Читать книгу Hungry for Happiness - James Villas - Страница 9

Crazy as it sounds, what’s gotten me through my weight ordeal more than anything else is cooking—for myself, for friends, and church events, and SPCA fund-raising picnics, and birthdays, and Lord knows what else. Okay, so I can’t actually eat like I did before the surgery without upchucking, and sometime my willpower’s really put to the test. But believe you me, nothing can keep me out of the kitchen, and now I can be pretty satisfied with just the thrill of tasting all the dishes. I guess you could call cooking a passion with me, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s also some kind of therapy. Always has been, I’d say.

And yeah, put out as I can be with Mama ’bout a lotta things, I gotta admit she gets all the credit for getting me interested in cooking when I was just knee-high to a grasshopper. Gladys never seemed to give a damn about it when we were kids, which I guess is why she and that family of hers nourish themselves today mainly on KFC and Whoppers and junk like that. But me, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Mama when she’d fix a mess of short ribs, or cut out perfect rounds of buttermilk biscuit dough with a juice glass, or spread a thick, real shiny caramel icing over her 1-2-3-4 cakes. And I can remember like it was yesterday (must have been about 4 years old at the time) when she first let me help her bake cookies, especially the same jelly treats I still make today and could eat by the dozen if I didn’t now have better control.

“Honey, start opening those jars on the counter,” she said while she creamed butter and sugar with her Sunbeam electric hand mixer in the same wide, chipped bowl she used to make biscuit dough. Strawberry, peach, and mint—the flavors never varied for Mama’s jelly treats, and just the idea of making these cookies with anything but jelly and jam she’d put up herself the year before would have been inconceivable to Mama.

Everything Mama did caught my eye, but I think what intrigued me most was when she separated eggs by rocking the cracked shells back and forth till the whites plopped into a bowl and then dropped the yolks in the batter. Next, she told me to cover the whites with plastic to use in scrambled eggs later on, and I just couldn’t get over how sticky they were when some got on my fingers.

“Okay, precious,” she said with a small amount of dough in her chubby hands, “help me roll clumps like this one into smooth balls and put ’em on the cookie sheet—not too close together, mind you.” So I rolled and rolled the dough between the palms of my hands the way she was doing, and if the ball was too little or too big, she’d say, “Pay attention, young lady,” and tell me they should be ’bout the size of marbles, and make me start over again. Soon the pan was full of balls the same size, and what Mama did then was take my index finger and push it down real gentle into the ball to make a dent for the jelly, and show me how to seal any cracks around the edges. The only problem was my fingers gradually became sticky again, and when I complained, Mama told me to hush up and just dip them in a little flour or water. And it really fascinated me how well that worked.

“Are we ready for the jelly yet?” I finally asked real impatiently.

“We certainly are not,” she answered as she grabbed the cookie sheet with one hand and stuck it in the oven. “They gotta first bake about 10 minutes.”

“Why, Mama?”

“Just because, child, that’s why,” she sorta huffed. “They gotta set up a little bit. Now stop asking me dumb questions.”

Then the real fun began when she showed me how to fill the holes with jelly scraped from a small spoon with my fingers. First I used some of the strawberry, then the peach, and finally the pretty mint, and when I alternated the fillings to make the cookies more multicolored, Mama smiled and patted me softly on the shoulder and said, “I see we got a real artist in the kitchen.” What she didn’t like too much was when I licked the spoon every once in a while. “Child, you gonna rot every tooth in your head out if you keep that up, so stop this minute,” she scolded kinda playfully.

Of course, Mama never asks, Mama dictates, and it was no different back then when she simply opened the oven door and told me to pick up the cookie sheet with two pot holders and slide it back onto the rack. Well, this scared me to death—that blast of heat from the oven, the fear of being burned, the sight of ugly red scars on Mama’s hands and arms—but when I just stood there, she said, “Go on, sugar. If you’re gonna bake cookies and biscuits with Mama, you gotta get used to the hot oven. Don’t worry, Mama’ll help you.”

And she did help me, and after we took out the first batch of bubbling treats, I don’t think I was ever frightened again of a hot oven. I noticed the way Mama watched the cookies like a hawk till they were just golden brown, no matter when the timer rang. I also learned to imitate her technique of nudging the cookies with gentle stabs of a spatula when we transferred them to a wire rack to cool. But I think what I remember most was the look on Mama’s face when she simply stared at the beautiful treats like she was almost in a trance and mumbled, “Pretty, aren’t they?” Mama was so proud of our jelly treats, and the way she put her arm around my shoulder, you’d never guess in a million years she could be so ornery. Soon as they cooled, we both ate a cookie, then another, then another, and still another, and I thought they were the best cookies I’d ever put in my mouth.

Biscuits were another matter, and nothing was (or is) more sacred to Mama than the hot buttermilk biscuits she served with everything from fried chicken to Brunswick stew to country ham with red-eye gravy.

