When I finger through my mother's large crate of clipped and printed-from-online recipes, I feel a closeness to her that the churning waters of everyday life, the testy arguments, kept too murky to see. (As I mentioned recently here, my mother died suddenly after Christmas.)
What I discovered going through her files, was that my mother and I clipped the same recipes — the Venetian Carrot Cake from the New York Times in 2007, for example.
I'm positive neither she nor I ever made it, but I know, as a daughter knows her mother, that we both loved the Venetian part. I know we both heard the waters lapping along the canals, and both of us thought it fascinating that the Italians actually had an elegant translation of the heavy American health-food standard.
My mother and I both saved recipes just because they signaled an atmosphere, an ideal, a romance that, just by taking out the scissors and clipping the recipe, might someday become a possibility. There was always the chance that someday there would be a quiet afternoon with espresso poured and two wedges of that Venetian Carrot Cake served on glass plates, and someone there discussing our favorite Venetian piazzas.
I haven't made that cake, but, who knows, the recipe is still in my files.
For a woman who often called me in the morning to say, "What are you cooking? I am in such a rut in the kitchen," her recipe files are like a trip around the world and to another century: Cucumber Soup with Wasabi-Avocado Cream; Mint Chimichurri; Congee; Locro, an Argentinean stew with pork and butternut squash; Chicken Fricasee with Morels and Asparagus; Deviled Fried Chicken; Panna Cotta with Balsamic Strawberries.
I never saw her drink more than wine, and yet she'd saved three Mojito recipes, a recipe for a Sazerac — a whiskey, absinthe, and bitters cocktail — and even a Cider and Tequila Hot Toddy.
I can see my mother, as I can see myself, imagining just the right party - either a hot summer day, and that Mojito is so refreshing, or a porch and we're serving etouffe and feeling very 19th century New Orleans, and only a Sazerac, first mixed by Anoine Amedee Peychaud at the Sazerac Coffee House in New Orleans, will do.
The Cider and Tequila Hot Toddy, on the other hand — Mom, when were you going to serve that?
Both our files are heavy on Clafoutis and French Apple Cakes. Anything called a Summer Pudding she and I loved, and she'd saved at least four versions of the English dessert heavy on berries and short on crust.
Any cake made with cornmeal we both made; I found her recipe for Pineapple Upside Down Cornmeal Cake, and saw it coming out golden and glistening from her cast iron skillet.
There are clippings from the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart online, and piles of stained Epicurious print-outs. The ultimate tribute, a moment that sent a fresh bolt of love and melancholy through me, was when I turned a page and saw my own column printed out and tucked in her files between the tattered Epicurious pages.
My mother probably experimented with new recipes far more than a lot of people, but that was because taking scissors to newsprint, clipping a patch of cuisine, was both art and voyage for her. More than the meal itself, she relished — and taught me thus — the way food allows you to dream.
I'm going to end with a Valentine's Day recipe from my mother's files. As I am her daughter, I know that she printed this recipe from The New York Times in 2004 imagining a bouquet of pink tulips standing in a vase in her sun-filled February dining room, her granddaughters seated there, awed by chocolate shortcakes with the fluffy pink raspberry centers.
I will make these cakes this year, and many more of her recipes, so that a few of her visions will be reality.
Perhaps I'll even make the Venetian Carrot Cake.
Chocolate Raspberry Shortcake
For the shortcakes
Vegetable oil or nonstick for pan
12/3 cups flour
1/3 cup cocoa
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick diced chilled butter
1 large egg
1 cup sour cream
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 tablespoons honey
For the filling
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon confectioners' sugar
1 cup raspberries
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Oil bottom of each cup in a 12-cup muffin pan. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and sugar. Using a pastry blender or an electric mixer, or working by hand, cut in the butter until mixture resembles damp sand.
In a separate bowl, whisk together egg, sour cream, vanilla and honey. Add to flour mixture, and stir until thoroughly blended.
Put a scant 1/4-cup dough into each muffin cup. Do not use muffin papers. Bake until risen and firm on top, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from heat, and allow to cool. Then remove from pan, and cool completely. Place 6 shortcakes in an airtight freezer bag, and freeze for another use.
To prepare filling for 6 shortcakes, whip heavy cream with 2 teaspoons confectioners sugar until thick but still soft. Add 1/2-cup raspberries to cream, mashing them roughly with a fork.
Split each shortcake in half horizontally, and place a dollop of raspberry cream onto bottom half. Add a portion of whole raspberries, and put the top back on at an angle.
Sprinkle a dusting of the remaining 1 teaspoon confectioners' sugar over shortcakes, and serve.
• • •
Food for Thought runs weekly in the Times' Taste of the Times section and is written by Heather Atwood, an author and mother from Rockport. Questions and comments can be sent to Heather at heatheraa@aol.com. And follow her blog at www.heatheratwood.com.
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