Becoming Our Parents

In a new television commercial, a series of adult men and women lament that they are turning into their parents.

The examples they cite relate to frugality (“Why is the door open? Are we trying to air condition the whole neighborhood?”) and to being behind the times (“I find myself texting in whole sentences”).

I don’t relate directly to most of the examples in the commercial, but I still find myself becoming more like my parents each year. I look so much like my dad did in his 50s and 60s (though he was a lot thinner and not quite as bald), I use some of his Deep South expressions (“I’m waiting on you,” rather than “waiting for you”) and I sometimes adopt the sarcastic undertone my mother might convey when you didn’t agree with her. Audrey has developed the same tendency that her mother had to worry about things large or small. Our kids know the importance of texting as soon as they arrive some place whenever they travel either a short or long distance. She is on “pins and needles” until the text arrives.

It seems inevitable that we just can’t escape the hold our parents have on us even after they are no longer physically in our lives. For Audrey and me, cooking, especially for holidays, is one definite way that we imitate our parents. And I don’t think we’re unique.

How do I know? For Exhibit 1, just look at the meal Audrey and I put together last Sunday when our kids joined us for Mother’s Day.

Here was the "historically-correct" menu:

1) Barbecued short ribs marinated in the special sauce my mother used to concoct (a mixture of sautéed onions, ketchup, chili sauce, Heinz 57 sauce, spicy mustard, and just a touch of sugar—with none of the ingredients actually measured, just added “to taste”); parboiled to remove most of the fat and assure quicker cooking on the grill; and then grilled as my father would do them so they were moist but still properly charred. Since I gave up eating red meat or chicken more than 10 years ago, these ribs were recreated from memory, not from taste. But they were well received by the rest of the family—and admired longingly but forlornly for by our dog.

Barbecued short ribs were a staple of the meal my parents would often cook for my entire family in Savannah on Father’s Day each year. They are also the meal that Brett would usually request to be served when he returned from sleepaway camp each summer.

 

2) A salad of marinated cucumbers and string beans, made the way Audrey’s grandmother used to do it. Slice the cucumbers and rings of red onion thinly; combine them with white vinegar, vegetable oil, mustard, and a little sugar; then let them sit for as many hours as possible to build the flavor. Once again, this recipe has no set measurements. That would defy tradition.

3) A special dessert—a German shortcake called muerbeteig, that is part of our family lore and humor. Following my mother-in-law’s rules, the dough was made with Crisco rather than butter for flakiness and included a touch of vinegar (“That’s what creates the muerb,” or fragility, my mother-in-law would say.) After the dough was baked, Audrey spooned on top a compote made of frozen rhubarb cooked with a half-cup of sugar. Then she covered the cake and rhubarb with a layer of melted semi-sweet chocolate bits that was allowed to harden in the refrigerator before serving.

Brett and Amanda and the famous muerbeteig.

For most of our married life, Audrey refused to take on making a muerbeteig herself despite her mother’s cajoling. “It’s so simple,” my mother-in-law would say. “Why won’t you make it?” In later years, our children picked up on the cajoling, in part to tease Audrey and in part to get a rise out of their grandmother. Brett even took on the task of baking a muerbeteig for a family holiday meal several years before Audrey did. The cake we served this Mother’s Day helped bring my mother-in-law back into all of our memories again and made us all smile

So, this Mother’s Day, we became our parents and grandparents, if only for a little while and mostly at the stove and dinner table. I am wondering just how our children will become us in the future.