Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls
My blog is loosely about my journey with food, but the story doesn’t begin there. It begins when I was a little girl cooking with my Sicilian grandmother. My earliest memories include Gloria Tripi up to her pretty dimpled elbows in flour, as she created her magic in the kitchen. Bread, cakes, cannoli, pasta, sauce, pork chops, homemade pizza, stuffed artichokes, and oh so much more. My childhood memories sing with the scents, flavors and textures of my grandmother’s food. She let me start “helping” in the kitchen when I was very small, probably two or three. I remember peering into bowls large enough to hold me and stirring whatever was inside. She held the spoon, and provided the real force, but I was so proud to contribute.
When I was six years old, I got a cookbook from the school book sale called “Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls.” I went home that very day and made cheesy pretzels, all by myself. My mother was a nurse who worked the night shift so she was sleeping, and my father was at work. I don’t know where anyone else was, but I remember being alone in the kitchen. I pushed a chair over to the stove so I could reach the controls for the oven and very carefully turned it on to 400 degrees. My mother came downstairs when I was done baking them, and I told her that it was ok, I knew what I was doing from Grandma. I never asked permission to cook or bake after that. I just pushed a chair over to the stove so I could reach, and did whatever I wanted to do.
This independence had its downside, too. I was soon roped into making food for the other kids whenever they were hungry. I only have one brother and one sister, but our house was full of other people’s children, including four kids who lived with us for varying lengths of time through the years. My brother always had crowds of boys in our house, playing Atari and nagging me to cook them hamburgers and fries. I get this need to feed people from my Grandmother, and also from my father. My father is a retired chef. He was a steelworker at Bethlehem Steel, until they shut down and laid everyone off. He had worked there from the time he was eighteen, and they laid him off three years before he would have retired with a full pension. Instead, they sent him to school. He chose food service management at Villa Maria College. He interned at several restaurants in Buffalo, but he turned down jobs in all of them to work in the kitchen at Our Lady of Victory Hospital. He wanted the regular hours that working in a hospital would give him. It let him be home with us at night, and a part of our lives while we grew up, something that would not have been possible with the long late hours of busy restaurants. My father is a creative, intuitive cook who loves to entertain, and loves to watch people eat his creations. I get that from him.
I take traits from both of them, my grandma and my father, and make something new. I am still independent. I still like to do things myself, my own way. I love to feed people, and I love cooking for crowds. I have stepped away from my grandmother’s sugar and fat laden recipes, though, in search of something healthier and fresher. I want to be able to make food that accommodates my food allergies, and still pleases everyone else who sits down at my table. I hope that at least some of the time I succeed.
