I’m just about the worst when it comes to going home and subjecting Mom and Dad to my constantly mutating culinary proclivities.  I eat some weird food, and the greatest irony of it all is that most of the stuff I ate as a kid now is now interpreted as weird. Or at least not palatable to my 39 year old brain. I’m largely vegetarian, and if I’m at home in my own place then I opt for full-on vegan cuisine– both because I think it’s a better choice and also because I’m lazy.

 

 

Don’t get me wrong, my mom did a great job of keeping the five of us mongrels fed while she was at home or at work– I just don’t think that come middle age many people eat the same things that we once did as children. Unless we’re talking about ice cream. I could eat that for breakfast, lunch, or dinner at any age if it weren’t for the fact that I’m 100% petrified of diabetes.  And also not fitting properly into an economy seat on a long-haul flight.

On my recent trip back home to Mashpee, I spent some time in my mother’s beautifully remodeled kitchen. She had updated the space to reflect the world’s current interpretation of aesthetic utility–but at the same time, she did a great job of maintaining a bit of a time capsule.

As me, my sister Molly and her daughter Moxie huddled around the kitchen island, Mom pulled out some old cookbooks that quickly captivated our attention. Her family hails from Maine, and as such she had a number of collections from her mother and grandmother that frequently referenced ‘Down East Cooking’. Here’s a small sampling of what we found on this impromptu archaeological dig:

I think that in every American kitchen you will find a flattened bag of Nestle Tollhouse Morsels. For those of you who are not read in to this American tradition, the bag is key because on the reverse you will find the cornerstone recipe for American chocolate chip cookies.

The first thing that the four of us women found hilarious was a chart giving advice on how much one should weigh. As it turns out, mass produced efforts to make people feel bad about themselves started a long, long, long time ago. I don’t know where my New England foresisters procured this particular chart, but I guarantee that it was on a page adjoining Lettie’s Lemon Sponge cake.

As we leafed through the delicate pages and crumbling adhesive textures, the recipes were more often than not unremarkable. I have no desire to bake a coffee jelly cake any time soon. It was the wording however–and even the advertisements found on the edges of the column– that we found most entertaining.

Marketing is a fascinating thing. It was easy to snicker at what passed for “acceptable” advertisements for female-targeted products– but at the same time, I couldn’t help but think that we haven’t really gone anywhere in terms of truth in advertising. Just last week I was in the hairdresser and picked up a magazine and immediately felt that I wasn’t living my life with a sufficient amount of lacquer coating my body. Advertising is the worst.

We’re still selling the same products that make us look just as silly as we did when we first rolled out of bed in the morning. Looking at these products. I thought about the crap that I myself have purchased over the years and didn’t feel super evolved. What’s worse, as soon as my brain finished pondering that thought, I thought about how I needed to head to Mashpee Commons after Mom’s house to replace my Sodastream cartridge at the local overpriced cooking store.

As a kid we had an Irish Setter that, if we’re being honest, my dad once kind of stole. His name was Danny Boy, and he was a great dog.  This has nothing to do with the advertisement shown here, except to say that this clipping reminded me of “DB”.  Also, I have no doubt that our particular pet got plenty of this magical dog food that became instantly gourmet with the addition of gravy. I’m pretty sure that before this ad came out, gravy was called water.

What’s great about coming home to the old kitchen is that Mum, whether she realizes it or not, has managed to maintain a blend of old or new.  We kids can still reach into the cupboard, pull out the dark blue plastic Tupperware tumbler and say, “I’m not drinking out of the Bug Cup!”  The Bug Cup was the unfortunate vessel that was, at some stage, used as an ice cream dish and left behind the couch for so long that once it was found, was coated in bugs. I never consumed a thing from that cup again. I still won’t.

 

It was good to be home, although my time in the kitchen was far too short. I had stuff that I needed to do (see previous comment on my commercial obligations in town).  My sister Molly stayed home and together with Mom and The Mox, the lot of them made sugar cookies in the fabulous new kitchen. I have no idea if they used one of Mom’s old cookbooks to make them, but I have no doubt that whatever the method, they came out pretty fantastic.

I’m not going to be home this year for Christmas, and a big part of me is sad because Christmas in the old Mashpee house is always something extraordinary. Still, no matter what I create in my own kitchen, there will always be a part of my that channels my mother’s willingness to be creative and attempt something different.  I look forward to the next time I can come home and we can compare recipes or other modern innovations that seem to help our lives be more simple.  I have no doubt that come a few more decades, all of it will be undeniably entertaining.