It is true that, just as you cannot choose your family, you cannot choose your cooking influences. As one whose life is devoted to writing about and, perhaps more important, to cooking and eating food, I have a significant—and complicated—culinary heredity. I have always claimed that my Jewish grandmother, a baker of traditional specialties like mandelbrot and strudel, was my mentor in the kitchen. Mema showed me how to handle dough, how to rely on my hands to measure out flour, and how to care about whatever it was I was making—to put love in the batter. I logged many, many hours watching my grandmother, in her gold bedroom slippers and with her face in full makeup, bake. With her, though, I was less an apprentice than an audience member of an imaginary cooking program. No, it took someone else to teach me the nitty-gritty lessons about good cooking: It took my stepmother, Melanie.
This is no Cinderella story, but there is a similarity: My stepmother, while not exactly wicked, was universally reviled by my mother's side of the family—which stands to reason, since she was partly responsible for my parents' divorce. I'm not sure a young child should be 100 percent aware of the specifics of the dissolution of her parents' marriage, but as far back as I can remember, I knew that my father had owned a store specializing in antiques from the Far East, that he had fallen in love with one of the shopgirls, and that he had left my mom and me, when I was 1 year old, to be with her. So it was with a negative disposition and through suspicious eyes that I first looked upon this woman. Sure, she'd always been a presence in my life, but I had a hard time trusting her. (Also for a good reason: "Don't ever trust her!" my mother used to say.)
The thing about Melanie, though, was that she was unapologetic about who she was. The very definition of the word shiksa, she was a non-Jewish woman who had lured a married new father away from a wife he seemed to belong with: Both sets of my grandparents orbited in the same social circle and belonged to the same synagogue. My stepmother was an outsider, everything my intense, brunette, studious, and constantly chattering mother was not. She was quiet and preppy and blue-eyed and blonde and pixieish, and she had gotten her man.
She was also the child of a mother who had grown up in the English countryside and who loved to cook and bake—mostly things I'd never heard of, like "scones" and "Yorkshire pudding." When it came time, as it did every other Sunday, for me to spend the day with my father, the man was quite satisfied to let slip entire afternoons watching football. It fell to my stepmother to plan activities for me, and she instinctively headed into the kitchen. I was about 5 the first time she set up a step stool, outfitted me in a white apron tied with red ribbons, and gave me a choice of several enticing dishes for what would be our first cooking lesson. I went for yellow cupcakes with chocolate icing.
Next Page: The Lessons She Taught Me...
