Deelish

I think that most families that get along have some sort of string that links them all together. It might be intergenerational love of a sports team like the Chicago Cubs. For my family, the common thread is food.

I think the centrality of meal time started with my grandmother on my mom’s side, who never met someone that she did not try to ply with a roast beef sandwich. No matter what time a visitor arrived at her house, the first thing she would ask was “Aren’t you hungry?” She probably decided that my dad was a suitable mate for her daughter when they were in high school, and he ate one of her cheesecakes for dessert. Meaning that my dad sat at his girlfriend’s kitchen table and ate an entire 12-14” cheesecake by himself in one sitting while her mother looked on. Most parents would be horrified by such a display. My grandmother was smitten.

Petroleum is the lubricant that keeps the world’s economy moving. There is no doubt that butter played a similar role in my grandmother’s kitchen. She buttered deli sandwiches. She made a coffee cake called blueberry buckle that probably had 2-3 sticks of butter in the main ingredients, and ceremony dictated that you include an additional tablespoon of butter on each slice of blueberry buckle that you consumed. My god, how delicious. My grandmother was a smoker for most of her life, and I suspect she soaked her cigarette filters in butter. The broccoli casserole that she made for Thanksgiving every year basically consisted of butter and breadcrumbs with a few broccoli florets sprinkled on the top. You know, for color. Unsurprisingly, it disappeared from the table and into our stomachs very quickly.

My mom clearly had a solid culinary foundation when she started her own family. Keep in mind that she married a cretin who distinguished himself among her suitors by consuming 4,000 calories of sugar and lard in one sitting without entering a diabetic coma. My mom tinkered with her craft over the years, and by the time I got to high school, she was producing meals with more kilocalories than weapons-grade plutonium. Of course, this is precisely what was needed for a growing boy like myself. A lot of moms make ham and potatoes for dinner, but only a select few think to put those ham and potatoes in a casserole dish, drown them in a quart of heavy whipping cream, and cover them in cheddar cheese. Another signature dish was called four cheese pasta. It contained all the primary food groups—sausage, heavy starch, whipping cream, and yes, four different cheeses whose identities are unimportant because there are four of them. It was one of the finest flavor symphonies that Germantown, TN has ever seen.

My mom’s cooking has had a profound effect on some of my friends. In middle school, one of my friends like her tortellini covered in bacon and gorgonzola cheese so much that he wrote down the recipe and strong-armed his mom into adding it to their meal rotation. When was the last time you saw a fourteen year old writing down a recipe that did not come from the Anarchist’s Cookbook? The gateway drug for one of my college roommates was my mom’s barbecue baked beans, which will cleanse your palette and your colon with equal effectiveness. Soon he was emailing her for recipes like a dope fiend looking for a taste.

I was too lazy to make a proper lunch in high school, and these meals were more delicious than cold cuts and potato chips, so I would usually bring the leftovers with me to school the next day. It is no wonder that my after-lunch Algebra II teacher called my parents because I was sleeping class. It is difficult to stay awake when your blood-butter level is hovering around .50.

A good coach adapts his system to his players, and my mom has done the same over the years. She made those sumo dishes because I was too immature to eat fruit and vegetables. When I finally realized that healthy food is delicious (my sister made this realization much earlier), she applied her genius to salads instead of starches. I think that this development has been disappointing to KC, who would eat fried chicken and white rice every night if left to his own devices. He often lobbies for the high-octane meals of yesteryear. “How about that pasta with the four cheeses that you used to make?” Of course, he is not taken seriously.