An Old Lady's Recipes

     Page Seventy-One.
     Does anyone need a short cookbook which teaches how to prepare 1950's style gourmet?
     When I worked at Fancy-Shmancy Nursing home, I befriended an old women who had been a private cook prior to retirement. For twenty-five or thirty years she cooked in an upper crust home in Shaker Heights. She knew of my interest in food and one day approached me about writing down her old recipes. Mostly because I thought it would be good for her, I accepted the challenge and went to her room most Friday mornings and had her recite, from memory, all her old cooking instructions.
     At the beginning, when she said things like, "now add some chopped tomato" I would say, "how much tomato". That would frustrate her to no end, so I stopped. (Today, I understand the aggravation inherent to that question.) It took a few months, but I finally ended up with a few dozen of her favorite recipes. When we were done, she said, "how do we get this published"? At that point I realized she didn't just want to save her recipes for posterity. She wanted to make some cash off them. I explained to her that it's nearly impossible to publish a cookbook and make money from it. But she badgered me for a few months anyhow until she gave up.
     She would die a few years later. Two of her four children wrote me letters of thanks for all I did for her. (There were other things too, but, that's for another time.) She wasn't even on my unit either, but, whatever. So, I still have all those recipes. They're stapled together nicely and stashed away in the back of my clipped recipes folder.
     If I ever have reason to make Chicken in Aspic, golly, I'm ready.