(by Charlotte Adamis)
The very first dinner my 25-year-old mother made for the man who would become her second husband, a widower nearly 13 years her senior and father to three little girls, was something less than a stunning success.
On the face of it, I’m quite sure, there was nothing wrong with the meal: pot roast with spinach and buttered egg noodles. My mother, even as a young woman, was an excellent cook. But as a divorcé who’d never actually lived with the man she claimed as my biological father, a man I wouldn’t meet until I was 29 and pregnant with my first child (and a man I’d find out, by accident, nearly 30 years after that, was not actually my father), the only person my mother had to cook for was me—and I was a very picky eater.
My mother and Henry couldn’t have been dating for very long, a few weeks at most, when she made him that first dinner. Not long enough to know that he despised spinach and didn’t care for noodles.
But Henry proposed anyway. And in August, 1966, only six months after they met, they married with blithe optimism that our two families would merge as magically as the raw batter I mixed and put into my Easy-Bake oven. The cakes came out as a solid unit every time.
Our family did not.
Mealtimes became a primary focal point of tension. It was, I can see now, a clash of cultures. When my mother and I had been on our own, there were no rules governing what was eaten or how. I was allowed to subsist on a self-selected diet, the foundation of which was melted chocolate ice cream, thick pretzel rods, and sour pickles. From a very young age, I’d also been taught how to get my own breakfast so my mother could sleep in.
In my new father’s household, breakfasts and lunches were, for the most part, prepared by a rotating cast of live-in childcare providers. And, as the minority member of this clan, I was expected to eat whatever my three new sisters ate, even when it was something I abhorred like Campbell’s tomato soup or cream cheese and jelly sandwiches.
My mother was in charge of making dinner in our new home, and a meal was not a meal unless the main attraction featured a slab of meat—pot roast, brisket, London broil, chicken, lamb, or veal (my father’s favorite).
When I was maybe eight or nine, I discovered the ugly truth about the treatment of veal calves and couldn’t bear to put it in my mouth. But under my father’s roof, we children were required to finish everything on our plates or we’d get sent straight to bed. I was sent up often enough that I wrote in my diary in the second grade about secreting away Swiss chocolate bars so that I’d have something to eat.
Believe me, I wasn’t starving. No child ever starved in our house. But I found the rules unbearably repressive. Like the rule against reading at the dinner table. Yet just like I figured out how to dispose of my unwanted food by spitting it into my paper napkin or dropping it under the table for the dog to eat, or even (when desperate) swallowing pieces of it whole, I also learned how to hide my book under the round, white Formica table as a ready refuge for the family discord that would inevitably erupt. It was far safer to imagine myself into the lives of children who had more agency, like the orphaned Boxcar children I was reading about in the classic (now 100-year-old) book series.
The fights always seemed to begin with my older sister, who had somehow acquired the habit of sniffing her food like it was poison and then salting it before putting a morsel in her mouth—acts that might have gone unnoticed at another table, or at least ignored. But they never failed to set our mother off on a rant about how long it had taken her to make our dinner. And the more she yelled and occasionally tossed out unanswerable questions like why couldn’t we have nice dinners like other families, the harder it was for the four of us girls not to start laughing even though we knew we shouldn’t. We couldn’t help ourselves.
Meanwhile, our father would continue eating with a steely kind of calm. Like a big cat waiting to pounce. I could always tell when it was about to happen, too. His eyes would go hard behind his thick lenses, his attention laser-focused on my wildly out-of-control mother.
“Judy…,” he would begin, his voice tight and menacing.
Even now, so many decades later, I can still feel my body tightening as I recall how my mother would jump up from the table, screaming about how she’d “had it” with one of us, or all of us. And how my father would say with a smile I can only describe as cruel, “I’ve had it with you. How do you like that?”
That was usually my mother’s cue for making a dramatic exit. She’d go flying up the uncarpeted back stairs, my father marching after her, probably still wearing his hard-soled work shoes. Seconds later, we’d hear their bedroom door slam shut, which did little to silence the sound of two voices screaming.
