PATTY CAKE, PATTY CAKE

PATTY CAKE, PATTY CAKE

What’s that I smell?

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Growing up in our Brooklyn NY apartment had its disadvantages. Our landlady (my grandmother) didn’t want to change our coal furnace to gas. She was raised on a wood stove back in Poland and thought her building should be coal (wood wasn’t as easy to come by as coal). Our building was a three-family walk up. My grandmother rented the bottom floor, she and my aunt lived on the middle floor, and my family had to top floor, because the top floor had an extra bedroom (which we needed).

The apartment was heated (if you could call it heat) by steam radiators. These so-called heating devices were located in the dining room and “parlor.” We didn’t call them living rooms back then.

To avoid confusion, I’ll briefly describe our apartment. You’d walk in the front door (ah hell, we only had one door). The bathroom was on your left and the coat closet on your right. If you walk and veery slightly left, you’re now in the kitchen. Veer right and you’re in the dining room. Make a complete 90-degree turn and you can walk right into the front bedroom, Keep walking and you’re in the second bedroom. Keep walking and now you’re in the parlor. Walk to the end and turn right and now you can walk into the “hall” bedroom where my brother slept.

It is what was known as a railroad apartment since most of the rooms were in a straight row.

In a way, I guess you could say we’d grown used to the cool air in the apartment. Even the coal stove didn’t much warm the kitchen.

And that’s all I had when my mom wanted to teach me how to cook. I silently chuckled to myself. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to teach me at that point in my life - she had no choice. Knowing my mom, she would have preferred to wait another year or two, then stand in the kitchen with me as I would learn to read and cook using written directions. Mom always said, “You can mimic, but you need to read in order to learn.”

Circumstance created a situation that had my mom look for work outside of home. That left little 12-year-old me to help with the laundry, taking care of my five-year old sister, tidying the rooms, and start supper for the family.

I never thought about it. I just did what had to be done. We all did chores to help our parents.

One of my chores was to start dinner while my mom began her trek home from her job.

My mother had all the ingredients laid out on the kitchen table with instructions on what to do. That night spaghetti was on the menu. There was no such thing as jarred sauce. You bought the canned sauce, canned puree, sliced and diced your onions, peppers, or whatever else you added to the mix. Then you cooked it for about an hour, while giving it the occasional stir.

I had the sauce in the pot on one of the coal burners. Then I placed a pot of water on another of the hot burners and waited for it to boil. (A watched pot never boils, so I busied myself with stirring the sauce, watching my sister, and reading a book. School was out for the summer so at least there wasn’t any homework to do.)

When the water boiled, I added the spaghetti.

My mom arrived home from work about forty-five minutes later, dipped the wooden spoon in the sauce and complimented me on a job well done. That is, until she looked at the pot of …. Well, it wasn’t water anymore.

“Uh, what’s this?” she asked almost hesitantly.

“That’s the spaghetti.” I was confused at her confusion, until she placed a long-handled fork in the pot and pulled out what looked like paste.

“Oh, honey, exactly when did you put the spaghetti on the stove?”

I answered, “As soon as I put the sauce on. Why?”

“Watch your sister, stir the sauce. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.” With that said, she practically ran out the door.

Once back, as soon as she walked in the kitchen, she said, “Sorry, hon, but I’ll explain in a minute.”

She opened the kitchen window and dumped the entire pot of putty-like spaghetti. It fell in the backyard with a loud splat!.

“Now, I’ll explain what I should have written down but neglected to do so. You never cook spaghetti as long as the sauce. You put the water to boil about halfway into cooking the sauce. Once the water is boiling, you add the spaghetti and only cook it for about 12 minutes. That’s it!”

I felt so bad that I wasted an entire pound of spaghetti but mom and her warped sense of humor (now you know where I get mine from), laughed and said, “Oh goodness. What have I done? I shouldn’t have tossed out that putty-like spaghetti. It was so thick we could have used it to repair where the wallpaper is beginning to peel off the wall.”

Huh! Thanks, mom!

By the time I turned fourteen, my grandmother decided to change from a coal furnace to gas. We had our first gas stove!

Wow, I thought, NOW I can cook a decent meal for my mom.

Yeah, right! It was like learning to cook all over again.

Cooking on a coal stove and suddenly switching to gas . . . omg! I think I burned almost every dish I tried to make. To a young teen, who’d been used to cooking on a slow-heating, coal stove, the speed of gas boggled my mind. Yep, this was something I’d have to learn – and learn quickly.

One consolation is that, at least, I never set the kitchen on fire!