2018_September-October.indd

the Home Cooking issue

THE RECIPE BOX

words by Pableaux Johnson I n my family, a true mayonnaise requires a recipe.My Baton Rouge grandmother Lorelle made her own, and referred to jarred commercial versions as “bought mayonnaise.” Rich and eggy, her mayo glowed a pale yellow and had the consistency of creamy lemon curd. I wanted to make some mayonnaise, and I hoped I could find that recipe inmy mother’s culinary biography — her recipe file. Dating back to the 1970s, the white, notebook-sized binder sports a heavy cardboard jacket covered with drawings of climbing strawberry vines. It was designed to hold newspaper clippings and menu ideas in the time before Google and Pinterest put a world of cooking in our cell phones. Overstuffed and tied shut with a threadbare red ribbon, the file held my mother Carmelite’s pieced-together

cookbook, a retrospective of her lifetime in various kitchens. My mother passed away in 1995, but her file lives on, stashed on a dusty bookshelf in my home. I rarely open it, except for times like these. Now, unlike my grandmother, my mother was not one of our family’s most celebrated cooks; she worked full-time most of her life and raised several kids and stepkids, so elaborate cooking was not something she had the time for or did very often. While her mother was a classical homemaker, Carmelite evolved into more of a modern survival cook. But cook she did, and I knew that the chances were good that at least some of my grandmother’s recipes might be preserved in that old binder. I knew that compiled inside it just might be a copy of the entire Hebert clan’s culinary canon — and hopefully, that mayo receipt.

Digging through it, I’m always amazed by the hilarious and disorderly collection of printed and handwritten materials. The sheaf contains three decades of kitchen education, aspirational home economics and workaday standards that kept our ravenous family fed. Before the advent of laptops as kitchen appliances and coffee-table celebrity chef cookbooks, many home kitchens ran on the weekly wisdom of the newspaper food section, and my mother’s was no exception. Most of the recipes in Mama’s file are yellowed, clipped columns from the kitchen corner and advice columns from the newspapers in all the places she lived (and cooked) — South Florida; Richmond, Virginia; Houston; and, eventually, New Iberia, Louisiana. But my favorites for pure artistic appreciation

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY

SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2018

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