The Day Of The Dead

Peg Bracken died recently. I heard the news with one of those small stabs of sadness since she has always been one of my very, very favorite writers. I keep my copy of the I Hate To Cook Book (That's not a link to the actual book, but rather to the combined 2 volume edition which you may as well go ahead and get.)beside my bed at all times, flipping through it and chuckling and admiring Hilary Knight's drawings for the millionth time.

Here's a recipe straight from the book:

Orange-Carrot Salad.
6 small servings
Prepare one package of orange jello, using one and a half cups of liquid.
Pare and shred a large carrot. When the jello is semi-firm, avert your eyes and
stir in the carrot shreds - also a small can of pineapple chunks, if you have some. Let
it jell the rest of the way in the refrigerator.

"Avert your eyes" - heh. I have made this quite often since my children will eat it when they won't eat ANY other vegetables, and now The Girl can make it herself, so long as I handle the boiling water part. My only change to this sturdy little recipe would be to DRAIN THE PINEAPPLE first.

I got my copy from my grandma's house - she very kindly let me take it home after my grandfather's funeral and I poured over it on the way home, sitting in the backseat of our car next to The Boy, who was almost three months old and who had never met my grandpa. I had The Boy in late January and my grandfather started failing soon afterwards, while staying down south with one of his daughters. I would make plans to get down to say goodbye to him and then be overwhelmed by the idea of travelling so far in the winter with a newborn and so I never did. The Boy nursed constantly and I would wake up each morning that winter full of milk and sadness. My grandfather came home for his funeral.

It took a few readings of the book before I noticed that there was a name written on the first page in a strong slanting hand - Clara, my great-grandmother who had died at a tremendously old age when I was 17 and who had been brave and good-humoured and in terrible pain and fond, in an abstracted sort of way, of her dozens of great-grandchildren. Some of the recipes in the book are checked off in her firm hand - Chicken-Artichoke Casserole was apparently a real favorite which is something I can't even imagine, my great-grandmother not even quite old yet, vigorously middle-aged and making fancy company casseroles.

I never really knew her, although I saw her quite often. I was an unhappy and not terribly sensitive child and she was one of the hosts of very, very old people who I had in apparent abundance in my life at that time, people who blended together in a kind of fragile wrinkly anonymity and who would gradually fade away and not be at family gatherings any more. So it is a funny sort of feeling to think that I have grown into a woman much like her (we like the same cookbooks, anyhow), that we could have been friends, maybe, had we not been separated by 76 years.

"On this mountain," the Bible verse goes, "the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples," something I picture as being much like one of those crowded long-gone buffet suppers at my grandma's house. Maybe I will look up from my plate - which will hold, perhaps, orange-carrot salad and chicken artichoke casserole, although I rather hope not - and meet my great-grandmother's bemused eyes, and we will know each other for the first time.

Peg Bracken died recently. I heard the news with one of those small stabs of sadness since she has always been one of my very, very favorite writers.