View Full Version : Was your mom a good cook?
My mom had many virtues but culinary skills were not among them. Cooking meant taking out the frying pan to fry some meat and potatoes and perhaps opening a can of vegetable. All vegetables came from cans. Iceberg lettuce and tomato sometimes for a salad. Bacon grease was the basic oil. White bread and rolls from a package. She could make Hershey's cocoa fudge and it really was good. I don't believe she owned a cookbook. I suppose it came from her growing up during the Depression followed by the war years of austerity.
Just wondering if your mom was a good cook or not??
She was a good cook - eveything from scratch but choked in heavy sauces, fried, lots of butter, homemade white bread, ultra rich desserts, etc...Definete 1950's meat and potatoes kind of food. But I was a VERY picky eater (still am) and don't like heavy fatty foods so hated pretty much everything she cooked even if other's thought it was good. Usually didn't eat it - or just a small amount.
Sad Eyed Lady
9-10-11, 6:24pm
I actually lived with my grandparents and my grandmother cooked everything from scratch, very basic southern cooking: Fried chicken, veggies from the garden, homemade biscuits, cornbread etc. Basic, but good. My to mother, food was something she could take or leave. She didn't eat a whole lot, was a very tiny person, but she did have a "sweet tooth". As a result, she was very good at making cakes, pies, that sort of thing.
My mother wasn't a particularly good cook, either. Plus, she never taught me to cook, and I'm pretty hopeless (although I do love making soups). But at least we had a sit-down meal every night, and we had our "regulars" which included some somewhat interesting things like stuffed clams (she made GREAT stuffed clams). But for the most part, it was meatloaf, spaghetti with Ragu, and other really basic stuff.
My kids' favorite summer pasta salad was handed down from her. I've made it for decades now and my kids still love and it gets rave reviews. They call it my "specialty" which I think is funny. Some have Beef Wellington as a specialty--mine is macaroni salad. Oh, well.
Mrs. Hermit
9-10-11, 6:33pm
My mother was a great cook. She cooked from experience, as well as cookbooks (she collected cookbooks), so she cooked many different kinds of foods, from many different cultures. I apprenticed with her to learn to cook, basically.
Bastelmutti
9-10-11, 6:36pm
My mom - nope. But my grandma lived with us, and she was a fantastic cook. Again, much like the other posters: standard Eastern European fare slathered in sour cream. Homemade chicken soup with all the bits left in and homemade dumplings. Salads from our garden (in sour cream, of course). Pork roast, baked chicken. The best-ever rye bread - several loaves fresh every week. Yum. My sister and I were reminiscing about how good her cauliflower was and then we remembered that she boiled a head of cauliflower and melted a stick of butter over it.
Mom? Uh...only if you like spaghetti with cubes of Spam in it.
Actually, my mother was from the north, Norwegien family. Dad was from the south. So I grew up with a strange blend and mix of foods as she tried to accomodate my father with some of the dishes he was used to. I remember lots of casseroles, Jello salads. Rarely any plain meat. Only one major rule. You took some of everything and you didn't leave the table until your plate was clean...even if you didn't like liver. I thought I got away with it one time by putting it around the edges of my plate, underneath it. I zipped out the door. Ha! Nothing was said. The next morning, that's what I got for breakfast. It's much worse cold.
my mother must be a sister to yours, florence!
Like Marianne, my mom is of Midwestern Norwegian stock. So even though I grew up in Texas, most of our meals were very plain meat and potatoes. And I mean plain meat and boiled potatoes with a side of boiled frozen or canned vegetables. I was forever begging to go out to eat (Mexican, Chinese or pizza), just so I could have something with flavor. Mom's idea of dinner was why I started teaching myself to cook at age 11. When I was in high school someone gave Mom a cookbook called Lutheran Church Basement Cooking: Blonde and Bland. It was a perfect description of most of our meals!
