When I was in second grade, my mother was deemed Mrs. Entenmanns. Whenever we had class parties and all the kids would bring homemade cookies or brownies, my mother would send me in with a box of Stop and Shop’s finest, and my teacher would say, “Mrs. Entenmanns was up all night baking again!”
For my birthday, my mother would take me to the grocery store and let me pick out what kind of cupcakes I wanted to bring in for the class. I always picked the ones with pink icing and sprinkles, because I figured if I wasn’t getting home baked, at least I could be unique and not have plain old chocolate and vanilla like everyone else.
The lack of home cooking in my house never really bothered me, but it caused me to become fascinated with the concept of home cooking in general, and particularly the concept of leftovers. Continuing on through elementary school, I was always incredibly jealous of the kids who brought last night’s meatloaf in for lunch. I recall offering to trade my bag of chips and my cookies for a piece of Jessica M.’s mom’s home-baked pound cake, which was always wrapped in tinfoil. Not in a plastic Ziploc baggie, but in tinfoil. As is obvious, the tinfoil fascinated me as well, since my lunch was always in baggies.
More than I was jealous of the meatloaf, I was downright resentful of the kids who brought thermoses of soup and spaghetti-o’s for lunch. Mind you, I didn’t like spaghetti-o’s, and wasn’t a particularly big fan of soup, but I thought it was the greatest thing that they had this hot, dinner-esque lunch in their lunchbox. Now don’t get me wrong, I did occasionally get leftovers in my lunchbox. Every Saint Patrick’s Day, my mother, who teaches second grade, would bring in green bagels and cream cheese for her class. Thus, I got leftover green bagels for a week or two. Sure, I got made fun of for bringing “moldy” bagels in for lunch, but hey, it was leftovers.
However, there was always the sacred once a month or so when my mother would break out the fryalator and make fried chicken cutlets. Home cooked, from scratch and everything. Then I would get cold fried chicken cutlet sandwiches in my lunchbox and feel like the luckiest kid in the gym/cafeteria. It was extremely detrimental to my well-being when the Italian market opened up down the street from my mom’s school. They sold pre-made fried chicken cutlets, which ousted the fryalator. I still got cold chicken cutlet sandwiches for lunch, but it just wasn’t the same.
For me, home cooked food wasn’t an everyday thing, but a treat, which I only got on special occasions when we would all go to my maternal grandmother’s house.
She was the master at cooking Jewish soul food. She made brisket, baked chicken, some kind of potatoes with breadcrumbs on them which my family called, “New Brunswick potatoes” (a name my mother’s cousin came up with, because my mother and her family used to live in New Brunswick), which I later adapted to, “North Brunswick potatoes,” (because we lived closer to North Brunswick than New Brunswick, and I kept forgetting it was New Brunswick), and my favorite, noodle kugel. Every holiday I ate like I was stocking up for hibernation.
To this day, I have no idea how Nana made those things, but I do know that they were amazing. In my later years of high school, she began to get sick and could no longer cook for and host the holidays, so we began to have the holidays at our house. We would order the majority of the food from a local catering service, but Nana would always make brisket and bring it along. It was her specialty, and my cousin refused to eat anything else. It’s a good thing the caterers weren’t attending our dinner, because throughout, all anyone could say was how Nana’s food was indescribably superior. When she passed away, we were left with catered food and an assortment of insatiable cravings. The food is certainly no comparison, but we have been making do as best we can.
Although I’ve come to accept the lack of home cooking in my own home, I have never lost the fascination with it in general. This past summer I went to a friend’s house for his birthday and his mother proceeded to stuff us silly with food. Every time I turned around there was a plate of fresh baked brownies on the table, a simmering pot on the stove and smoke wafting up from the barbeque. Every night I was there we ate a home cooked meal, which, to my further amazement, consisted of products from each food group, and was then followed by dessert (home cooked, of course). Since then I have been begging him to ask his mother to send a strawberry pie up to school. I fully intend on moving into their house this summer … or at the very least, stealing his mother.
Stacy Kasdin is a Collegian columnist.
