I was way more connected to my father than my mother and I take after him in a great many respects. My mother – not so much.
From my father, I got my fascination with the stock market; my humor; my insane book-a-day reading ability; my thunder thighs, and certainly my competitiveness.
And yet.
There are these moments I feel like I am channeling my mother.
For my entire life growing up, and really until a couple of years before she died, my mother made spaghetti sauce (that’s what it was called then—not pasta sauce or marinara—simply “spaghetti sauce.”) She made it in an army style 20 quart pot. TWENTY QUARTS!!! It would cook on the stove for days. Then she would ladle it into quart containers and put those in the basement freezer. It was absolutely delicious. Undoubtedly the reason that I never ordered pasta at restaurants for most of my life—how could it possibly compare?
After my parents moved to Florida, whenever I visited, I would return home, carrying with me on the plane, four rock-hard frozen quarts. Each quart was wrapped in sheets of newspaper, then plastic bags, to make sure it didn’t leak. Fat chance! Even after a three hour flight and the taxi to my apartment, those quarts barely broke a sweat! My mother, being who she was, never shared the recipe. She would say, “I don’t know—I just put in a little of this, a little of that…”
Now as the anniversary of her 95th birthday nears, I find myself making sauce. Not 20 quarts, but I have been cooking it for most of the day. I taste it—really, REALLY good. Yet not as good as hers. What I wouldn’t give for a taste of that again…
But I am forever grateful for the cook that she was, the sauce that she made, and the seeds of the amateur chef that she planted in me.
