Eat, Darling, Eat 

Cakes came out of an Easy Bake oven as a solid unit. But after Mom’s marriage to a widower with three daughters, their blended family did not.

Mom was an “artiste,” but art school would have been an impractical choice for earning a living, plus of course she would be getting married and “taken care of.”

Hands that pinched her baby daughter’s round cheeks. Hands that were lifted to the sky as she danced around the kitchen. Hands that formed delectable meatballs.

Mom wore a pink and green quilted skirt and matching floral blouse to serve dinner the night that she went to the hospital. She did not return.

There were delicious pillows of pasta and the salty-sweet tang of focaccia at family gatherings. Something was wrong but no one would talk about it.

Women in the family had "gotten in trouble," and Mom couldn't care less about traditional female roles like cooking, but disparaged a daughter who did.

When her daughter's new boyfriend moved in, Mom was polite but not much more. Until she found out he could cook.

Mom felt like more of a servant than the only daughter of Hungarian immigrants with four older brothers, responsible for meal after meal after meal.

As party guests talked about the Vietnam War and the travesty of inflation, Mom, the most beautiful woman in the room, set out her famous crabmeat dip.

Mom was eating at an outdoor cafe when she sneezed, and her earring, a gift from her daughter, flew into the nearby fountain—or so she said.

A difficult pregnancy, an emergency C-section, open-heart surgery on a tiny seven-day-old daughter—through it all, food was for sustenance, not pleasure.

Feeding a crowd was something Mom did with enthusiasm, always eager for a new challenge. But cooking salmon in the dishwasher?

Some of what Mom prepared for holidays dated back to an older generation whose journey to America was motivated by an escape from the Czar.

Within a classic stay-at-home, post-WWII mom was a free-spirit, as wacky as the actresses she adored: Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday, and Shirley MacLaine.

All married people fight—that was the message from a deeply unsatisfied mother. But a hand-cranked ice cream maker introduced some family fun.

The sky might fall down if Mom (now 92 years young) stopped cooking, all through immigration from Sri Lanka, to Ghana, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

A young daughter was anxious to learn what she thought it meant to be female. When her mother refused to share kitchen wisdom, it felt like rejection.

When a difficult mother was facing declining health alone, her daughter commenced a rigorous project of cooking for her mother’s freezer.

Mom's sense of order and pragmatism guided most everything in her life, and taught her daughter much of what she knows about cooking and entertaining.

Mom kept her rings on while baking her famous buttery cakes—and beat the batter with a spoon, pretending it was her husband.