My dad didn’t cook much when I was growing up. He took over Saturday morning pancakes after the birth of my youngest sister. He mastered the grill as an almost erudite hobby – salmon, steak, Thanksgiving turkey. He made scrambled eggs and hashbrowns after church when I was a teenager and fed us from the Zatarain’s box on backpacking trips (always accompanied by his favorite joke about oatmeal, calling it our designated emergency food). But this was really the extent of his culinary comfort zone.
The last Christmas I was in college, I, my sisters and my mom all came down with a rotten, feverish flu. Our worst times were, mercifully, staggered enough that we were able to care for each other as the fevers waxed and waned. But at one point, I was the only one feeling up to eating, and Dad was the only one feeling up to cooking, so I asked him if he would make me a grilled cheese sandwich.
To my genuine surprise, this request stymied him. In the abashed voice he only ever used to admit to his daughters that he was unsure of something, he said, “Gee, honey, I don’t think I’ve ever made one. It won’t be pretty.”
I had been a self-taught cook for a few years at that point, and took a sort of beginner’s pride in my technique for things like quesadillas and grilled cheeses, where the bready vessel so often burns before the cheese melts properly. “Low and slow,” I told him. “I don’t mind waiting.”
After twenty minutes, he brought me a plate with the sandwich on it, slightly blackened on the outside just the way my mom makes them, apologizing profusely for not knowing what he was doing. I thanked him and wolfed it down, not at all surprised that it was just what I needed. That’s my dad – never quite sure of what he brings to a table, literal or metaphorical. I don’t know if it’s because of my love for him that I always find what I need in what he does for me, or because he is just that good.
I don’t care to find out, frankly. Let this idol stay upright.
I mentioned in this post that my father considers yellow cake with sour cream chocolate frosting to be the ultimate birthday dessert and the only one he ever requests. Unfortunately, Betty Crocker stopped making sour cream chocolate frosting in a can when I was a kid, or at least stopped distributing it out in the hicky-mountain west state where I grew up. It had occurred to me before that perhaps I could make it for him, since he often bemoaned its loss (regular chocolate is not superior, in his mind).
(I didn’t expect to be back writing Birthday Cake: The Sequel, but here I am.)
Then I received a wedding gift from my Gran, his mother, of an antique Betty Crocker cookbook that she had picked up at a bookstore on one of many happy visits to the Oregon coast with my grandfather. And sure enough, in it is the recipe for sour cream chocolate frosting. Now I was armed. This was doable. But the birthday boy himself needed to quality test it. I quailed a bit before this. God forbid, what if it was wrong? (There wasn’t any corn syrup in the recipe, after all.)
I happened to be home for Christmas this past year (his birthday is a few days after), and even though my mom had a can of chocolate frosting in the pantry, I horned my way in on the process and cobbled something together from the last of their sour cream and (accidentally) twice as much butter as was necessary.
How it worked, I don’t know. But Dad called it the closest thing to the frosting of his childhood he had had in a very long time. I suspect some of that is paternal love, of course, but I only embarked on this frosting wild goose chase for the sake of love – a love I had noticed, among other things, in a grilled cheese a few winters before.
Dad – I’d say we’re even, except of course the frosting is my paltry offering beside a lifetime of love, encouragement, freezing track meets, spirited political discussions, shared appreciation of literature, treating class registration day like a holiday, and a serendipitously perfect grilled cheese. Happy Father’s Day – I have the best one.
Along the Milky Way 