Cooking Lessons

“Calpurnia,” Mother called up the stairs in that particular tone of voice I’d come to dread, “We’re waiting for you in the kitchen.”

I was in my room reading Granddaddy’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I put it down and didn’t answer.

“I know you’re up there” said Mother, “and I know you can hear me. Come down here.” I sighed, slipped an old hair ribbon into the book to mark my place, and trudged downstairs. I was the condemned young aristocrat holding my head high in the tumbril. It was a far, far better thing–

“There’s no need to look like that,” said Mother, as I walked into the kitchen where she and Viola sat waiting for me at the scrubbed pine table. “It’s only a cooking lesson.”

On the table was the marble slab, the sugar tin, a rolling pin, a large bowl of green apples, and one bright yellow lemon. And a book. I perked up until I got a closer look at it.

“Look here,”said Mother, “It’s my Fanny Farmer cookbook. You can borrow it until you get your own copy. It has everything in it that you need.”

I doubted that. She presented it to me in the same way that my grandfather had handed me his book–The Origin of Species–a few short months before. Mother smiled, Viola looked blank.

“We’re going to start with apple pie,” Mother said. “The secret is to add a splash of lemon juice and a handful of lemon zest to give it that nice tart flavor.” She smiled and nodded and spoke in that coaxing voice mothers use on reluctant children.

I tried my best to smile back. Lord knows what I looked like because Mother looked alarmed and Viola cut her eyes to the corner.

“Um, won’t that be fun?” said Mother, wavering.

“I guess so.”

“Viola’s going to show you how to make the crust. It’s her specialty.”

“Get two scoops of flour out of that bin, Miz Callie,” Viola said. I blinked. She had never called me “Miss” before. “Dump ‘em in this bowl. Okay.”

Mother thumbed through her cookbook and planned our Sunday dinner while Viola tried to lead me down the tricky path of pastry-dough-making. I must have seen her make a million pies as I wandered through the kitchen and it had always looked so easy. She never measured anything, instead cooking by eye, by instinct, and by touch, throwing in handfuls of flour and thumb-sized chunks of lard and drizzling in more or less cold water, depending. There was nothing to it. Any idiot could learn it in two minutes flat.

An hour later I stood panting and thrashing around with my third bowl of dough, with Mother and Viola growing more incredulous by the minute. The first batch had been watery and lumpy; the second so dense I couldn’t roll it out with the pin; the last had turned out as sticky as wallpaper paste and with the same unappealing consistency. It was all over my hands and pinafore, smeared across the counter and the pump handle and there were streaks of it stuck in my hair. I think there was even a glob on the fly paper hanging from the ceiling several feet above my head but how it got there, I had no idea.

“Next time a kerchief, I think, Viola,” Mother said.

“Mm-mmh.”

“I tell you what,” said Mother, “Maybe we’ll let Viola finish the dough. You go ahead and peel and core the apples. Hold the apple like this, and draw the knife towards you. Be careful, it’s sharp.”

I held the knife and apple in imitation and, with the first paring motion, sliced my thumb open. Fortunately, I only bled on a couple of the apples. Viola plunged them in water but they were still tinged pink. We all pretended not to notice.

Photo: Joe Burge via SXC