The Best of Behind the Kitchen Door (repost from January 2010)

Every year when it is State Fair time, I think of the occasion when my mother won a blue ribbon for her bread baking but did not see the picture that was taken until she was in her 80's..  This is a picture of her at age 16 taken at the fair when she won.  Here is the rest of the story....

I think every older generation has said to the younger, "Things were much better when I was young." The young (including me when I was) roll their eyes and chalk it up to old age. Well, this time I think it may really be true.

I was born in April, 1944, just as the Second World War was coming to an end. I was born in a hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota and brought home to a large, Victorian, red brick house on the corner of Olsen Highway (Hwy. 55) and Russell Avenue. The house has been gone for a long time, but back then it was the Queen of the block. It stood on a hill and besides being red--a standout color--it had a turret that towered over the smaller, more modest homes on the block. It had been purchased by my parents and turned into four apartments. Ours was on the main floor and the biggest--housing my mother, a homemaker who had left her teaching job when she was married in 1939; my father, a mechanical engineer for Honeywell and my three-year-old brother, Billy.

We lived in that house until I was four and I still have vivid memories of it. I can picture the interior precisely--and share this ability with my brother (my only sibling). My parents called me a few years ago because they were having a disagreement over what the kitchen table looked like in that house. Somehow, they knew I would remember--and I did. (It was a wooden, drop-leaf table with a Pennsylvania Dutch tulip design painted on one of the leaves). I also remember the neighborhood--and the neighbors. Across the street was a family with whom we became very good friends. And at the end of the street another family made a trio of us who socialized and were close. Those of us who are still alive keep in touch.

All the memories I have about that time were happy ones--making leaf houses in the fall, taking a penny down to the corner store and buying candy lipstick or wax coke bottles filled with sweet syrup, shopping with Mom at a small, family-owned grocery store on Lyndale Avenue, attending church every Sunday at Calvary Methodist Church. But the most potent memories center around food.

Mom was a great cook. She grew up in North Mankato, MN and belonged to 4-H and Campfire Girls. In those days, those organizations really taught young people skills. Consider her times--The Great Depression--people needed to know how to cook, sew, raise livestock and can and preserve the produce from their gardens. She did. When she was sixteen she won a blue ribbon at the county fair for her white bread. This qualified for a week's trip to the State Fair in St. Paul, all expenses paid. It was the highlight of her young life and she delighted in telling us the stories of that wonderful week. Once, about twelve years ago, she and my Dad were at the state fair, looking at displays under the stadium. Mom looked up and said, "Burdette, look at that!" It was a picture of my mom, age 16, (1926) posing in her white apron and cap with a beautiful loaf of bread. She hadn't ever seen the picture before. The fair people were very gracious in giving her that picture, which I own today.

When I tell people that I began cooking at age three, they tend not to completely believe me. But I really did. My mom doted on my girl-ness. She had three brothers, her mother had been the only girl of 6 children, most of her cousins were boys--as they wheeled her out of the delivery room after 36 hours of labor in the transverse position birth of my brother, she told my grandmother, "I supposed all my babies will be boys". In our family, being a girl was the most desirable. Many years later in a college Marriage and Family class, the subject of Gloria Steinem and Womens' Liberation was hot. I had a hard time digesting the idea that girls had been oppressed. For me, the opposite was true.

Well, back to the kitchen at age three. Mom would get me a step-stool and an apron and settle me right beside her at the counter. Anything she was baking (not other kinds of cooking), she would show me how to do. I had my own small dishes, pans and utensils. The one I remember best was my own small rolling pin. Pies and cookies were the the things we started with. She would show me how to mix my own dough and then tell me how to roll out and cut the cookies or the piecrust, always emphasizing not to handle the dough too much. I know that I didn't listen to that advice, at least not at first, because my doughs were dirty and tough. When mom would take her pie crust or cookies out of the oven and they were pretty and yummy; then mine, which were ugly and tough, I learned to listen.