Liver and Onions

My mother was pretty good at making sure we always had a hot meal to eat. She certainly had a few favorite go-to options, but she made a good variety of different meals.

We usually had a roast beef on Sundays, with potatoes, carrots, and onions. In fact, this was such a quintessential Sunday meal that Sundays were empty without it. Once, when I was a teenager, my mother was hospitalized for several days, including a Sunday. Nobody mentioned anything about Sunday dinner, but it didn’t see right to me that we should each just scrounge around and maybe make a peanut butter sandwich. So I pulled a roast beef out of the freezer, called my friend’s mother for instructions, and I prepared our roast beef Sunday dinner.

In my early childhood—which probably coincides with my parents’ lean years—my mother did a lot of canning and baking. She would buy seasonal produce by the bushel. In some cases, we grew our own produce. Peaches, pears, apples, grapes, cherries. She canned all of these and more. She amassed an impressive food storage. We kept much of it for emergencies, but we did cycle through it and enjoy the harvest from time to time.

My mother sometimes ground her own wheat to bake bread. She baked loaves in bread pans, but she would also use a large drinking glass as a sort of cookie cutter to make hamburger buns. She would sometimes make cinnamon rolls. More often, orange dinner rolls.

Baking was common during the holidays. Cookies of many varieties, fudge, and other sweets filled our kitchen, awaiting their delivery to our friends and neighbors. My favorite of her holiday treats was the divinity, a nougat-type of candy. I would sometimes ask her to make some, but she said it would only turn out if the humidity was just right.

A mother of six children—especially picky ones, each with different tastes and distastes—could be forgiven for taking shortcuts in the kitchen. Yet, my mother didn’t shy from hard work. We loved it when she made Apple Cinnamon Sinkers for breakfast, made from a deep-fried applesauce dough and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Naturally, we didn’t always appreciate her offerings. We often had to endure terrible things like . . . vegetables . . . in order to get dessert. Or sometimes—especially if my grandmother was visiting—to even leave the table. Why did she constantly inflict on us these awful foods? In this lies one of my fondest memories of my mother. I was rather young—maybe 10 or 11 years old—when it occurred to me that my mother frequently made us meals that she knew we wouldn’t like, but she never made anything that she herself wouldn’t want. I confronted her with this “conflict of interest”. She earnestly responded that this was simply because there wasn’t anything she didn’t like.

My mind raced. Surely, there must be something she didn’t like, but how would I know? That was the crux of the situation. I never saw her eat anything she didn’t like because she never made any of those things. And then my young mind remembered. I remembered once from long before the story my mother told of visiting her in-laws. Or maybe they were her soon-to-be in-laws. Whatever the true circumstances, my grandmother had served liver and onions for dinner, and my mother hated it. So, I burst out, “Aha! I know that you don’t like liver and onions!”

To my mother’s credit, she soon made liver and onions for dinner. Even though she knew she wouldn’t enjoy it, she made it for me. Or maybe she did it to preserve her integrity. Whichever it was, I learned that day that I also do not like liver and onions.