Sugar Pie
Growing up, my parents’ house was dinner party central. Christmas, New Year’s, birthdays, anniversaries and the occasional “come on over for dinner” all seemed to end up in the same kitchen.
After my mother passed, I found her dinner party notes: menus, ingredients, little reminders and glimpses of the meals she had prepared for family and friends over the years.
In this series, I’m going back through those notes and recreating one dish from each dinner party. The recipes are part reconstruction, part memory, and a way of understanding where my own passion for cooking came from.
A Life Lived in Courses
October 9, 1995
Thanksgiving was running late.
Not disastrously late. Nobody had lost the turkey. We had simply decided that Thanksgiving, traditionally celebrated on Sunday in our family, would make a perfectly good Monday.
There were seven of us around the table, including my grandmother Rose, my mother’s mother.
My grandmother was a great cook. A lot of what we ate came through her, sometimes by recipe and sometimes by osmosis.
My mother had learned the way people often learn family cooking: by watching, helping and eventually acquiring the confidence to know what belonged in a dish without having to look everything up.
Thanksgiving had its requirements.
There was stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, carrots and turnip. And then there were a couple of things that had wandered in from another era and apparently had no intention of leaving.
Tomato aspic was one of them.
By 1995, tomato aspic had already passed its cultural peak, but my mother was not especially interested in culinary fashion. I don’t remember any of us being particularly enthusiastic about it. Still, there it was, quietly occupying its place on the Thanksgiving table.
Some family dishes survive because everyone loves them.