ROBERT GARDNER
For most of my life, I've eaten well. My mother was an excellent
cook, who fixed a full dinner for us every night, including dessert,
which was usually pie. She could roll out a perfect crust with just a
few flicks of her rolling pin. In those days, crusts were made with
lard, which I don't suppose anybody eats these days because of health
concerns, but four of our five family members lived into their 90s,
so it can't have been too bad for us.
I lived with my sister Jesse for many years, and she was a good
cook, but it looked like my years of eating well might have come to
an end when I got married.
Katy had lived at home, then at the YWCA, and had no experience in
the kitchen. Our first meal was an adventure. Wanting to impress me
with her wifely skills, she pored through women's magazines for the
perfect recipe. Why a respectable magazine would print the recipe she
chose I can't say, anymore than I can say why of all the recipes Katy
chose this one. Perhaps it was the familiarity of the ingredients --
potatoes and frankfurters -- but anyway, this was to be her debut.
The recipe directed her to core the potatoes lengthwise, no mean
feat, and then to thread the franks through the hole, not an easy
task, either, but she managed both. She then put them in the oven to
bake, unaware, as the recipe's creator apparently was, of the
different cooking times each ingredient required.
Never suspecting a problem, Katy took the dish out of the oven at
the required time, put a potato on each plate and proudly brought the
meal to the table. It was a very peculiar looking dish, but I didn't
want to disappoint her, so I attacked it enthusiastically.
"Wonderful!" I exclaimed in what I consider a neat bit of acting.
Katy beamed, happy with her success, until she cut into her own
potato when she discovered what happens when you cook a potato and a
frankfurter the same amount of time -- the frank dries up and the
potato is still almost raw. One bite and she burst into tears, and it
looked like we might spend the rest of our lives eating in
restaurants, but she persevered, and eventually developed a good if
somewhat conservative repertoire of dishes.
After she died, I had no choice but to step back into the kitchen.
I'd always done a certain amount of cooking. I'd take the remains of
a ham, a packet of split peas, and over a long afternoon and a few
drinks, create a soup that would make Andersen pea green with envy.
Now, however, I was reminded of the difference between cooking on the