“Time you learned to make biscuit, young lady,” she sorta proclaimed one chilly fall morning as she stretched a red apron around her big stomach and handed me a smaller white one to tie around my waist. And to this day Mama still uses only the singular word “biscuit” whether she’s referring to one or two or a dozen biscuits.

“Stick your hand in that sack of flour and grab me a couple of big handfuls,” she directed me. Well, I thought that flour I dumped in the chipped, cream-colored biscuit bowl was the softest thing I’d ever felt in my life.

“One more handful, sweetheart,” she then said after she’d studied the mound. “Your hands are a lot smaller than mine.”

I did as she said, and when the amount of flour looked just right to Mama, she next sprinkled on some white powder she pinched from a purple can with her fingers, and another powder from a bright yellow box, and some salt from another box with a picture of a little girl carrying an umbrella, and then told me to stir everything with her wooden spoon. No measuring cups or spoons, no scales, nothing but our hands and fingers and a big wooden spoon.

“Honey, open that can of shortening,” she said next as she held out a large silver spoon, dug it four times into the can, and scraped the messy shortening off with a finger into the flour. She then took a few whacks at the flour with the metal pastry cutter, handed it to me, and said, “Here, Loretta, you cut in the shortening the way you just saw me do.” I began hacking away at the pale gobs, but in no time Mama’s howling, “No, no, no, angel” as she took my hand and guided the blade in more gentle strokes. “Don’t crush those lumps so much, for heaven’s sake. They’re what make the biscuit flaky.”

I noticed before Mama began pouring buttermilk in the bowl how she held the carton up, took a sniff and a few long guzzles, and declared, “Lord, that’s good milk.” Then she sprinkled a little flour on the counter and started stirring the dough fast as lightning, and when it looked and felt perfect to her, she gathered it into a big ball with her strong hands, plopped it on the counter, and said, “Okay, honey, pat that out gently with your fingers till I tell you to stop.” So I began pushing at the dough anxiously with my hands, and within seconds Mama was telling me, “Not with your hands, precious, and not so rough. I said to just pat it out gently with your fingers. You gotta be easy with biscuit. If not, they’ll be tough as whitleather.” With which she coaxed my hands away and took over a few seconds as she patted away, then told me to try again.

When the slab of dough was about half its original thickness, she handed me her battered metal biscuit cutter, grabbed a small juice glass for herself from the cabinet, and said, “Now, let’s cut ’em out nice and round and even and put ’em on the baking sheet—not too close together so the sides’ll brown.” To me, this was the fun part, but no sooner had I cut out my first biscuit than Mama had to correct me again. “Didn’t I say nice and even? Just look at that biscuit. It’s lopsided, and nobody wants to eat a lopsided biscuit. You can’t twist the cutter, sweetheart. You gotta cut straight down if you want even biscuit.” She cut a perfect one with her glass, and when I did the same with my cutter, she smiled and said, “That’s the girl. And don’t forget to leave plenty of room between the biscuit so the sides’ll get nice and crusty.”

Into the oven they went for twelve minutes, but before the timer rang, Mama peeped through the glass on the oven door, and handed me the pot holders, and ordered, “Take ’em out, they’re done. Never can trust that damn oven, and if those biscuit stay in one minute longer, they’ll be hard as rocks.” How Mama could tell I couldn’t figure out, but, sure enough, when I pulled the pan out, the biscuits were golden and puffy and crispy on the sides and pretty as can be.

Mama was baking hot biscuits mainly for us all to eat with something like her fresh vegetable soup at lunch, but, as usual, she could never wait to break one open, and smear lots of butter on the two halves, and hand me a half to taste, and soon pronounce the biscuit to be “perfect.” The problem was that if it wasn’t quite time for lunch, and the biscuits were particularly light and fluffy, and the butter tasted particularly rich and sweet, we never stopped with just one but might eat two or three before sticking the rest back in the oven to keep warm. I also gotta say it wasn’t beyond Mama to even grab her jar of strawberry or peach preserves and spread a good spoonful of those on the biscuits, and yeah, I thought that was pretty sensational. I don’t think it so much as dawned on Mama—not for a second—how fattening those biscuits were. If so, it didn’t matter to her, and, of course, I never gave it a thought at that young age.

Whatever, to this day I’ve never tasted buttermilk biscuits that can equal Mama’s, and to this day, goddammit, I gotta admit I still can’t produce a batch that come out just as fluffy and beautiful as hers every single time she fixes ’em. Don’t ask me why. I use the same brands of flour and baking powder and even buttermilk as she does. I’ve watched her over and over and follow religiously the same techniques she taught me as a child. And once I even had her watch me every step of the way to see what could be wrong. “You rush things,” is about the only explanation she’s ever come up with. Oh, I fix damn good biscuits. They just don’t look and taste exactly like Mama’s, and it makes me mad as a hornet.