My 84-year-old mother likes to tell the story of how, not long after she and I moved into my father’s house, he let her know that he expected to begin his meals with a juice or a soup.
“I am used to have a juice or a soup,” is what he said.
My mother laughs now. But she also remembers being so angry at the time that she wanted to throw a juice or a soup at him.
In spite of all the drama around food in our house, by the time I entered junior high, I had become my mother’s enthusiastic helper in the kitchen. My palette had also greatly expanded—though I remained averse to eating veal.
By the time I was in high school, I was helping myself to my mother’s vast collection of cookbooks and whipping up dishes by myself in her kitchen. At 15, when my parents went out of town, I organized my first dinner party. My best friend, Alice, and I prepared a steak that we’d soaked in brandy and planned to set on fire for a dramatic finish at the dining room table. But we never got that far. The two boys we’d invited got into a fight and ran out of the house.
(My Grandma Charlotte’s pot, which I inherited)
It probably wasn’t until my siblings and I grew up and left home that our father finally loosened up a bit. Still, during the next 30 or so years, I never heard him wax poetic about anything that went into his mouth—or anything destined to go into his mouth.
Like the time I arrived for a visit with a peach pie I’d made from scratch. The recipe had most likely come from one of the cookbooks my mother had gifted me. It wasn’t from one of hers—she was still a very active cook. But starting with Craig Claiborne’s The New York Times Cookbook, which she must have given me back in the late 1980s, she’d been investing with great pride in building my own impressive collection of both classic and contemporary culinary stars.
“Henry,” my mother had raved as soon as my creation was set down on my parents’ kitchen table, “isn’t this the most beautiful pie you’ve ever seen?”
“Judy,” my father said. “It’s a pie.”
Perhaps he was merely reacting to her intensity. The ballast to her high. A continuation of a pattern I’d witnessed all through my growing-up years: his inability to resist an opportunity to let the air out of my mother’s balloon.
Even so, as my father teetered into his 90s, as long as my mother wasn’t extolling the virtues of, say, the best strawberries she’d ever eaten (or my peach pie), I began to notice a child-like joy he displayed around certain foods.
Ice cream, in particular, made his eyes light up. He liked the good stuff, too. The expensive, artisanal flavors my mother filled their freezer with that he would have scoffed at as a younger man.
The final memory I have of my father is from the week before he died, which will be three years ago this November. My mother had put out her usual bounteous spread for brunch: bagels and cream cheese and smoked salmon, whitefish salad, sliced tomatoes, and a cucumber salad. My father’s appetite had diminished by then. He had diminished, too, both physically and cognitively.
Still, I will always remember how grateful he was that day. How he thanked my mother for everything. And not just for the food that she put on his plate.
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Charlotte Adamis is a retired school librarian and writer who lives in Kingston, New York. Her essays have appeared in Brevity Blog, Hippocampus, and HerStry. Several of her stories have been selected by Writers Read (formerly Read650) and read by the author on stage. She has completed a memoir and can be found on Instagram and Facebook.
Grandma Charlotte’s Pot Roast
(My mother tells me she doesn’t really have a recipe for her pot roast. She’s always made it just the way her mother made it—my namesake, Grandma Charlotte.)
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Salt and pepper a bottom round roast.
Brown the roast in some oil* in a big, heavy, deep casserole on top of the stove.
Take the roast out of the pot and set it aside.
Brown sliced onions and chopped carrots, and add a can of tomatoes.
Put the roast back in the pot, cover, and put it in the heated oven.
Turn the roast every half hour until it’s tender (about 3 hours).
Take the roast out, let it cool, and slice.
Mash the vegetables to make a sauce, and reheat the sliced meat and sauce together when ready to serve.
(*Grandma Charlotte used the fat she removed from the previous roast and saved it in the refrigerator to brown the next one.)