However, while Mom's day to day meals weren't spectacular, she was an excellent baker and made fresh bread and cookies weekly, with the occasional pie. If she was in a really good mood on bread baking day, she would make caramel rolls, which were heavenly.
rosarugosa
9-10-11, 8:22pm
I'm of Italian descent (and about 10 other things, but when I talk about food I'm Italian), but I wouldn't say cooking was Mom's strong suit. She can't tolerate pepper, is allergic to most herbs, and when my grandfather lived with us, he was on a total no salt diet. So "bland" was the culinary theme in our house. I actually found a small cookbook in the cellar once titled The Bland Cookbook. Aha, I thought! This explains a lot :) Although we always had high quality, expensive food, huge piles of lamb chops, lots of fruit, good salads every night, just no salt, pepper or herbs.
As an adult, I can't cook anything, and I am not really interested in learning. I surround myself with amazing cooks, DH being in the forefront, and I contribute my other talents to the mix of life. I really appreciate good food though, and I know it when I eat it. And I think at least partly because I only weigh 98 lbs, the people I love, love to feed me. And I put freshly ground black pepper on nearly everything that isn't dessert!
goldensmom
9-10-11, 8:25pm
My mom was an excellent cook as was my grandmother who lived next door. Grandma was the primary baker and passed the skill onto my mom after she died. I learned to cook at a very young age, watching mom and grandma cook from scratch, from the occasional recipe but mostly 'some of this' and 'some of that'. Many of their recipes that I cook/bake from today lists the ingredients but not the amounts. Most of mom and grandma's meals were Pennsylvania Dutch comfort foods.
My mom was always a good cook and baker, and I think she's an even better cook now. You know the hypothesis that anyone can become an expert in something with about 10,000 hours of practice? She's got way more than that under her belt now.
What we ate - homemade sourdough bread, plenty (too many) cookies, cakes; German-style food for dinner - wurst, goulash, roasts, chops etc. Now, she cooks much lighter fare, more vegetables. We always did have fresh veggies from our garden, but I don't recall having more than 1 serving of veg/day when I was growing up.
When I was in high school someone gave Mom a cookbook called Lutheran Church Basement Cooking: Blonde and Bland. It was a perfect description of most of our meals!
However, while Mom's day to day meals weren't spectacular, she was an excellent baker and made fresh bread and cookies weekly, with the occasional pie. If she was in a really good mood on bread baking day, she would make caramel rolls, which were heavenly.
Hilarious!! Being raised Lutheran, I can poke fun of this!! Yes, my mother was a great baker, too.
In hindsight I don't think Mother was a "good" cook, but I didn't know any better, and meals were tasty and adequate. Mostly veggies from our garden; some canned. They were Depression-era too, so food was pretty simple. We had pot roasts and chicken (we raised chickens) and when we had goats, we had goats milk and meat (which I cried about), and sometimes breakfast for dinner -- Daddy liked pancakes and eggs and bacon/sausage with biscuits and gravy. (And I like biscuits and gravy too, but can't "afford" to eat them!) We all survived just fine ...
iris lily
9-10-11, 11:44pm
Raised in the mid-west. My mother was low-average cook. She did hardly any baking. But she made decent spaghetti sauce. I didn't learn anything from her. She always referred to herself as a bad cook.
30 years ago, there just wasn't Chinese restaurants around in small towns in the mid-west let alone any other non-Euro cuisine. Once I was able to eat some decent Chinese restaurant food I was inspired to learn to cook stir fries--easy, nutritious, and always good.
Wildflower
9-11-11, 5:15am
She kept us fed and did as good a job at cooking as she could. Basic midwest food. Meatloaf, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, fried porkchops with fried potatoes, tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, roasts with mashed potatoes and gravy, chili, beans and cornbread. Always had a vegetable or fruit daily. I still love that kind of food, but have learned to like other ways of eating, especially ethnic, that would have been foreign to her.... She baked the best peanut butter cookies ever and I really miss those and her....
My mom is a great cook, but she would just call herself an 'ok cook' and she says I'm more 'adventurous and gormet' but her breads and pies and roasts are so good.
