Spiller - Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mothers Recipe Box

COMPROMISE CAKE

Copyright Nancy Spiller 2013

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spiller, Nancy.

Compromise cake : lessons learned from my mothers recipe box / Nancy Spiller.

pages cm

1. Spiller, NancyChildhood and youth. 2. CookingSocial aspects. 3. CookingPsychological aspects. 4. Mothers and daughtersCalifornia, Northern. 5. Stay-at-home mothersCalifornia, Northern. 6. Suburban lifeCalifornia, Northern. 7. Sex role. 8. Compromise (Ethics) 9. California, NorthernBiography. 10. Cake. I. Title.

TX652.S635 2013

641.5dc23

2013017680

Cover and interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-687-2

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To Tom, always and forever

TABLE OF CONTENTS

My mother is by my side as I roll out a piecrust in my southern California kitchen, instructing me with an authority and enthusiasm she rarely displayed in her life. I dont make piecrust often, but when I do she is always there, at least in my imagination.

In my mind we are in her kitchen, the kitchen of my childhood home, her workplace. I am nine years old. The San Francisco East Bay light is bright white, but not harsh like Southern California light can be. The linoleum floor is clean, the coved tile counters recently wiped down to a satin sheen with her damp kitchen rag. My mothers hands are plump, less spotted with age than mine are now, her bosom ample, though slumped with middle age. Her coloring is vivid, considering she smokes, doesnt exercise, or wear makeup.

We roll out the crust as round and thin as we dare, and she lifts it delicately from the floured surface to the waiting metal pan, a trip fraught with tension until the safe landing. We exhale in tandem before she allows me the well-earned pleasure of crimping the crusts edge with finger pressed to thumb for a perfect ruffled selvage.

The preheated oven welcomes our pie shell into its gas-warmed belly for the first bake-to-brown step.

Our concern now turns to the filling. If we are making lemon meringue its a double boiler stove-top operation. I am only nine, but I know well the pleasures of a perfectly baked, weeping golden mound of meringue. Today, though, were going a different route, a cooler direction. Were making my mothers Lemon Chiffon Pie.

The word chiffon always stops me, makes me think of gauzy fabric, the gathered skirts of ball gowns. Chiffon is not my favorite word for things to be eaten.

I try not to think of the name when I do eat it, the cool gelatinous filling of egg and lemon and sugar topped with whipped cream and chopped walnuts, set in a flaked Crisco crust with a delectable grain of salt. Its like biting into a sweet lemon swamp topped by a bank of cream fog; a scattering of walnuts offers the only resistance. These walnuts were grown on our backyard tree, shelled on our hearth, and chopped in a wooden bowl with a wooden handled, crescent moon shaped rocker blade.

But this was in the 1960s in Northern California, when my mother was still alive.

She is now four years gone, and I am making that same pie from the card I found in her recipe box. The card names it Sunny Silver Pie. Maybe my mother changed the name to reflect her need for a less pathetically optimistic sounding pie: a sunbonnet-wearing covered-wagon pioneer of a pie. Or maybe she changed the name to recapture a lost sense of genteel style, to express a longing for more luxurious fabrics than the cotton she sewed by machine or sometimes even, with lumpy results, by hand. Perhaps she wished to experience chiffon as a pie since she no longer had any occasion to wear it.

I now live in Southern California, on the far western edge of Los Angeles, known as The Big Wild. The light and the meteorological effects of the ocean air on the land are closer to those of my Northern California sensibility than what I experienced all the years I lived farther inland. Here, mist melts over the mountain ridge that separates us from the ocean. The bright Mediterranean light bounces off the saturated colors of our coastal canyon.

My visit with my mother, her life, and our times together, comes by way of her recipe box that now sits on my kitchen counter. I rescued the yellow box, ancient rust marring the rolled edges of its lid, hand-painted flowers still exuberant after decades despite petals scratched away, from the pile of her possessions headed to landfill when we cleaned out her house, my childhood home, after shed been moved to a small residential care facility in early 2002. It wasnt until months after her death in December of 2007 that I spent any time exploring it.

It was a bite of a walnut from the Santa Monica farmers market that compelled me to make this Sunny Silver Pie. The Central Coastgrown, freshly harvested nuts taste more like the nuts of our backyard tree than any Ive had since my childhood. Im sure it is their freshness combined with the soft coastal air and the winter light, but they conjured a quick and visceral longing for that pie.

The recipes directions end with top with whipped cream and nuts, if you desire.

If you desire.

Its the whipped cream and nuts that I desire most at this moment. But the phrase stops me.

If you desire.

Its timid, wistful, and indifferent all at once. I cant help but wonder what, beyond whipped cream and nuts, my mother desired. And I wonder to what degree I desire the same things.

We didnt have many satisfying mother-daughter talks when she was alive. I usually felt I was the mother, lashed with the need to understand a withdrawn, recalcitrant, unhappy daughter. My job, like that of any concerned parent, was to try to figure out what my coy, puzzling, enigmatic, fey, angry, teasing, infuriating daughter meant in any given moment. My hope was to help her become the palpable parent, available and appropriately concerned about my childish needs.

But that wasnt meant to be.

The recurring conversations I best recall from living together were her efforts at determining what I might desire, if only to eat. It began with her poking her head inside the door of the TV room and asking playfully if Id like anything from the kitchen. I would say, What did you have in mind? and she would respond with tempting items like apple pie la mode, or chocolate cake or oatmeal cookies. When I finally said yes to the cake or the pie or the cookies, shed say with a mischievous grin, Well, we havent any.