NONFICTION -
    with a focus on food  
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Sixty Years in the Kitchen
by Kaaren Strauch Brown

Omi was a so-so cook. One of her greatest strengths was her willingness to try out new recipes and to ignore any criticisms her fussy children might make. Despite the fact that German women of her generation prided themselves on their cooking ability, she clearly didn’t enjoy cooking. The experimental dishes helped her through the boredom of it all. She did make a fine Pflaumenkuchen. My face announced what I thought of my stepmother’s attempt at making the plum cake. We never did get along after.
 
My Aunt Mary was a talented pastry cook who insisted on kneading the water out of butter before she started her puff pastry. She proudly announced to all and sundry that she had an international repertoire—Bavarian food, Alsatian food, and the Eastern European foods favored in Berlin. I learned to buy puff pastry.
 
It was only many years later, when I lived abroad and tried to find the ingredients for cooking the food my family ate, that I grew to appreciate the cooking difficulties Aunt Mary and my mother overcame when they arrived as refugees. I was inspired by a good friend living in a small English village who managed to find everything she needed to maintain a traditional Korean diet for her family as I whined about my inability to find sour cream in Leamington Spa.
 
I grew up in a small mining/farming community during the Second World War. This meant that we ate what was seasonally available. Canned vegetables (home canned with bounty from our Victory Garden) were served all winter. Meat was scarce. My father hunted. I remember learning to eat squirrel, trying hard not to bite down on lead pellets.
 
Long before he married, my father lived in India, serving as a doctor to the members of an English colony. His love of curry was passed down to everyone in the family. Although he normally didn’t cook anything except his own breakfast, he could spend hours experimenting with various ingredients, most of them not easy to find in rural Wisconsin, trying to duplicate a well-remembered Indian dish. Exotic foods and trying new dishes were an integral part of my family of origin’s culture.
 
The dinner rule in our family was that the children had to try everything on the table at least once. Resistance triggered a little homily from my father about the necessity of being able to eat anything since one never knew where one might be living in the future. This was strong motivation indeed for a twelve-year-old who devoured Richard Burton’s travel romances.
 
Memories of three childhood foods have persisted through the years. Beets! I tried and rejected beets innumerable times. Then, one day, perhaps my mother cooked them differently or perhaps my palate had matured, or, even, perhaps because I was not being oppositional, I suddenly liked them. Then, once, in a small French restaurant on the Moroccan coast, I heard a child breathe out, “les crepes,” as though his fondest wish had been granted. I knew just how he felt. An entire batch of crepes, the German pancakes of my childhood, made whenever my father was absent at dinner, eaten with jam or fried apples, has been my secret solitary dinner for years. A third guilty pleasure related to childhood memories is pork hocks with sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. Only the Asian markets of San Francisco seem to carry fresh pork hocks. Unfortunately, I married a man who eats none of my comfort foods.
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I went off to college loving food. Although I could can meat and vegetables, I couldn’t cook a dinner. After several unhappy experiences in several women’s dormitories—my oppositional nature has never totally deserted me—I wound up living in an old house that had been converted to efficiency apartments. As the only woman in the house, the males living there appointed me as the cook. They would buy and pay for the food and be responsible for cleanup. So I learned to cook. Woman’s Day became my bible. My companions were good-natured about my mistakes. Death by Cloves became one of the cards in the Clue game we all played when studied out.
 
A marriage and three children later, my family spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. It was an international camp for adults where the women and children spent their days together while the men were off doing something they thought was very important. Our neighbors were German so I met another great German cook. Our first beef fondue dinner was in their apartment. It was splendid! The sauces made the dinner particularly special. I carefully learned each of them.
 
Over the next twenty years fondue became the official birthday dish for each child. We purchased electric fondue pots. We needed to buy more and more fondue forks as the boys brought girlfriends to their birthday dinners. Tastes changed. One son gave up red meat so fish and chicken were added. One girlfriend was a vegetarian so I took a lesson from a Korean neighbor to learn what vegetables might work, and also learned that all the new additions benefitted from another addition--tempura batter. This dish has slowly replaced the Christmas goose when we all gather together over the holidays.
 
In retrospect, it was my interest in eating that fueled my interest in cooking, one growing quite naturally from the other. If I ate something I loved, I wanted to learn to make it, if only to be able to eat it whenever I wanted. Tiramisu took several years of experimentation. The first time I ate it was in a student café in Perugia, Italy. It was perfect, and I’m sure not at all traditional, or at least not at all like the many Tiramisus I ordered in a variety of settings over the years looking for my original experience. I did succeed in replication after many failures, although even the failures tasted fine.
 
Over the years I have learned a number of things. The most important lesson was not to try to write French sonnets before learning French. Mastering the basics of cooking, including the chemistry of various combinations, what works and what doesn't work, takes a long time. It is tempting to make substitutions. Some of them work beautifully and some are ghastly. I was never afraid to throw out the failures even if it meant scrambled eggs for dinner.
 
I learned to learn from my daughters-in-law. One totally changed the way I make jam; another taught me a better way to make an old family holiday standard, red cabbage; and another taught me to sit back and let her cook the Vietnamese dishes of her childhood. And, occasionally, I channel my long dead mother, triggering a desire for something truly new. Currently, Usha’s Pickle Digest, 300 pages of Indian pickles, and Chinese Street Food sit on a coffee table, little yellow tags marking my next attempts.
 
At the moment, however, I’m working on oysters. There are such excellent farmed oysters available in the San Francisco markets it seems a crime not to eat them. Oysters and artichoke bottoms are a winning combination, in a cream sauce, over puff pastry. In the end though, fried oysters with tartar sauce (lots of tartar sauce) and coleslaw remain a simple but tasty favorite. Even my husband likes it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kaaren Strauch Brown is a lifelong student, retired Professor of Social Work, and post retirement museum docent. She is a recent transplant to San Francisco from the Midwest. After annoying her fellow sixth graders with her fiction many, many years ago, she has returned to writing. Her science fiction book, The Abril Legacy, is available at Amazon E-Books.

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​Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.
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