Good Midwestern upbringing here, too, so had the classic (dreaded) Lutheran/German/Norwegian influences in the meals. However, my mom is a great cook, unlike either of my grandmothers. Whenever she brought food to church basement potluck dinners we always went home with empty pans. She is also a great baker: breads, pies, cakes, cookies. I remember her making sponge cake almost daily for weeks one time as she prepared for a baking contest. She won, of course. Although she never formally taught me how to cook and bake, I learned a lot from just being in the same kitchen. I consider myself a good cook, but not great. It's hard to compare my cooking to my mom's because we like very different types of food. Her meals were and are very meat-focused. I'm a strict vegetarian. My older brother is an adequate cook. My younger brother is a great cook. We have a good time cooking together when we get together even though we all have very different preferences in food and food preparation.
We had spaghetti and meatballs that didn't come from a can for the first time when my sister and I were old enough to put it in the cart and cook it. Corn muffins from the box were near her limit.
My father was not bad at cooking his straight meat and potatoes diet; better than my mother.
I don't remember eating awful food, so I think my mom did a fairly good job, considering she worked full time. I think I had a natural talent for cooking and would spend the days trashing the kitchen in the summers, while she slept (she worked nights). Boy was she bummed out when she woke up!
I remember roasts, stews, soups, veggies, deserts. Now DH would have some good stories for you. His grandma immigrated from Hungary and her forte' was cooking and baking. The only thing DH didn't like of her's was her lettuce soup. haha His mom was a great cook too, but lots of salt and butter and sour cream, but it always tasted great.
I'm getting hungry. :)
Oh these stories are great. I wonder how our children will remember our cooking???
domestic goddess
9-11-11, 1:23pm
Florence, I will be afraid to ask!!
We never had horrible things to eat, but my mom was pretty one-dimensional in that respect. Take some meat, put a can of cream of chicken soup on top and bake. Still, dinner was always on the table without a lot of fuss, unlike me, who is sometimes paralyzed by choices. I really never learned to cook at home, but learned through desperation once I left. When you get hungry enough, you can become quite creative.
My mom doesn't cook now, at least not more than heating something up in the microwave. She was all hot to trot to buy a new stove, and has never used the oven. She uses the stovetop to boil water for tea. Or she eats out or brings prepared food in. When I visit, I cook, and her blood pressure goes down! I rarely add salt when I cook, but use other spices and seasonings.
Oh, I hope no one ever asks dd about my cooking!!
I loved my mom and miss her dearly. She was not a good cook except for her swedish meatballs. I once asked her if she would make them again for me and she said no. She loved stuff from cans and hamburger helper and bisquick...I have learned as an adult to cook and bake from scratch because of her. Mom was swedish and irish american...
My mom was an OK cook but I don't think she liked it much either. She hated to bake - she was famous for "Momma's holiday cookies" canned frosting between 2 graham cookies. I make them too, in her honor, but with homemade buttercream frosting. She collected church cookbooks from anywhere around the country though I could rarely find much difference in them. My son made her Christmas when he gave her 20 cookbooks he had collected over the year working in a thrift shop!
Her mother was a wonderful baker - especially pies and filled cookies! She also made jellies and jams - something that has skipped to my generation.
She was an okay cook. Food was very bland. Even onion was considered too spicy in our home. I was 16 before I had my first taco. She made great pies though. I'm a good though not great cook. I'm very, very basic but I do the basics from scratch. Except for spaghetti sauce. Newman's Own sauce is as good as anything I can make.
alvinsmith
9-11-11, 11:38pm
Yeah Great Mom, She knows what I want and I hated. Well that sounds a perfect Mom to me. You know what is my favorite cook during winter its Wanton Soup. :)
home electricity monitor (http://currentcost.net/)
My mom was a very good cook. 'Back then' if you wanted to eat good food, you had to be. There simply was not the broad array of frozen entrees or prepared deli items. Or at least not in our small town.
She liked to try new things, but when I was a kid, there was no Julia Child or tv food shows for inpiration. The only 'ethnic' cooking was the one of your own family, or perhaps your neighbors. And there were not the vast array of cookbooks there are now. Mom only had a Betty Crocker cookbook, and recipes she clipped from the newspaper. The ingredients were more limited than they are now too. There was an Italian market way cross town, but nothing Asian that I remember. There was Mexican, but back then there also was more prejudice.
