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Lessons of love

Mothers and sons savor childhood memories from the kitchen
Image from Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cookbook, 1970.

For many of us, food is an expression of affection – the favorite Christmas cookie painstakingly made year after year, the famous osso buco braised into total tenderness for hours, the perfect chicken noodle soup balanced between the exact amounts of meat and broth.

When it comes to love and food, nothing is more elemental than mothers and children and, for this story, mothers and sons. They took their first taste from their mothers’ hands, cooked their first meal at her side and likely, achieved their first culinary success – whether grilling a juicy hamburger or baking a flaky biscuit – under her tutelage.

They may not even realize it at the time. But years later, likely in college, they discover they have a knack for inventing salads or creating amazing canapés or pulling together heart-warming stews.

And then they know.

“I sure did learn how to bake a cake,” said chef Neal Drysdale, co-owner of Yardbird Eatery, whose father prepared the meals, while mom did the baking. “I like rum cake.”

He recalls being a toddler and watching his mother make cookies. To help, he brought a large plastic bin of flour over to the stovetop, where it promptly melted. Nonetheless, she didn’t scold him.

“She wanted me to keep cooking.”

For some mothers, the kitchen is their private schoolroom, a place to teach their children not just how to flip a pancake, but how to count or how to value nature or how to share.

County extension agent Darrin Parmenter remembers his mother, Debra, joining women on his block to split buckets of pie cherries in their Durango neighborhood. He and his friends rode their Big Wheels in the street as the women baked and canned and called them home to dinner.

The lesson of collective effort and community largess has never left him, leading him in part to his profession, which entails helping people to grow and preserve food.

“I have a T-shirt that says ‘I’m a man and I can,’” he said, chuckling. “I have a strong image of my mom spending days in front of a large pot making salsa and tomato sauce.”

Debra Parmenter remembers those times, too, perhaps a bit less fondly.

“I slept on the couch, because the salsa simmered all day and all night and I’d have to get up and stir the pot every two hours,” she said.

The kids were in and out of the kitchen the whole time the mothers worked, maybe writing labels, maybe helping to fill the jars and maybe – just maybe – channeling the message that summer’s gifts are winter’s rewards.

It seems to have worked.

“It’s just one of those things,” Darrin said. “I got my love of food preservation from her.”

As is typical of self-assured sons, one accomplished local cook didn’t give his mother much credit for her culinary skills. One day, 12-year-old Shane Benjamin saw an exemplary cherry pie with a lattice-woven top in a restaurant and challenged her to best it. Carol Benjamin agreed, for a price – $10 from his youthful earnings.

She won, and Shane (today, this paper’s city editor) learned that harsh truth – never bet against your mother.

“I gained a solid respect,” he said, not at all sheepishly.

For her part, Carol extols her son’s entertaining prowess and his particular skill at making delicious appetizers. He came to her Dallas home for a Christmas party and wowed guests with handmade spring rolls. Even now, she says, her friends still rave about them.

Yet, she recognizes her son’s practical side and admires his thriftiness. In college, to save money he would make a pot roast and turn the leftovers into a week’s worth of dinners. Even now, she said, he can make four different dishes from a single roast chicken.

“He’s so funny,” she said laughing. “He figured out that it’s cheaper to cook at home than to go out.”

Some working mothers concede they didn’t have the time in the kitchen with their children that they would have liked. But the culinary gods work in strange ways – they turned out to be good cooks anyway.

Kirk Komick, general manager of the Rochester Hotel, can be seen any Saturday morning at the Durango Farmers Market choosing the choicest vegetables and chatting up the growers. He’s a whiz on the grill with fresh fish, chicken and, of course, that delectable produce, but he didn’t learn it from his mom, Diane Wildfang.

The youngest of four with two older sisters, Komick’s major contribution to family meals when he was young was picking lettuce from the large backyard garden and maybe peeling a carrot for the salad. Mostly, he followed behind his grandmother as she worked in the garden or baked her amazing apple strudel.

Yet he still loves Diane’s most spectacular dish – rack of lamb.

“One of my favorite memories is having lamb in the house,” he said. “She does it so well.”

One of Wildfang’s favorite memories is of getting her son to eat at all. He was thin, as he is now, and picky, with a tendency toward sweets. But he had one saving grace for a weary mother – he liked vegetables. Asparagus, artichokes, carrots, whatever came out of her garden, he’d eat.

Who knows where a mother’s culinary influence will fall?

And who knows how difficult it must be for a mother to concede that her son has specialties of his own and is now better at them than she is? But some mothers admit just that.

Karen Anesi, a marvelous home cook and food writer, taught her son Nick the basics of baking bread. In law school, he became the dough maker, once preparing 30 pizzas for a group of friends who shared meals and expenses. Today, he can tell his mother if her loaf is moist enough to rise properly.

“I taught him the basics,” she said, “but he went out and perfected it.”

Karen trained him well, of course, teaching him how to hold a chef’s knife (fingers curled under, no easy feat for a child), boil water for pasta, make chili in a slow-cooker and grill the trout they caught. Nick’s first memory of cooking with her is making cookies with a hot pizzelle iron.

But his favorite dish after all those years together in the kitchen is not a fancy dessert or a stellar roast. It’s his mother’s pierogis, simple but sublime Eastern European dumplings.

“She puts in cheese, potato and sauerkraut and we always eat them with sautéed onions and butter and a side of sour cream,” he said, wafting off into blissful belly memories. “They’re wonderful.”

This is what mothers do for their children. They feed us with love and encouragement, teaching us to appreciate nature’s bounty and fend for ourselves. Along the way, the food, the love and the time together build the soul of our families and the memories that linger throughout our lives.

phasterok@durangoherald.com



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