On my kitchen wall hangs a charming picture of my mother, dressed to the nines, sitting at the table in our Memphis kitchen circa 1960, serving slices of lemon meringue pie to my brother and me. I’m holding my plate with a big loving grin on my adorable five-year-old face, and we’re all smiling warmly — if a bit artificially — at one another, over my mother’s magnificent culinary creation.
Many folks will be too young to remember this, but at one time regional newspapers ran a weekly column spotlighting a specialty dish prepared by a local homemaker. It was a minor honor to come to the attention of the editors of these pieces, and I’m sure my mother, who would have been about 40 at the time, was pleased to be selected. She was in fact a wonderful cook, with a real passion for food and curiosity about cuisine, which was not necessarily common in those days of fish sticks and jello. She even had an advanced degree in nutritional science and worked for a time as a hospital dietician.
But the funny thing about this newspaper piece is that lemon meringue pie was NOT her specialty! In fact, she said that she never conquered meringue; despite her culinary skill, hers would always ‘weep.’ But evidently the Memphis Commercial Appeal editor wanted a piece about lemon meringue pie that week, dammit, and my mother was assigned to make it regardless! We WERE a happy family, and my mother WAS a good cook, but beyond that, the piece was totally fabricated. Even the items arranged on the countertop in the background are make-believe — a silver tea service, a stylish hammered aluminum ice bucket. These would never have been out on a daily basis, but were probably chosen and deployed by the photographer for the photo op.
I find all this simultaneously amusing and distressing. My mother laughed it off, though I’m sure it rankled not to be allowed to flaunt her authentic talents rather than the ersatz ones demanded by the paper. Certainly it was typical of the time period, when married women couldn’t get credit cards in their own names or serve on juries in some states. Enforced meringue-making really isn’t that big a step from handmaid bonnets.
I can’t help but relate this to Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s incredible body of work on gender rights, and the insult to that effort represented by Trump’s nomination of Amy Barrett to RBG’s seat. After decades of progress, are we now to be driven backwards? — towards a society in which women’s true gifts, natures and ambitions are of no interest; indeed are openly repressed? The America some yearn to ‘recreate’ never really existed for vast numbers of Americans — it was a myth, just like my mother’s meringue.
Linnetontheleaf 