We are so lucky today to be exposed to the various cooking influences of the world from restaruants, cookbooks, and the numerous tv shows. Mom would have absolutely loved all that. I know I do. :D
treehugger
9-12-11, 12:24pm
Nope. My mom is a first-generation American with German immigrant parents, but she spent much of her childhood and adolescence in the Philippeans and Indonesia eating nothing but plain white rice. My grandmother was actually a very adventurous cook (and person) but she was unable to pass that along to my mother.
While my parents were still married (until I was 7), family meals were composed of cream-of-whatever soup, frozen vegetables (either green beans or creamed spinach), bland meat cooked way too long, and plain rice or noodles. After my mom and I left my dad and moved in with my step-dad, family dinners became very rare (my step-dad doesn't really eat meals at regular meal times), and once my little brother was born 2 years later, meals became all about catering to what he would or wouldn't eat. Canned chili and spaghetti sauce from a packet were common.
I taught myself how to cook when I moved out at age 18. I feel strongly agree with whomever said, "If you can read, you can cook" and I don't understand people who say they cannot cook, unless they simply don't want to. I don't mean that I think I am a great cook, but I am competent and capable and comfortable in the kitchen (any kitchen). I am greatful that I enjoy the process, because my ability to cook good-tasting frugal meals is really saving us right now.
Now, my mom calls me up with cooking questions. She is terrified to improvise or play around with a recipe.
Kara
Pretty good, I'd say. My childhood spanned the whole of the 1970s, when most people still cooked from scratch every day, and sat down to eat as a family around an actual dining table (actually, that describes our home now, but I suspect it isn't as common as it was).
Mum came from a naval family and one of her grandfathers was an officers' steward from 1913 to 1935. I'm fairly sure that one of our 1970s staples, chicken curry, was the navy version based on a roux sauce with lots of curry powder rather than anything that you would find in India itself.
After Dad left the navy he worked in Iran for a few years (before the revolution) and he brought back a recipe called Kidney Shiraz, which he got from the cook in the company house where he lived. Lambs kidney, cooked in a sauce made with herbs and mushrooms, sultanas and almonds, served with rice. Lovely, really lovely, and she still cooks it for my Dad now.
We spent the summer of 1976 staying with relatives in Gibraltar, and after that she found you could buy squid at the central fish market, so we had that quite often, but it wasn't like the squid and octopus we'd had in Gib. Still, fairly adventurous for the '70s.
We didn't have a lot of money, so offal featured quite often. Liver and bacon, kidney, even stuffed Ox heart - a little chewy but very tasty.
Kevin
Miss Cellane
9-12-11, 5:23pm
My mom was a fantastic cook. Who had a family which largely didn't appreciate her cooking at all.
Mom loved food with taste--her curries were wonderful. She could whip up a stew, spaghetti sauce, meatloaf, and casseroles.
What she had to live with, beside me who would eat anything she put on my plate except scrambled eggs, was a family of 7 other people who among them didn't eat the following: butter, onions, tomatoes, green beans, beets, broccoli, carrots, peas, rice, beef, garlic, celery, sage, basil, oregano, cinnamon, or any dish with more than three ingredients. (There's more that people wouldn't eat, but I can't remember it all.)
Her meatloaf became ground beef with breadcrumbs. She gave up making stew and bought Dinty Moore's. My dad refused to have a casserole more than one day a week, and "casserole" really meant any dish with pasta, so it included lasagna and spaghetti. Dad really wanted every dinner to be meat or chicken, potatoes or rice, and two to three vegetables, so that's what we mostly had. We always knew when Dad was not going to be home for dinner, because that's when we got the "good stuff" like lasagna.
Mom was also a very good baker, something which most of her children inherited. We can all whip up Grandma's Special Brownies or a batch of chocolate chip cookies with ease.
For all the food issues, we grew up sitting around the dining table every single night for dinner. With a family with 7 kids, it was one way to keep everyone current on all the various things going on with all the members of the family. Even today, decades later, I have no trouble eating breakfast or lunch alone. But eating dinner by myself just feels wrong.
IshbelRobertson
9-12-11, 5:31pm
I come from a long line of wonderful cooks. Both grannies were great - my maternal one was a wonderful baker! We Scots are famous for our cakes, breads, scones and other baked goods.
