IMAGINE THAT

 

As we rode through the long olive hills of Kentucky a while back, I glimpsed a lady at the mailbox, comfortable in a yellow sleeveless blouse and jeans, putting in a handful of envelopes and swinging the small red flag to Attention.

So insignificant and so everyday was that small, familiar gesture, that I imagined her day there in that green spot, that immaculate yard with its baskets of petunias swinging on the porch, as she went back into the house, into the orderly rooms smelling of breakfast.   The Dawn bubbles in the empty sink are long-gone, along with their kin from the Purexed single wash-load, gurgled out and down into the faraway ditch in the field.  The almost-done clothes are now perfuming the hall with warm Downy air from the dryer.

She’d washed up the the few dishes “real quick,” except for the black skillet where she’d fried the bacon.   It’s sitting still on the stove, gleaming with bacon grease, for the supper cornbread she’ll bake later.   She’d written a few checks with her first cup of coffee, sitting there at the table in her duster and slides, and soon as she was showered and dressed, she’d run out to the mailbox to get all the bills in before the carrier comes by. 

She’s completed all her little morning rightenings---beds made, yesterday’s Bluegrass Press, well read before supper and folded in the can, and her long shelves of African Violets given their weekly feed of Miracle Gro beneath their blue-light awnings.   Her husband rode off early after his third cup of Folger’s, away to the Co-op to check out those new butterbeans that cook up like speckled ones, into a big pot of purple-brown pot liquor and soft, rich old-fashioned beans.   He’ll be back with the seeds, and probably a lot more, and put the hills in before suppertime, coming in smiling and muddy-handed, pants-legs wet up the shins, from giving the rows a good drenching with the hose. 

Marlee has done all the chores with the TV on louder than usual, for she’s been following along with that awful trial way out there in the West.   She’s followed it all the way through, missing in only a few places when she had to go out to help with the Missionary Luncheon, or the days she takes her Mama to the doctor, and she’d give anything to haul off and slap the smug smirk off that murdering hussy’s face.  Her and her "apostle" boyfriend and their unforgivable spree of mayhem---Marlee's just had about enough of the primping and smiling and lying, and she broke down completely yesterday when the family spoke about their lost brother and friend.  

Marlee is a good Christian woman, and does right by everybody, but she knows, sure as she knows her shoe size and all the grandchildren’s birthdays, that SOME FOLKS just Pure-D need killin’.

BUTTER SCOT PIE OR THEREABOUTS

I love my Cookbook shelves, "curated" in my fashion over the years from gifts, hand-me-downs, yard sales, Goodwill shelves, Half-Price--Books' lower tiers of immense coffee-table volumes with photos like portraits---those last ones retailing for the price of dinner at Ruth's Chris, and marked down to a shameful $3.00 remainder.  I treat them like novels, avidly turning pages, soaking up the scents and color, or marveling at some of the combinations or language.   They vary so widely as from "Now, skin your rabbit," to caramelization color wheels like from a paint store, and I love them all.   And, save for a few baking directions (the science of THAT gets into rocket science sometimes), I hardly ever use a recipe.    I've read over the ones that seem promising, and then I just improvise on the ingredients and taste combinations---my slipshod concoctions have turned out to be palatable, and some, including a crustless quiche that I improvised one Sunday morning in the Sixties, has probably spread over five counties, from word-of-taste request at a hundred weddings and parties over the years.    

 I still re-read sections of my Larousse just for the beauty of the words and images, and just bought a 1926 French edition of a generic Larousse, which I've been meaning to get to all Summer. Might be nice to see what it shows in the translation.

My favorite of all, I think, is the little spiral-bound cookbook by the ladies of our little church in Alabama. The small church volumes with the cardboard covers and little plastic spiral edge contain fourteen recipes for Green Bean Casserole, all printed so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. There are omissions, transpositions, and hilarious typos, in addition to some really outlandish combinations and seasonings.

But the little books contain the best of each cook's repertoire, gleaned from old McCall's and Farm Journals and from under the hairdryer. Mammaw's recipe for pound cake and Sawdust Salad, Mrs. Pund's uncooked fruitcake, the various alchemies which convert a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom into veloute, bechamel, whatever is required---those are the foundation of a kitchen and a cook's reputation. They represent the downhome, solid, family-around-the-table values which are disappearing like vapor from our homes and towns.

The little book I love most was in our little rental house in over on the Alabama/Georgia line, along with everything else which had belonged to the owner, an elderly woman who had gone into a nursing home. We slept in her beds, gathered the clean, fragrant sheets from her clothesline every week, ate from her cut-glass sherbet dishes, read her books, watched the children's almost-Easter-Egg delight at pulling radish after radish from the little garden rows of that one Spring garden we cultivated.   

When we were leaving, I knew her son was to auction off all the household goods, so I asked the realtor if I might buy the little cookbook with its margin-filled writing from its owner's hand. She gave it to me, and I've had it almost forty years now. I smile every time I look at the flyleaf---in her beautifully-formed letters taught to scholars in another time, in the shaky, still-elegant script of an eighty-year-old hand---thin, pale brown scribing, as slender as the trail of a hatpin dipped into a rusty inkwell, it reads:

BUTTER SCOT PIE. LOOK ON PAGE WHERE PIE ARE.

It's sitting there on my shelf, with its "Cream of Chicken Soup" right up there with all the gifts of Ripert and Bouchon and Escoffier's lingering aromas of demiglace and Poulard, and Anthony's timeless way with the Kitchen Language---that scuffy small brown book is a tiny parvenu whose provenance befits royalty to me.  

And snugged in-between in the pages of one of my Mother's "Taste of Home" annuals are the cardsfrom her recipe drawer for Squash Pickles and her Karo Pecan Pie, both in the elegant left-handed back-slant of her 1940's Sheaffer (her Valedictorian prize at graduation).    

Anyone else just "read" them like novels, and just enjoy the having?   Y'all have any treasured and tender souvenirs in your Cookbook shelves?