In Defense of Mom or A Busy Kitchen and a Cold Hearth

(slightly edited from my original blog)

After my previous post, I feel that I need to write a post in defense of Mom!

My frustration with the way I learned to ‘not’ clean the kitchen (by procrastinating) is just a part of my own struggle with procrastination. There certainly weren’t many times that I did it without being asked or told until I was much older – like when I came home from college and was happy to be in any kitchen at all (or when I felt guilty when Mom was sick or taking her finals)! Mom has told me a story several times that I treasure.

She was sitting in a chair with me on one knee and my brother on the other reading us a book when her Mom came to visit. Nannie J made a comment about it being nearly lunch time and the beds were all still unmade. Mom told her that her babies were growing every day, and that after they were grown there would be plenty of time to make the beds. I'm glad cleaning the kitchen wasn’t a top priority for her, but our life together changed when both my brother and I went to school and she went to work, then to college, and then began teaching.

I can remember many things from when I was very young and Mom was home with us - or we were home with her...

Some of them are my own memories, and some of them I remember from stories and pictures. It’s hard to explain the difference that happened when we went to school and she went to work,. It just seems it wasn’t so much a life centered around our home and land as it was when I was very young – and maybe my world just got bigger… When I was actually ‘learning’ to keep house by doing it (or not - by procrastinating as I was saying before) it’s was in a family that all went to school and work and came home. Our house was empty all day long. That doesn’t sound too odd for people nowadays, but the following story will show you how different if feels.

In the winter our home was heated completely by wood heat, so the fire would need to be fed all day long. Dad would bank the fire at night and get up very early before anyone else did and stir it up before he did his chores, so in the morning the house was already getting warm. The first place I would go every morning was to stand or sit on the hearth. During the winters after Mom began working and my brother and I were in school (after we were old enough to get off the bus at our house rather than the sitters) we would come home to a very cold house.

I would open the door expecting to feel the warmth of the fire and there was nothing, it was just cold. That was when I realized that our house had been empty all day. Our house now is hardly ever empty – there’s almost always some combination of us here. My kitchen has to function different than Mom's did. The way I learned to function in a kitchen hasn’t been working for me. It has taken me 10 slow years to figure that out! Now I'm trying to dredge up those early memories of when we were very little and all home - how did the kitchen function then when it wasn't me in charge of getting it clean?! Mom, if you read this sometime you can help me out!

Laurel's Kitchen: Tennessee Corn Pone Recipe

My friend Beth has leant me (almost on permanent loan) two very wonderful cookbooks by Laurel Robertson: Laurel's Kitchen and Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book. Maybe on another post I can tell why I like them so much (even though we aren't vegetarians) and why I have been so reluctant to return them (I've recently decided I just have to get copies for myself), but for now I'm going to post Laurel's recipe for Tennessee Corn Pone since Beth posted about it here but didn't have her book to type up the recipe!

Tennessee Corn Pone

A homesick friend from Knoxville described a dish his grandma used to make. After several false starts, we came up with this - a dead ringer, he says, and certainly one of his favorites. (This is Amber talking, not Laurel -- I'll have to tell you where the phrase dead ringer comes from in another post, but this is one of the reasons I like Laurel, people just came into her kitchen and she cooked for them. She got to know them through food.)

4 cups very juicy cooked and seasoned beans (especially pinto or kidney)
2 cups cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 quart of buttermilk
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1/4 margarine

Heat beans until quite hot and pour into a lightly greased 9" x 13" baking dish. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Mix the cornmeal, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Melt the margarine and combine with buttermilk and eggs. Stir the wet and dry ingredients together until smooth and pour them over the hot beans. Bake on the top rack of your oven until bread is a rich golden color and the sides of the corn bread pull away from the sides of the pan. This takes about 30 minutes. Serves 10 to 12.

Laurel says this about beans:

Even if you weren't interested in cooking them, you'd probably like to have several jars of beans around for decorative value alone. Their rich, earthen colors are a feast for the eye. Our Red Bean Mix is designed to maximize nutritional value, but its appearance would delight the most exacting artist. It may be because during the Depression people could afford nothing else, but a good many people have a mental block against beans. We did at first, but it quickly gave way with a little experimentation.

She goes on to talk about how to cook them and even about flatulence when we aren't used to eating them. In one place of Laurel's kitchen she even talks about eating beans for breakfast!