We have wonderful produce in Scotland - wonderful beef, venison, trout, salmon and other seafoods - amazing soft fruits like rasps and loganberries and blaeberries (blueberries).
We lived abroad for extended periods when I was a child and my mother was quite adventurous about incorporating Singaporean, Greek, Asian foods into our diet.
Mom was a good cook for her day. She pretty much lived by the Joy of Cooking and we had a lot of meat and potatos as well as many "experimental" casseroles that inevitably had a can of cream of mushroom soup. We had a goulash night, spagetti night, and Sunday noon chicken most weeks. Her pan fired chicken and gravy was wonderful! We never had a BBQ grill, which any more seems like an American staple.
In my family you pretty much have to go back another generation for good bakers and scratch cooks. I inherited a recipe box with a few small handfuls of favorite family recipes handwritten on index cards. Someday it would be fun to have a recipe exchange with others that might have interesting traditional recipes.
treehugger
9-12-11, 7:36pm
In my family you pretty much have to go back another generation for good bakers and scratch cooks. I inherited a recipe box with a few small handfuls of favorite family recipes handwritten on index cards. Someday it would be fun to have a recipe exchange with others that might have interesting traditional recipes.
I think this is true in lots of families. After all, there was a giant boom in prepared foods in the post-WWII era, so this covers a few generations.
What's funny about family recipe collections is that I recently got my husband's maternal grandma's box and DH was so disappointed to discover that most of the recipes in there are cut from the back of packages and/or magazine clippings that call for prepared ingredients (cream of ____ soup, Bisquick, etc.). He had a romantic notion about the way his grandmother used to cook that wasn't really fact-based. The same thing happened several years ago when we got a copy of the the family cookbook from his dad's side. 99% of those recipes start with a cake mix or can of soup.
Entire generations of American woman were successfully convinced that it was too hard to make sauces, soups or cakes from scratch, and that their families would be happier and better off with boxes and cans. Now that's good marketing!
Kara
iris lily
9-12-11, 11:42pm
My MIL was a great cook. She had a house full of kids, a huge garden with fruit trees, and she grew up in Switzerland. So, she knew German type cooking but was adventurous and tried many things. DH had pizza at his house before it became an American staple.
I inherited a recipe box with a few small handfuls of favorite family recipes handwritten on index cards. Someday it would be fun to have a recipe exchange with others that might have interesting traditional recipes.
Hey, I have a tin box, too. And I LOVE it, because a lot of the cards were handwritten by those different members of my family. So I have a soup recipe written in my Grandmother's hand, dessert recipe in my my great-aunt's "Claudia's Lasagna" written in my SIL's hand, of course, lots of the recipes I remember my mom trying in her hand. Then I have little tear-outs from Better Homes and Gardens 1957, and best of all, I have my Mom's Christmas cookie recipe that is all flour-dusty and shortening-greasy, and has a tack mark from when she tacked it up to follow it from year to year.
One of my favorite possessions.
My mother was a very good cook although the food was mostly meat and potatoes. She made bread weekly as well as baked weekly. She was an excellent baker.
Absolutely! Even though money wasn't something we had much of growing up, mom always managed to grace the table with well-balanced and delicious meals, and to this day she can still raid a kitchen with sparse cupboards and create a meal fit for a king!
My mom was not a good cook. She was a passable cook, who at repetoire of tried and true recipes that she rotated. They were from the book and never varied. They were recipes she liked and knew that in general we would try. I don't recall her experimenting or trying new things, or cooking from scratch. She didn't bake, rarely made things like pancakes, cakes, quick breads. If she did, they were from a mix.
My dad did the cooking in our house most of the time and he could have been a gourmet chef until he got terrible acid reflux and couldn't eat much anymore. That happened when I was about 12. Mom is a good assembler. She is good at pairing foods and has basic cooking skills so she is able to make good food, but she doesn't have the depth of knowledge my dad has.
My favourite meals of my Dad's were his French Onion Soup and Roast Duck. Mmmmm. The roast duck took all day to make and was extremely putsy so we only had it about once a year, but it was good. He would go all out on the cooking and my mom would go all out on the presentation. Mom loves to deck out a table and had specialty dishes and stemware for just about everything you could ever imagine. Dad made delicious food during the week and on the weekend went all out.
