My mother was one of those women who frequently had chaos in her life but order in her kitchen.
Mondays were either meatballs and spaghetti or spaghetti with meat sauce; Tuesdays were calves liver with bacon and onions; Wednesdays were fried or baked pork chops – which I anticipated with great enthusiasm. Thursday tended to be stuffed pepper day. Friday was always fish.
Although my mother was a good cook, she wasn’t particularly adventurous. We had certain days of the week when we ate certain meals. But those baked pork chops!
I’ve never had them anywhere else, and I’ve never seen a recipe for them. When my daughter, a chef, was in charge of her first kitchen, she put them on her menu and sold out every time.
Although I didn’t particularly care for green bell peppers, they worked with this layered dish of pork chop, onion and tomato. We ate mom’s baked pork chops with a wedge of iceberg lettuce and blue cheese dressing.
To this day, if there are two dishes I love in the world more than seafood gumbo, it’s Melba Sweets’ baked pork chops and Nat Sweets’ chili.
We always ate dinner together, except on Saturday, when mother put on a pot of beans and we fended for ourselves.
Sunday was chicken day: fried, baked, roasted or stewed with dumplings.
Summer in St. Louis was what I imagined life to be like on the Sahara, but with humidity. Daddy used to say, “It’s hot enough to bake Cootie Brown.” Cootie Brown was a mystery man, but in eavesdropping I once heard Daddy tell Mother that someone who misbehaved at a party had been “as drunk as Cootie Brown.” I figured ol’ Cootie must be quite a character.
When peaches came into season, we took family outings to Eckert’s farms in Illinois. Mother chose them one by one. We’d bring basketsful home, peel and slice them, then make peach ice cream to go with Mother’s peach cobbler. We all took turns cranking the old-fashioned bucket.
I remembered those years as I struggled to raise my daughter, Hannah. Although I was a single mother, I was determined she and I would pick fruit together, but I rarely had time.
In the spring of 1980 I became an unemployed single mother. The mayor who appointed me to a job failed to get re-elected that April. His replacement replaced me.
If there is such a thing as a good time to be unemployed, it’s spring. I reported immediately to the unemployment office and signed on for food stamps. At last: my tax dollars at work, for me. Didn’t even think about looking for a job until early August.
My four months on unemployment were the best 120 days ever. Eight year-old Hannah and I found all sorts of free things to do. For starters, we became vegetarians.
Instead of buying bread, we bought flour and oil and milk and baked our own. Onion bread, cheese bread, whole wheat bread and, yes, white bread.
We went to the farmers market late on Saturdays, when they were practically giving away produce. We already had memberships in the botanical garden, the art museum and the zoo, so we went to each in rotation throughout the summer.
We made egg salad and tuna salad sandwiches on our homemade bread and, to save gasoline, rode bicycles to Forest Park – St. Louis’ answer to Central Park – for picnics. Sometimes we went to the levee and watched tugboats navigate the Mississippi.
I dug up part of my parents’ back yard and grew a garden. Hannah got to choose what we planted. We pulled weeds and watered rows. When the eggplant, bell peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes and onions were ready, she picked them and we made ratatouille.
When our tomatoes threatened to consume the state of Missouri, we canned them and made our own spaghetti sauce.
Early morning trips to the botanical garden earned us fresh-picked bananas for breakfast.
We went to Eckert’s, where my family had bought peaches, and we picked strawberries in the spring. We ate as much as we picked. We made strawberry jam and gave it for birthday, get-well and wedding gifts.
In summer, we grew okra and pickled it.
As autumn approached, we picked apples and made chutney.
When the food stamps didn’t stretch far enough, I posted a note in the lobby of our apartment building and offered to cook for neighbors, cash on the barrelhead.
A couple from Louisiana hired me to make gumbo for a dinner party. Hannah helped set the table, arrange flowers and peel shrimp. When we were done, we couldn’t wait to get back to our apartment, where we opened the envelope with our pay in it. We had apparently not charged enough, because instead of the $100 we had agreed on, the envelope contained $150.
We promptly bought groceries we couldn’t otherwise have afforded – capers, Gouda, fresh mushrooms and ingredients to make gumbo for ourselves. The closest store was an upscale place not generally frequented by people on food stamps. It was also my mother’s preferred destination for buying meat and seafood.
On this particular Saturday afternoon she was in one line while I was preparing to check out in another. She was so worried that I would whip out those little multicolored coupons and exchange them for food that she actually began shaking her head, as if to say “Please don’t do that while I’m here.” I smiled back and whipped out cash.
She breathed a visible sign of relief and smiled again, a little guiltily, I thought.
May, June and July came and went. The botanical garden’s banana season ended. Signs appeared announcing that the zoo train would soon run on an abbreviated schedule. The children’s classes at the art museum scaled back to weekends.
The days dwindled down to a precious few.
Time to look for a job.
One evening, while riding our bicycles from Baskin-Robbins, I bumped into a friend who told me about a job possibility. Seems there was a new vice president for public relations at (what was then) Bell Laboratories. She wanted ex-reporters to translate tech talk into English.
I wrote, detailing my intimate familiarity with telecommunications technology (i.e., I’ve used a telephone all my life) and my enthusiastic willingness to apply wit, charm and technological expertise on behalf her august institution.
They actually hired me.
On the eastbound flight to New Jersey, we took one last look at the city and the farmland that sustained us through what had been a pretty lean time. But at least Hannah, then 9, learned that food came from the earth, not in vacuum-sealed plastic bags and Styrofoam.
She became a dancer in New York before retiring a decade later to become a chef. I left corporate America to return to journalism and became a food writer.
Although she can cook concentric circles around me now, we still consult with each other. Her restaurant menu has gone way beyond chili and baked pork chops, but she still makes them for herself. Food, which bound my family together in so many ways, binds my daughter and me.
We’ve both learned that you can be as broke as Cootie Brown and exist happily on a wealth of shared kitchen experiences.
Staff writer Ellen Sweets can be reached at 303-820-1284 or esweets@denverpost.com.
