Food Fight

Every time I make a cake from scratch, I betray my mother. Every biscuit that does not come from a box of Bisquick is a personal affront to her. Not to mention non-Pillsbury piecrusts.

My mother was a modern lady, carefully schooled on shortcuts and prepackaged foods to feed her family beautifully while allowing herself maximum free time.

She could not believe that, I, her daughter, a working mother refused to learn from her. “I am just trying to save you time, honey,” she lamented as she asked why I didn’t use Betty Crocker’s Potatoes Au Gratin instead of peeling and slicing and cooking. “What you are really saying, Mama, is that the packaged stuff tastes as good as my homemade.”

“Let’s not go there,” she replied, in the hippest jargon imaginable.

Mama was trained by Betty Crocker and Peg Bracken. She loved chicken baked with canned cream of chicken soup, pancakes from Bisquick and especially boxed potatoes au gratin. The likes of Julia Child and Alice Waters could never loosen her alliances. She was loyal. I was not.

Her mistake was to let me cook. She was in a crummy situation when I was teenager. Her mother, the formidable German haus frau that she was, moved in with us. My father was Italian and Gramma never did trust foreigners. I don’t think I heard her address a single sentence directly to him.

His extreme patience stopped at the dinner table. No wonder Mama wanted to get dinner over with. Someone was going to be annoyed no matter what she made. An Italian dish and Daddy would be all smiles. Gramma would look like was being asked to eat Martian food.

Daddy would eat most America dishes as long as there was bread and Romano cheese on the table. But after Gramma moved in, he seemed to get a bit testy on the subject of American cooking.

Mama discovered that if she let me cook, her two critics would be on their best behavior. I wanted to try out things I had discovered in my new devotion to all things French. These required a great deal of cutting and chopping, but as long as there was no grousing at the table she was fine with any recipe I wanted to try.

It wasn’t until after I was married, working, and had a family who ate whatever I put in front of them that her incredulity showed itself.

At first she would suggest I could save time by using prepackaged cake mixes. I really couldn’t tell her that they had a chemical taste because she would have been insulted, so I took the easy way and said they were too expensive, which they were. I said they didn't save enough labor to make them worth the money.

The only difference in actual preparation as far as I could see was that the mixes left out baking powder, salt and shortening. You still had to dirty a mixing bowl and beat in eggs and milk. So what was so darn easy about that?

Mama said it was a matter of having confidence in knowing the dish would turn out well.

“Well,” I told her, “if someone didn't like the cake I baked for him or her, he or she could keep his or her mouth shut about it because there probably wouldn't be any more cakes baked from scratch or from mixes if people started complaining about it.”

“Ok, ok,” She said, “Don't get so steamed up about it, it was just a suggestion. I thought I was helping you and now you go off on me about it.”

As Mama aged she changed tactics. She gave up on cake mixes and switched to side dishes. She would bring up potatoes au gratin every time we saw each other as if it were for the first time.

“Did you ever hear of Betty Crocker’s Potatoes Au Gratin?” She would innocently inquire.

I would narrow my eyes and wonder just how much of this was age and how much was Mama.

”Yes,” I would answer, "Every time I talk to you.”

She would, in turn, narrow her eyes and remind me not to get sassy.

She suffered from Macular Degeneration and was told to eat more green vegetables and salads, a prescription she did mot much care for. I don't think she ever met a vegetable she really liked. Maybe canned white asparagus, but then that certainly didn't meet the green standard.

I prepared fresh vegetables and salads for her but she could only stomach them drowned in bottled dressings. She particularly disliked fancy salad makings like mesculin. Iceberg was as far as she would venture.

She called me a few years ago to say she was having a recurring nightmare in which she was lost in a field of arugula.

As she neared ninety we came to a truce. I would not serve her salad if she would quit bringing giant bottles of strange salad dressing with her to New York.

We visited each other frequently. She never failed to ask if I had tried Betty Crocker’s Potatoes Au Gratin yet.

Mama is gone now, but on her birthday I never fail to buy a package of those potatoes. I make a meatloaf with Lipton Onion Soup mix and for a vegetable I buy canned creamy corn.

I serve it with a nice arugula salad.