The thing about me and my mom is that even though our mother-daughter issues hum below the surface of our cooking lives, they always rise up through the food channels. No matter how sore the conflict, when the dust settles we will always return to take our places on either side of the stove to produce heroic quantities of food—whether laughing or fighting or both. We are mother and daughter, but, above all, we are two cooks in a kitchen.
That summer after the trip to France, we reunited to make the food for my brother Bob’s firstborn’s baptismal party. How we could return from an eating tour like that (a gastronaut’s blowout by anyone’s standards), and come to stand in my mother’s apartment kitchen in St. Paul, stirring a vat of diced chicken and canned water chestnuts glued together with murky, industrial, carrageenan-rich canned “soup,” the essential fixative in the Midwestern hotdish, is a total puzzler. And yet, when faced with the prospect of feeding fifty people a hot lunch, my mom reached into her recipe box, and into her past, and pulled out a card for Macy’s Hot Chicken Salad—known to all Minnesotans as chicken hotdish. Now, before it has dawned on her how bleak it sounds compared to what we’ve just lovingly gorged ourselves on in Grandpa Dion’s old country, we are already too far into it to turn back.
So here we are. I have pinned my knee into a yellow-flowered vinyl chair for leverage, because dragging a spoon through this quantity of chicken-chunk mixture is as hard as rowing a boat into the wind. I am amazed by the sounds coming out of it. Pleef!, it gasses, making the very same sound your sweaty lower back does when it disengages from a hot vinyl seatback. Like an elementary-school kid, I burst out laughing and say, “What did this thing eat?”
“It’s got indigestion!” she says.
My mom picks off a floater of chicken and lobs it into her mouth for a taste, and I think back to the way Michel Bras’s mother plucked at her potato puree to check its spring: Both of them make the same semi-agreeable “eh” kind of face.
But now my mom is crushing bags of crispy kettle chips and then raking them over the surface of the hotdish so that they will brown into an even gold crown across the top, and I have to admit, it is impossible not to pinch off a chip, its bottom soaked in a salty, sticky, implausibly delicious cream. What we are making is one gigantic, addictive dip.
The glorious junkiness of this thing does not elude me. For once, it is wonderfully comic. Mom and I are both hooting, noses up, then pitching forward, flimsy stems in a rollicking wind. Her famous hoot has been reduced to a whistling high C.
“Heeee!” she wheezes, hardly audible. “It’s no French chicken fricassee!”
She pulls down the low oven door and squats, reaching into the oven to take it out, and then stops and bends over in ripples of laughter and defeat.
The giant hotdish stands before us, the puddles of fat from the melted cheese twinkling with the reflection from the fluorescent lights. It has turned out perfectly, and we and all of our relatives will demolish it with relish. It turns out that the full poundage of our canned-soup chicken-and-cheese Midwestern heritage, the rich, dense weight of it, is too much for either of us to bear alone. I look for the other pot holder.
It’ll take the two of us to pull this sucker out of the oven.
4
MEAT VERSUS VEGETABLES
You can generally tell how a woman was raised by the way she wipes down a countertop.
Some mothers of my generation shooed their daughters out of the kitchen in the hopes that they’d never have to toil in it and gave them little direct instruction. Others, like my mom, insisted that their daughters could “do anything” they wanted to do, but then continued to school them in the housewifely arts anyway.
When I was nine years old, my mom taught me how to wipe the countertop in the following very specific way: You soak the washcloth in steaming-hot water, wring it out hard with both hands so that it no longer drips, then stretch the cloth flat on the countertop and lay your hand on it, middle finger pointing toward a corner, that corner flipped back up over your fingers like a toboggan. This way, when you wipe (and if you haven’t seen this demonstrated, let me tell you, it’s a goddamned miracle), the corner of the cloth stays up over your hand. “With a flat expanse of cloth, you can pick up crumbs,” my mom stressed, her body leaning into the surface, running her cloth-covered nail tip into the crevice between the stove and the countertop. Her face, hanging above the shiny surface, was smooth and contented. Not joyous, not sad, but what you might call Placid Wiping Face. Unconsciously I absorbed the look of spine-tingling satisfaction she gave the gleaming countertop and knew it contained something even greater: hope for tomorrow and its many projects. If you’re despondent about the future, you don’t wipe like that. You let the crumbs lie.
The other way to wipe a countertop is to distractedly grab the wet cloth in a bunch, the sloopy ends dripping water, and run it along the surface, pretending you don’t see the crumbs that remain—which is how Aaron does it, and how many people do it, and which still generally gets the job done.
But inside my mom lived many generations of female ancestors who elevated mundane household maintenance into a craft. Women who wiped their countertops with rags so hot they steamed, who bleached their cutting boards monthly; women who thought that walking away from a crusty dish to let it soak would be like inviting the demon himself into her kitchen. From my barstool perch on the other side of the counter, I watched my mom wipe the mouths of glass condiment bottles, digging the crud out of the rim threads before putting the lids back on. I watched her transfer diminishing leftovers into smaller containers before putting them back into the fridge. For jobs too fine for a washcloth, she grabbed the old graying toothbrush from the bucket beneath the sink and frantically brushed the tight corners. The level of detail to which my mom and her mom, Grandma Dion, cleaned their kitchens was borderline obsessive-compulsive, and yet it pretty much sums up the entirety of professional cooking. Via the simple act of wiping, they passed on to me about 85 percent of what I’d need later on to survive my years of cooking in Manhattan kitchens—which is to say, the percentage of line cooking that depends on your ability to keep shit clean.
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After my summer trip to France, I went back to Danube for a second helping—five or so nonillustrious months on the entremet station—before quitting once again. Out of fear that I was becoming addicted to the Bouley brand of dysfunction, I felt I needed to move on to another kitchen to see what else was out there. My next cooking job was at Daniel Boulud’s db bistro moderne (all lowercase), where everyone, whether subjected to housewife training or not, knew how to properly wipe down a countertop. Unlike at Danube, where I was often the sole woman, this place was flush with female cooks—and from what I could tell, they were all angry.