d never trust that I got every little bone strained out and if someone is going to die from getting a bone stuck in their throat it’s going to be me. I eat my chicken soup very slowly, letting my tongue be the finally judge on whether or not I got every bone out before swallowing. With this batch I never did find the wish bone which makes me wonder if the universe was trying to tell me something. No more wishes for you, Old Lady! You’ve wished your life away.

My mom made a lot of soups---good soups---and she never used a recipe. I did the watch-and-learn exercise a couple of times trying to root out her secrets. But she never measured the spices or other ingredients she used and she always incorporated left-overs into soups so I never got a single recipe out of my once serious attempt to write down Mom’s recipes. And to this day there was one spice she used in just about everything soup and stew that I still can’t identify. It looked like baby spiders floating on the top and growing up that’s the only name I knew it by. "But Mom I've got spiders in my soup!" I once complained. "Just eat them,” she replied. “They're dead!" I’ve written about her ‘spider spice’ before so if this sounds familiar you’re not imagining it. I’m old and I’m starting to repeat myself.

Trying to learn how to cook from my mom was an impossible task---at least for me. My brother didn’t seem to have the same trouble as I did. He’s always been a better cook than me and he's has a lot more experience doing it than I’ve had. He started cooking in his teens, eager to learn, and I had to be brought to the stove kicking and screaming when I was that age. Mom would tell me I was never going to get a husband if I didn’t learn to cook. But it was her fault that I was in my twenties before I could even identify cuts of meat which was a problem back in the day when you had to tell a butcher what you wanted from the other side of the glass case. Growing up, when I’d ask my mom what she was cooking she’d say things like, “An old dead pig” or “road kill” or “an old dead cow.” To the best of my knowledge we never ate road kill but for some reason Mom thought it was funny to make me eat mystery meat. At my brother's house, however, if he told me he was cooking road kill I would 100% believe him.

Fast forward through the years I still can’t scratch cook and I really don’t care anymore. But I did go through ‘70s getting good at baking bread. Then again in this century I was doing artisan breads until I had to stop because of my husband’s diabetes. I’m looking forward to getting back into baking after I move. I’ll be the apartment from which delicious smelling breads will seep into the hallway every Sunday. I just hope I don’t acquire a neighbor who cooks pig’s feet and sauerkraut. My mom cooked that combo often in fall and, boy, did that stink up the house when my mom boiled the crap out of them. (And, no, we don’t have a drop of Polish blood in our ancestry.) Can you even buy pig’s feet in the supermarkets these days? That was about the only meat I could identify growing up. Those and chicken necks. 

Talk about tiny bones that can choke you I do wonder, now, why my mom bothered boiling batches of chicken necks. Maybe we were poorer than I thought we were? I do know Mom must have had a better way of straining the bones out of broths than I do because to be best of my recollection no one ever had a near death experience at our dinner table and I don’t recall her ever warning us to be on the lookout for bones. I found two in the bowl of soup I ate today. Just sayin' there are some tricks I wish I had learned back in the days when I had to use a step stool to peer into the pot cooking on Mom's stove. ©

Talk about Awkward!

My doorbell rang this week which rarely happened before the pandemic and never since our state’s lock down started in March. I didn’t want to answer the door because it was nearly noon and I hadn’t gotten dressed yet. But I knew from the way Levi was acting as he peered out the window alongside the door that whoever was on the other side of the glass was someone the dog knew and liked. That narrowed the field of likely visitors down to a few neighbors and a half-dozen others who wouldn’t show up without calling first. Wearing my nightgown and long bathrobe I deciding that it was better to be embarrassed by my sloth-like ways than to have a neighbor call the police for a wellness check. On a wellness check, the police will walk around your house, looking in the windows and hoping not to find the stench of death in the air. Wellness checks can also happen if have worried, out-of-town relatives or you’re a senior citizen who hasn’t collected your mail from the box after x-number of days and the carrier reports it which is the only reason I have for going to the mailbox these days when it’s mostly filled with political junk mail and letters from car dealers claiming they have people desperate to buy my 2015 Chevy Trax. Do they really think we're that stupid?

At my door was an elderly man who lives around the corner and down the block. I don’t know his name but Levi knows him as the guy who sits in front of his garage door in the late afternoon asking if your dog can have a milk bone. I made a lame excuse for my appearance---just stepping into the shower for an afternoon appointment---and he asked me if I was interested in commodities which I thought was a strange question. “Not really,” I answer, “I was just at the bank checking on my investments and I’m good.”

“No, no, not that kind of commodities, he said, “I mean food baskets. We’re having an event up at the church on the corner tomorrow.” Still confused, I replied, “Oh, you’re looking for donations. I can do that.” “No, no!” This conversation was getting weirder by the minute. “My wife and I were thinking that you’re living all alone and maybe you might need some assistance and it’s free to anyone one in need. We put up boxes of produce and other things to pass out, no questions asked.” I thanked him for thinking about me but told him that I have a good income and the kindness would be better served if it went to someone less fortune than me. I don't think he believed me and it took a long time to get him off my porch. After he left I thought, Jeez, I really do need to update my wardrobe! I must have that bag lady look down pat. 

Change of topic: I don’t cook from scratch very often but Saturday I had the itch to make chili and raspberry scones. Chili, beef roasts, medium rare steaks, artisan bread, bread pudding and scones are my go-to things to make when I want to play Susie Homemaker and I can’t remember the last time I screwed up making any of these things…until Saturday. Worse pot of chili I’ve ever made in my life! How do you screw up making chili? you ask. By not checking the pantry before starting. I didn’t have red kidney beans so I used garbanzo beans. And I didn’t have a green pepper but the mixture looked so bland I decided to add a small can of corn for color.

I ate a bowl and froze the rest because the guilt of throwing out food is not an option in my world. If anyone has a suggestion for something else I can add to improve the favor profile of that batch of chili, I’m all ears. Maybe sour cream? Pasta? A can of the red beans? I’ve never been good at saving near-disasters in the kitchen other than to eat them up thus making the evidence disappear. I’ll tell you this, though, my Bucket List goal of making a white chili recipe that features garbanzo beans is crossed off. No way, Jose will that happen now. I bought that can of white beans back when I was planning to make hummus to expand my palate to include more plant-based snacks. But after trying a ready-made hummus I lost all interesting in wasting calories on something that tasted like cardboard…not that I’ve ever eaten cardboard but I've got a good imagination. Give me a spinach dip and I’ll eat it until the whites of my eyes turn green.

Speaking of plant-based treats makes me lust after the peaches, watermelon and blueberries my neighbor said would be in those commodities boxes. I buy a box of mixed fruit with every trip to the store and watermelon in season but the pandemic has me going to the store less often so sometimes I’m without fresh fruit in the house. And what’s even sadder is the fact that I haven’t been to the farmers market all summer. With our Pandemic Rules of Engagement in effect, it just doesn’t sound like a fun thing to do on a Saturday morning anymore. So I’ll keep my fond memories of the farmers market, thank you very much. Memories of no lines to get in and no pressure to get your stuff and go. Of leisurely molesting the melons and tomatoes and sampling the homemade breads and jams, of buying cookies to support a cause, of smelling caramel corn cooking and peanuts roasting and going home with homemade dog biscuits and flowers, blended butters and goat cheese along with farm fresh veggies and fruits. Those were the good old days of 2019 and before. I hope I live long enough to see them again. ©