Some things our mothers teach us are concrete: How to drive a car, read a W-2 form or hem a pair of pants. Other life lessons sneak up on us.
My mother taught me to cook almost by osmosis. It was something that happened every day at our house, and I moved so gradually from watching to doing, I can’t remember the moment when I thought, “Okay, now I can cook.”
I do, however, have vivid memories of early mishaps (a tablespoon of salt, not a teaspoon, in a batch of cookies) and triumphs (lifting golden-battered chicken from hot oil).
Self-sufficiency was highly prized in our house. As the youngest of eight, I realize now that each person had to pull his or her own weight to keep the whole thing on track.
As we matured, we assumed more responsibility, and that’s how my mother’s Every Man For Himself Friday dinners were born. My mother had long before created a weekly menu and assigned a night to one of us girls. (Girls cooked, boys mowed the grass.) The menu would change from time to time, but having a plan made it easier for her to stay within her budget for our once-a-week grocery shopping trips that resulted in three overflowing carts.
When I was around 12, she added EMFH Fridays to the schedule. It worked so well that she wrote a little piece about it that was published in “Women’s Day” magazine in November 1976.
My mother died in August at 97. As I joined my siblings clearing things from our family home, I came across the magazine tucked inside a filing cabinet near a folder of old grocery lists. She wrote about how the DIY dinner idea was received: “At first the children and my husband were startled, and felt a little abandoned and raw at the prospect of getting it all together. Gradually, after some spilled soup, a few eggs tumbling off the counter, several tough pizzas, they all began to take hold and develop a pattern of operation.”
Why Fridays? Because after a week of teaching public school and, as she put it, “homemaking,” she was tired.
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“Now it is not uncommon for my man to begin an evening with, ‘How do you feel about sharing a Spanish omelet?’” she wrote.
That may not seem like a big deal, but as a society, we were moving from the age of “women’s work” and “men’s work,” so it was a seismic shift in wife-husband relations. For perspective, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which went into effect in 1975 and prohibited discrimination in lending based on sex or marital status, meant my mother could finally get her own credit card.
As I recall, my mother’s only kitchen rules on EMFH Fridays were that we had to use what we had on hand, and that we cleaned up after ourselves.
At my parents’ home, we had two refrigerators and a chest freezer that we filled once a week. We rarely ate fresh vegetables. Most were canned or frozen. Canned meats and fish were a big part of our diet, too. One of the old grocery lists I found noted the usual six loaves of bread, six dozen eggs, three gallons of milk — and “6 codfish flakes.”
That notation about cod jumped out at me, perhaps because I made so many of those fried fish cakes. We used cans of flaked cod, which I no longer see available in grocery stores. We made mashed potatoes from a box, then mixed the canned fish with the potatoes, a whisked egg, dried parsley and salt and pepper. We fried the cod cakes in a cast-iron skillet in vegetable oil until brown and crispy on the outside. We would open a few cans of green beans, and dinner was on the table fast and cheap.
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For the recipe I’m sharing here, I modernized the dish using fresh poached cod, making mashed potatoes from a couple of russets and mincing fresh parsley. On the side? Fresh green beans. It still is a thrifty meal. As I reflected on this recipe, which was typical of the kind my mother would make as she pinched pennies to feed us all, I realized that along with teaching me to cook, she snuck in a lesson on how to make-do, to “live within my means,” as she used to put it.
So, when as I was squeaking by on a cub reporter’s salary, I naturally reached for dried black-eye peas, cans of tuna and chicken — if, of course, that poultry was on sale.
For her submission to “Woman’s Day,” my mother earned $25. I wish I knew how she spent that money. I like to think she bought something for herself, but it is more likely she spent it on us.
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