The perfect meal for melting-pot family
Grandma Sadie, Pop’s mother, was less than enthusiastic when he married Nurse Vivian. In 1947, a mother-in-law would not openly disapprove of her daughter-in-law. She could, however, disapprove of her cooking.
Nurse Vivian had grown up in an iron-smelting town in Pennsylvania, where, between the Great Depression and the Great Johnstown Flood, there was little time for her to learn how to cook.
I’ve told this story before: The only class that my mother failed in nursing school was the Diet Kitchen. They set her to make the dessert, and that night every single patient sent back the Jell-O. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I followed the recipe exactly. I even remembered to butter the gelatin molds.”
She was warned ... nevertheless, she persisted. One winter night, when Grandma Sadie came to visit, Nurse Vivian cooked stew. Grandma Sadie took one sip, put the spoon down and said in her brogue, “Honestly, Vivian, the recipe’s in your blood. I don’t know how a girl from County Cork could ruin a stew. But this one, the grease would come right up your throat.”
I grew up on my mother’s cooking, and yet I didn’t like her stew, either. But I ate it, maybe because Paulson meals were Darwinian: If I didn’t lunge for the meat loaf, it was a sure thing that Brother X would swallow it.
Nowadays, instead of a mother-in-law, I rely on my two sons to criticize my cooking. If the dinner menu deviates from either frozen pizza or hamburgers, I get an earful of “Nobody else in the sixth grade eats salad. Not one.”
Last Sunday, we stopped at the market after church, and I asked my husband, Brian, what he wanted for dinner, counting on his usual answer of “Whatever you feel like making.” But no. He said, “I’m in the mood for stew.” The one meal I had not cooked in our 32 years together.
When Nurse Vivian died, I inherited the penny postcards on which she had written out her recipes. There’s a little box in the kitchen in which I keep the secret of her pie dough. Every single postcard. Except stew.
So I made it up. I browned the chuck and sliced vegetables and made a slurry with broth and flour. Brian chopped all the rosemary and sage, but I was on edge.
Zane doesn’t try new foods. He threw a fit the day that I made mac ’n’ cheese with real cheese. And Aidan has little gourmand rituals; he eats corn one kernel at a time. He doesn’t mix foods. The psychologist told us it’s normal for a boy to build a wall of mashed potatoes so that the chicken never touches the broccoli.
“Stew, a new dish with everything all mixed together,” I thought, “is the perfect recipe for disaster.”
The psychologists have also told us that both boys have problems with transitions, probably because of the traumas that got them into foster care. And this was a Sunday of big transition, the day before Zane began Thurgood Marshall High School and Aidan began St. John’s Junior High School. So as we sat down to supper in the outer, outer, outer Excelsior, I was wary.
The kitchen table is battered with graffiti that Aidan has carved with a fork. The chairs are battered from Zane’s tantrums and the rescue dog’s teething. The cookware doesn’t match. The glassware doesn’t match. Frankly, the Fisher-Paulsons don’t match. But every night, we hold hands and say grace. We toast “the best boys in the world” and then we eat, Bandit resting beneath us on someone’s ankle, ready to pounce in the event that someone’s fork misses his mouth.
This night, Zane tucked in with his spoon and raced through his bowl, for the first time in his life finishing a meal before me. And how did Aidan solve the problem of his food being all mixed up? He ate his stew in alphabetical order: first the broth, then carrots, then meat, then onions, then potatoes. Had I put in zucchini, he’d still be eating.
Aidan, who never compliments a meal, said, “Daddy, that’s the best food you ever cooked.” To which Zane added, “Maybe Uncle X is right. Stick around this family long enough and you are Irish.” Maybe Grandma Sadie was also right, and the recipe was in my blood. Mulligan (or Irishmen’s) stew isn’t fancy. It dates from the time when the hobos gathered in camps, each of them bringing vegetables or meat or potatoes and cooking it over a community fire. Sometimes the parts that don’t match make the best meal. And the best family. “Stew, a new dish with everything all mixed together, is the perfect recipe for disaster.”