Why I Cook

MV Britannic

I am an only child who lived in New York City until I was ten years old at which time we moved to Bergen County New Jersey. My American grandfather owned a butcher shop on Broadway in the Manhattan area called Morningside Heights. I ate good - and healthy - food at home, cooked either by my English mother or my Italian-American grandmother.

Every other year when my mother took me home to visit her parents, we sailed back and forth from New York City to Liverpool on the MV Britannic, a Cunard White Star Liner.

On board ship, even when I was young, my mother and I ate each meal at the second seating in the dining room. I was never relegated to "nursery tea" at 4:00 o'clock, which is when most children ate their last meal of the day. The food in the "grown-up" dining room was delicious, plated by stewards wearing white gloves, using French Banquet Service (two serving utensils in one hand). My favorite steward of all time was a young man, first name Bert, surname Lee, but I didn't "get it" and called him Bertley, like Bentley, one word. He was nice enough not to mind.

Once in England, even though post WWII rationing was still in effect, the food at home was also delicious. My grandfather there, in the Wirral, a pork butcher, made his own sausages and pork pies, similar to the ones you can get at Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street in NYC. We ate our most substantial meal of the day in early afternoon and called it dinner, not lunch. Then around 4:00 p.m. we had tea, the meal, where we had pots of strong tea, followed by things like crumbly Cheshire cheese, ripe cherry tomatoes, sharp green onions, freshly-laid eggs softly boiled, Hovis whole wheat bread sliced thin and buttered sparingly, and small fish paste sandwiches. There was always a single-layer sponge cake in the kitchen if you wanted a slice and usually some currant scones unless they had already been eaten. 

Sunday lunch was another matter entirely. It was the day we had a grand meal at midday. My favorite  - roast leg of lamb with gravy, peas, and crunchy roast potatoes - convinced me then and forever that only the English can properly roast a potato.

After getting engaged at 19, I ate Sunday dinner at my future mother-in-law's, where the food was enthusiastically cooked. And when I married, a month shy of turning 21, I took the two cookbooks I had received as engagement presents, the 1964 Joy of Cooking and the blue, now well-worn, Craig Claiborne New York Times Cookbook inscribed by my friend Kathleen with the Thomas Wolf quote 

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner f for someone she loves."

and set myself to the task of learning to cook. 

The very first meal I was going to cook, after I got home from work, was meatloaf, but my young husband was impatient and hungry, and it was going to take too long to get that dinner on the table, so I took a tip from Joy and made little individual "meatloaves" in a muffin tin. I used dried parsley and didn't know enough to cut down on the amount in the recipe, so dinner was essentially horrible parsley balls. Fortunately, it's been uphill since then. I learned to cook, I love to cook, and, not a surprise, I never used dried parsley again.

My motto became, even if I've put in a long day's work, "I'd rather eat late than eat out."

On Board Ship - Me and My Mum