by Ruth M.
I was my parent’s last chance to have a son. After me there could be no more children. We lived on a dairy farm, and from as soon as I could walk well I dogged my father’s footsteps. I knew he would have preferred a son and I thought that if I wished hard enough I could be it. I tried to hide the fact that I sometimes played with the dolls. I was good at climbing trees, shinnying up ropes, and riding a horse bareback. And sometimes, when Daddy let me, I rode the rickety seat on the harrow in back of my horse Star as we weeded the long rows of corn. I did pretty well with a hammer making my own toys even though I would miss sometimes and hit my thumb. There were lots of orange crates around in those days and they made great pretend cars or airplanes. I had so much imagination that sometimes I scared myself pretending to be two tribes of Indians fighting each other. I roamed for hours at a time in the woods trying to stay out of hearing of Mother’s call – RUTHIE? (Her voice rose higher at the second syllable and had great carrying power.)
As busy as she was, she never gave up trying to teach me to cook and clean house. I was forced into it for a while every day. I dusted, swept down the stairs, made beds and ran lots of errands, a task I liked to do. But I was a reluctant learner when it came to keeping house. I was going to be a cowboy! Let my sister do it. She loved cooking and housekeeping.
One day when I was 11 or 12 years old my mother and father left, taking my sister with them. They said they wouldn’t be back until supper time. I was quite shocked when, as they were going out the door, Daddy told me to have supper ready when they got back. There were four of us in the family, and we always had three or four hired men as well. That was a lot of people to cook for who might suffer from my cooking.
Mommy had already made two apple pies, so dessert was taken care of. She told me to make whatever I wanted for the main entrée but she suggested beef stew might be a good idea. There were no family sized food freezers in those days, but we rented a commercial one whenever we butchered a young bull raised for that purpose. My father made trips now and then to bring back big hunks of meat.
When I opened our refrigerator – the kind with the coils on top – that is just what I found, a huge hunk of meat that took up the whole bottom shelf. I was supposed to make stew out of that? I wrestled it out onto the kitchen table, got a big butcher knife and started hacking. I didn’t know enough to cut off the amount of meat I would need and cut it up into neat pieces, I just hacked off what I thought would be bite sized pieces one by one until I figured I had enough. In spite of myself I had seen my mother cook enough to know I had to brown the meat first, so I got out our huge old iron skillet, put some lard in it and browned the meat. Then I went down into our musty dirt floored cellar and got carrots out the box of dirt where they were stored. I picked up some potatoes and onions from bushel baskets while I was down there, too. We had stew fairly often, and I knew what went into it. I put the meat and vegetables into a big kettle, put a lid on it, and turned the electric burner on high. (We had abandoned the old black iron stove when a chimney fire made us remodel)
When it boiled over I knew I had to turn down the heat. It would have turned out all right, but I didn’t know how long meat had to cook to be tender. I cooked it only as long as I did the vegetables and it turned out very tough. It took a lot of chewing, but everyone praised it. I suppose they were in hopes I would be inspired to learn to cook better. Mommy suggested I use her cookbook next time. I had not thought of that.
The summer of 1940, when I graduated from high school, I got a job as an upstairs maid at the summer home of a family at Lake Candlewood. There was a French Canadian cook already employed there. But not long after I hired on she and the lady of the house got into a ferocious argument, and after a lot of French swear words, the cook packed up and left. The lady of the house asked me if I could cook. I would make more as a cook than an upstairs maid, so, with my fingers crossed, I said I would cook if she would get me a cookbook. The kitchen was very small with hardly any counter space. When I had the cookbook open for frequent reference, and was using a mixing bowl on the counter too, I just piled the dirty pots and pans on the floor when I ran out of counter space. My cooking wasn’t bad, and the family seemed satisfied even when they had company from New York.
But one night the overgrown 14-year-old son of the family showed up in my bedroom and tried to have his way with me. At almost 18 years old I was a pretty well developed farm girl so I clobbered him the best I could, and yelled so that it woke his mother, and he was dragged out. After thinking about it a while, I had the idea that she would probably blame me rather than have her son disgraced. I knew I would never feel safe there again, so I quit and left the same day. But, I had proved to myself that I could cook if I just used a cookbook.
My trouble was that during my life as a wife and mother when I also had a government job for most of that period, I was so busy I never took time to read anything in the cookbook except the recipes. It wasn’t until I completely retired about 30 years later that I started to read what else cookbooks had to offer. What do you know! You can really learn to cook well, and understand how eggs work in a cake, and how to cook meat to keep it juicy. It gives food values and calories too. All my questions were answered in my cookbooks. My favorite has always been the American Woman’s Cookbook. If I had only paid attention years ago, I might have kept my husband alive longer. If I had paid more attention to a healthy diet for him rather than cook all that fried chicken and steak he craved he might not have died at 59 from clogged arteries. I’m not far wrong when I tell people he died from my cooking.
