Part Two Collecting Handwritten Recipes

PART TWO

Collecting Handwritten Recipes Was the Result of Being A Kitchen Voyeur

     My mother used recipes from an old beat-up cookbook, but she wasn't, by her own admission, patient enough to ever be considered a good home cook. She could make dinners for us if they involved cooking meat, boiling potatoes, mashing them, and occasionally, roasting a chicken, turkey, or a big ham. She could boil water without burning it, and truth be known, I was never at a disadvantage growing up, having my mother preparing the evening meals. She got us through some tough economic times by falling back on some of the strategies used by her mother Blanche, who I wrote about in yesterday's post. But it was my father Ed who eventually stepped up, and was in charge of the daily cooking tasks, and admittedly, we were quite satisfied with the change, and the more exotic dishes he liked to prepare. Merle was delighted to have him at the helm. He used lots of cookbooks and researched meals he wanted to prepare, sometimes weeks in advance, and while some failed miserably, others showed his passion and competence in the kitchen.
     After he passed away and Suzanne and I were looking through his cookbook collections, we found man handwritten recipes he had copied from magazines, and been given by some of his friends for dishes he thought we'd like to try. This is when I really got choked-up because I knew we were finally discovering just how much the man loved to cook, and turn his retirement into a foodie paradise. Unfortunately, fate played its hand, because my mother had a hiatus hernia and various other diet restrictions, that prohibited her from trying to much other than the most bland output of culinary efforts. He was a frustrated chef, I think, and it still seems strange to me, because he never really showed us this keen sensitivity, because he didn't, I suppose, want us to think he was soft. Afterall, he was a career lumberman, and a former sailor in the North Atlantic Squadron during the Second World War. He was most definitely a good cook, and he had all the supporting reference material to assist him in this regard.
     My real turn-on to the kitchen, and culinary arts, was when I was being looked-after, as a wee lad, by the landlord of our Burlington apartment. Anne Nagy agreed to look after me, to help out my mother and father, who were both employed well outside our area, and would often arrive home from Toronto and Hamilton respectively, well after normal dinner hour. It wasn't a big deal to me, because there were a lot of perks being under Anne's care. She was brilliant in winging-it food preparation, in the category of home cooking, and it was in her small basement kitchen with a small window, where I saw culinary mastery at work. Even before I knew what that was, I watched her make everything from scratch, that drove me wild with the most incredible aromas and visuals, especially the sight of an apple pie in creation, and baking away in the oven. It was often the case, Anne would feed me on the fly so to speak, ahead of lunch hour and supper, just so I wouldn't pass out from perceived hunger. Imagine yourself in a small room with the warm permeating aroma of apple and peach pies, roast beef, fresh bread, country stews and soups that supported a ladle upright.
     I was amazed at how speedily she worked, and honestly, I never remember seeing a recipe in front of her, as she prepared her latest creations. I'm sure she had cookbooks somewhere in that kitchen, and a few gravy-stained handwritten recipes folded up in their texts, but I can't recall where they would have been shelved or even stored in that tiny basement kitchen, with its bright atmosphere but meagre cupboard space. I must confess that I had a lot of questions, but I was more satisfied in those young days to watch and shut-up, because interruptions meant delays in getting fed. But the point of mentioning this in this series of columns on handwritten recipes, as folk art, and old cook books as jewels of cookery heritage, is that this exposure to kitchen-craft and lore, turned my life around even before it had found any other direction. I was in love with Nagy's kitchen, and then, in time, our own kitchen, which was pretty neat all the same.
     I remember the first lunch I enjoyed in Anne Nagy's apartment. Her husband Alex was home that day, from his job at the Massey-Harris plant, and Anne had prepared a stew that was so thick you could drop a cup into it, and it would submerge any more than a fraction of an inch. To go with the stew, she had baked a loaf of white bread, and it had such a beautiful golden crust, that I knew one piece would never suffice. Until I saw what dimensions as slice of bread represented in her family. Gosh, it was the size of three normal slices and was oozing with butter - not margarine which may have only just been introduced to the marketplace at that time.
     When I began eating my lunch, and trying to safely and politely navigate the honking big slab of bread into the bowl for some stew gravy, Alex started to laugh at me from across the table. He said, "Teddy, this is how you eat your bread and stew at the same time." His big calloused hands folded the slap of bread to look like a hot dog bun but thicker. He showed be the end that would be dipped into the bowl, and it was hollow as you would expect. "This," he said, "was better than a spoon, because you can eat it and the stew, right? Try it. You only use the spoon for the very bottom of the bowl, or when all the bread is gone." Gosh, it worked like a charm. The bread was magnificent and the stew was out of this world, at least what I knew of it at the age of five. The Nagys brought their European culture to this wide-eyed kid, and so much of what I enjoyed of their heritage, manifested itself right in that wee little kitchen, that by the way proved to me, size of the facility wasn't an issue with a great cook.
     In the autumn season, Anne's kitchen was loaded full of freshly canned vegetables, pickles especially, and there were preserved tomatoes here, there and everywhere. Anne's best main course dish, in my opinion, was her old country cabbage rolls, which I still dream about. If I was set to be executed, well sir, I'd want my last meal to be a direct copy of her cabbage roll recipe. But I really don't think she ever put it down on paper, because her memory was iron-clad. You know, it wasn't a hardship whatsoever to sit with Anne at her kitchen table, watching culinary magic happen around me. I got to eat apple peels while she readied herself for the final stages of preparation for two or three apple pies, which Alex particularly enjoyed. As I said earlier, the aroma in that apartment was intoxicating, and amazingly inspiring, such that it has stayed with me, in clear memory, all these years.
     I know that Anne Nagy had recipes and cookbooks concealed somewhere, no doubt beautifully dusted in flour and graciously stained with butter from her moist fingers, but to know her, and her sense of resolve to get any job done perfectly, (including looking after me while my parents worked) that she never really needed the hard copy recipes, to make her food delicious. She had obviously learned to cook very early in her life and she could make-do with modest provisions and a small working space. The size of the kitchen honestly, seemed, at least for me, to enhance the whole food preparation experience. Sort of like looking at something minute in size, through the lens of a magnifying glass. I had a wonderful few years looking through that magnifying glass, as such, and learned a lot about cooking passion and competence. She was very unforgiving of herself and I never once smelled a burning cookie in the oven, or over-done smoking roast in her oven.
     To this day Anne Nagy was a sort of culinary folk artist, and I was up close and personal to each of her creations, and it left with me a most enriched opinion of kitchen culture that has stuck with me up to this point. I love being a kitchen voyeur. Now if only I could cook something myself, without having to call the fire department to put the fire, and me, out.
     Stay tuned for more stories about handwritten recipes, old cookbooks, and culinary arts from a bygone era. See you tomorrow.