Cooking with Gustav

September 5, 2008

The sky was barely light. I had taken lately to waking up at dawn. This irritated me, especially on Labor Day when I had no obligations until noon.

I had gone to bed the night before wondering about my friend Hank.

I turned on The Weather Channel to check on the progress of Hurricane Gustav. The camera went back and forth from this man to that woman talking excitedly of an event that hadn't happened yet.

This was to be the mother of all storms. Even Governor Ray Nagin described it as “the storm of the century.” The wire service that reported his statement allowed Nagin might be exaggerating just a little bit.

The lack of sleep and the hypnotic whirl of the green spiral on the TV lulled me back into an early morning nap. When I came to, one of those weathermen was perched on a sidewalk in a Hail Mary pose, his left hand palm out against the stiff wind. He looked just like the yearbook photo of some high school quarterback, only instead of a football he held a microphone.

I had managed to snooze until 8 a.m. and was satisfied to get about my morning.

During the last year my ex-husband had taken to holding casual cookouts at his house for the people he considered his family. He was eternally without a relationship. I was eternally between them. Nevertheless, we made a charming couple, and it was nice for our daughter and her son that we played well together.

The last time we met I spontaneously made two pies that morning and included them in my contribution to the meal. Not knowing of my inspiration, my daughter had purchased a boatload of sweets at the grocery deli.

So this time I committed right out loud that I would bring dessert once again, along with my usual tray of deviled eggs and whatever bowl of fresh fruit there was in the fridge. This time of year it would be the last of the summer peaches.

Dessert was to be another blessed event bestowed on us by summer. My friend Ann had been generous with her annual haul of fresh blueberries. I had enough for a pie.

There is a story about Ann and blueberries that goes back to the early days of our friendship.

I had long since pacified my conscience regarding commercial pie crusts. I struggled with this briefly, as I reasoned that my first-ever homemade blueberry pie should have been wrought with a from-scratch crust, but I was now old enough to ignore such foolish grandiosity. I left the crusts to soften on the counter and went to check my email.

I heard the eggs splashing water onto the hot burner and remembered my business in the kitchen. I got to the stove as the timer went off, and moved the boiling eggs to the sink, draining the pot and covering them with cold running water as quickly as I could, cracking the hot shells as the pot filled.

I had been cooking since I was tall enough to reach the stove, standing on a chair. Maybe at that point I was just stirring or dropping dumplings into a pot of bubbling broth, but it looked like cooking and it was more than some people of any age ever learn to do. After nearly 50 years of cooking, I had earned my place in Western civilization as a good cook.

One of the secrets to good home cooking is patience. It was not a thing I was born with. It was something I had to learn after many failed meals, and more than a few successful ones. Another secret is timing. It just won't do to leave the eggs to sit in hot water. I must say I mastered timing pretty early in cooking. I wish I could say the same about other worldly pursuits.

As always, when cooking, I thought of my mother. It was the one place where I could acknowledge that she had helped me. At one time she had been a good cook as well. Years of family dysfunction had eroded her confidence in all efforts her own, and that included attempts at meal preparation for a crowd. Or maybe it was just that having cooked a good 20 years longer than I, she became bored with it. She took to cooking as a creative outlet. Where I grew brave enough to experiment with acrylics on a canvas, she experimented with things like Jell-O. I will never forget a family dinner at which she served a gray congealed salad with floating specks of something white in it, which I suspect was cottage cheese. It really was gray, not misty blue or pale sage green, but a perfect dove gray.

Mom told us what was in it. I don't remember what she said, but it sort of explained the result. My brother and I just looked at each other as she put a scoop of it on Dad's plate.

You have to understand that my Dad was a man who ate cold bean sandwiches during The Depression. He is the only person I have ever known who enjoys hospital food. So when Bill asked him, “How is it?” of course he replied, “Pretty good.” But I could not make myself try it. I watch too many CSI shows where they show beakers of stuff supposed to be the corpse's stomach contents. This gray Jell-O reminded me of those beakers.