My favourite meals of my moms are her turkey walnut gorgonzola salad, her chicken paprikash and her orzo with fish, sauteed veggies and lime.
My grandma on my mom's side is a very good cook, but in a meat-and-potatoes not-afraid-of-butter kind of way. My favourite meals of hers are ham loaf, rice pudding, a concoction called kraut kruppens which is chopped ham and sauerkraut rolled up in noodle dough like a jelly roll and fried, then steamed, and her chicken and dumplings. My great-aunt is another great cook. I like her...everything. Especially her pies. Her pies are legendary. And her butter sponge cake. Dang it. Now I'm hungry. :)
Simplemind
9-17-11, 1:49pm
My mom was a fantastic cook and baker. She collected cookbooks and was always trying to experiment and change it up with our limited budget. Nobody to this day can make a pie like her. My sister is close but I could tell the difference. My mom has alzheimers and one of the first things we noticed was her inability to understand and follow a recipe. I miss her cooking :0( I have taken over the family dinners and I have the cookbooks but I swear the ju ju was in her kitchen counter along with her memory which is now lost forever.
nope. i think the last good cooks were my great grandmothers. both of my grandmother's worked, and so they were into convenience meals, and my mother is relatively self-taught on the packaged foods that my grandparents bought. and then, that's how i was taught -- package sauce mix, brown meat, canned veggies, rice/potatoes/etc -- and soemtimes the potatoes were flakes from a box.
when i became vegetarian, i had to learn how to cook. I'm currently -- imo -- the best cook in the family, btu since the sun shines out of my BIL's every orifice, he currently holds the title.
Now, my husband pointed out that in our head-to-head competition, i cooked everything from scratch as follows: creamy fennel-leek soup, beautiful apple-walnut salad with home-made dressing, roasted turkey stuffed with lemons and sage with a sage-cream sauce, roasted golden and red beets and a hot mixed bell pepper and chard (beet greens) salad with spicy-roasted sweet potatoes, followed by home-made buttered-pecan ice cream with home made caramel sauce. Likewise, everything was local, organic, fair trade (when not local -- like sugar), and pasture raised (animals).
my BIL made beef roast with roasted vegetables, salad, and minestrone soup, and bought a cake (from a good, local shop). He prepped the meat with a spice mix (not of his own devising, but out of a packet -- which also included MSG), and the salad came out of bags, and the dressing was out of a bottle -- not a home mixed dressing.
I think my parents just feel the need to say he is the best-est ever. My aunt, though, who spent christmas with us and I was using limited everything while we travelled and were cooking at hostels -- and then spent easter with my sister -- decided that, in fact, my cooking is MUCH better because I did manage to make a pavlova (which is not easy) in a HOSTEL without my own utensils (and not even the mixer to beat the eggs -- did it with a WHISK!).
And, I have a lot to learn. I am really good with a LOT of different veggies -- having been veg and vegan for so long -- and I'm just now learning how to cook meats. I'm good at roasting -- i can roast like no-body's business -- but braising, grilling, or even basically handling seafood or offal is beyond me at this point. :)
My mum knows how to cook, but I don't think she ever actually liked doing it when we were kids. She had enough on her plate with us running around! (excuse the pun, haha)
She taught me culinary skills, but let me put it this way - I didn't know that you could make a cake without a box of Betty Crocker or mashed potatoes without a canister of Idaho Spuds until I was about 19...
My mom really tried to be a good cook, but after we kids were all adults, she had to admit that she really hates cooking. It showed, because she stuck with the same recipes over and over without experimenting much. Everything was bland and much of it was out of a can or box. It turned out to be kind of a blessing, though, because I became inspired to do my own cooking from an early age and to end up being a darn good cook. My picky son would disagree, though.
She thought she was, and I've never had the courage to say otherwise!
My mom was the queen of opening cans and making things into casseroles. Everything was....edible. We did have a huge garden in the summer and she did can or freeze tons of produce every year, but only in the most basic ways. Home canned green beans suffered the same fate as factory canned green beans.
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