Comments on: For Roz Nelson, Mom in the Kitchen was a Recipe for Disaster

By: Carol Enos

Carol Enos — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:09:48 +0000

I like this recounting even better the second time around. I do hope you’re still writing. You are too good to stop. Carol

By: Savvaio

Savvaio — Sun, 09 May 2010 12:09:50 +0000

This article is great. I would like to be able to write my own life memories like you do. But i suppose this is a gift, not everyone can do this stuff. I enjoy reading other peoples life memories, especially if they are talented and know how to write to keep the reader interest. Thanks again for sharing.

By: Joanna

Joanna — Sat, 08 May 2010 16:13:53 +0000

Roz, you have my sympathies. My mother was also a horrible cook. I didn’t know until I was grown and on my own that steak wasn’t supposed to be gray and rubbery. Or that real spaghetti didn’t come in cans and the “sauce” it came in wasn’t supposed to be pink and watery because she’d added a can of water to make it “go farther”. To this day I can’t eat cauliflower in any form because she’d cook it for THREE HOURS, and the smell would linger for days. Several decades later, I’m finally able to eat baked chicken, which she made for Sunday dinner every week, 52 weeks of the year without fail. Instead of plump chickens, she’d buy the cheapest, scrawniest (and probably oldest) in the butcher case, then bake it uncovered. The result being barely enough meat for one person, let alone a family of four. Saltine crackers in milk was MY alternative meal most days. Chocolate wafers would’ve been pure heaven!

She did make one or two things that we all looked forward to. One was banana nut bread, supposedly from her own mother’s recipe, but even Grandma could never make bnb as moist and tasty as Mother’s. Nor could anyone else, including myself , even tho I watched her make it dozens of times!

By: Annie Payne

Annie Payne — Sat, 08 May 2010 10:28:01 +0000

Hello Roz,
I live in Perth, Western Australia and have never experienced Jewish cooking and have always heard that the Jewish panacea for everything was chicken soup, often with Matzo balls.
After hearing your description, I’m not so sure that it would beat our Australian panacea – a strong cup of tea, a Bex (a now banned cheap powder containing aspirin and phenacatin, which was highly addictive and led to complete renal failure around the 60′s age group) and a quick ‘lie down’!! This was used for headaches, backaches, and ‘women’s aches & pains’, tonsillitis, flu or just a bad cold.
Only women used this ‘cure all’ and it was very common practice when I was a child in the ’50′s and ’60′s. Often at the same time as the lie down on the bed, a pan containing sliced onions and a chunk of butter was left barely simmering on the stove, filling the house with the aroma of tasty cooking. Mum would jump off the bed, dabbing at her forehead with a tea towel, as if she’d been ‘slaving over a hot stove all day!’

By: Linda Missouri

Linda Missouri — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:32:34 +0000

Dear Roz, I’m glad Dawn put your story, a Recipe for Disaster, on her blog. It’s a winner. I love the details, took me back to my Grandma’s Missouri farm. I love “before cholesterol was a household word and fatty was equated with juicy and delicious.” I like how you show a variety of your Mom’s qualities, both strengths and weaknesses, as in “If she was short on intellectual curiosity, she was long on common sense.” I can see the pseudo-Turkish patterns barely visible, brown bar of Fels Naptha soap, Mom’s pie crust could have anchored a battleship. Please submit this piece to the contest Dawn told us about, and CONGRATULATIONS on surviving the childhood dinner menus and writing about it. (Linda in Tuesday class.)