At breakfast my Dad was twirling his orange juice glass and watching my mother wait on me.
“It’s about time you learned to cook.” he said, peering at me from under his shaggy eyebrows.
My sister and I, pampered and spoiled, were lazy and unskilled in the household arts. Raised in a strict convent school, Mom vowed to raise her own daughters with more love and less discipline. She may have swung too far in the opposite direction. On that morning, I remember my mother being puzzled at Dad’s culinary interest, but supportive of his comments.
“But Dad—I know how to make toast.” I whined.
“You make nothing.” he said. “A baker worked to make the bread. We bought a loaf, your mother sliced it and you put it in the toaster. That’s what you did. You toasted bread.” He paused and glared at me, “Ten-year-old girls world-wide make bread, sew clothes, sell vegetables, take care of their siblings while you can’t even make your own bed.”
I sulked. He used his lawyer voice, the one I heard on the phone in the middle of the night when there was trouble in his large unruly Irish family. By trouble, I mean when someone needed bailing out or worse, when someone died. Until then, grades were the measuring stick of accomplishment in the family and I earned good grades. Now he seemed angry with me.
Dad was going through a rough spot, my mother told me later. He was defending a veteran who’d molested his daughter. My father found the man disgusting. “Men like him should be tattooed on the face with a warning for all to see,” Dad told my mother.
The case disturbed him and he’d realized how overprotected and unprepared for life my sister and I were. He’d decided he was negligent, we should grow up fast and he was starting with me in the kitchen.
“We’ll make a cake together this afternoon,” he announced. Mother, a meticulous housekeeper cringed. She envisioned a flour storm in her tidy kitchen. Many years later she confessed they’d come close to divorce after he retired and took up baking. He kneaded his bread dough while sitting on the living room couch watching game shows on TV. She’d stood over him with the vacuum at the ready. Where had her competent, natty husband gone? The husband who read Bruce Catton and civil war history in his leisure time? Now she was sharing the house with an curious unshaven old creature, a sloppy amateur baker, enthralled with Monty Hall. It was hell for a while until they negotiated a lifestyle tolerable for both.
Dad brought a Betty Crocker Yellow cake mix home. My mom and older sister laughed uproariously. “You call that making a cake?”
“You have to begin somewhere,” he said. He pulled a stool into the small pink kitchen and made me sit at the counter. It was 3:00 in the afternoon, the best time for fun and games outdoors. The front yards in our neighborhood stretched for blocks without fences in both directions. Every post-war bungalow housed a kid or two ready to play our massive hide and seeks, rope pulls, ball games. Stuck in the kitchen with my father, turned stern stranger, we gazed at the box front which depicted a perfect slice of two-layer yellow cake adorned with artful swirls of chocolate icing.
Dad began, “This is what we’re going for. Always have a goal in mind before you start to make anything otherwise you might end up with a Rube Goldberg thing, no matter if it’s a cake or a dress.”
How he decided he was the one to teach his fidgety, unfocused daughter to cook, I can’t fathom. He had no interest in domestic matters and left everything about our home to my mother. If it had been eight o'clock in the evening, I might speculate that alcohol played a part, but he was sober and serious. What a ridiculous pair we were—Dad, dressed in suit trousers and suspenders; me double wrapped, like a cocoon, in my mother’s apron... so long it hung to my ankles.
“Let’s get everything we need.” he instructed. Everything we needed was a pan, the electric mixer, a measuring cup, water, vegetable oil and two eggs.
My father was a good planner. He was fifty-three in 1952 and faced a dozen years before he retired. Scribbling on the back of an envelope, he’d work on his plan to reach the magical financial goal of a thousand dollars a month. He dabbled in the stock market which unnerved my mother, a saver, who squirreled away every penny she could.
The years flew by and he did retire with his thousand, but leaving his work wasn’t as satisfying as he’d expected. Thanks to careful preparation, his successors did well. He was shocked he wasn’t missed.
“It’s like a hand in a bucket of water. You remove it and the void fills instantly, like it was never there. Try to do something lasting,” he told me during one of our last visits.
Back in the pink kitchen, we read the cake instructions together: Empty the contents of the box into the mixing bowl, add water and two eggs. Beat on medium speed for three minutes, pour into the greased pan and bake in the pre-heated 350 oven for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center came out clean.
My mother, unable to stand the pressure my father was putting on me retreated to our basement where she knit and listened to the Plouffe family on the radio. My sister, at the stage in life where my suffering gave her supreme happiness, gloated behind the door of the bedroom we shared.
I tore at the boxtop in my usual style: act first, think later. Dad stopped me and made me follow the dotted lines with scissors, cutting the top off. Through the open window, I could hear my friend Earl playing Stretch on the lawn. I wanted to go out and play too.
“Let’s get that pan greased.” Dad instructed. I smeared Crisco in the middle, missing the corners. Dad made me repeat the process, covering every inch, every nook and cranny.
If he hadn’t followed orders during the war, he told me, he wouldn’t have made it home from France. If he’d failed to grease his gun correctly, he wouldn’t have survived. I wondered how many grease stories one man could tell.
“What will happen if the corners aren’t greased?” he asked.
“We’ll finish faster and I can go outside.” I said
“What will happen if the corners aren’t greased,” he repeated.
I burst into tears of frustration. Sobbing, I said, “I guess the cake will stick.”
“And then what’ll happen?”
“The cake will break apart when you try to get it out.”
Dad smiled. “I rest my case. Is it worth taking the time to grease the corners?” I nodded, forced to answer every one of his questions. On we plodded, yoked together, father and daughter, teacher and reluctant student. He must have been as frustrated as I was. In his zeal to teach me, he’d forgotten I was a child.
Of course, I didn't measure the water correctly. He made me pour it out and get it right. We bent down to see the level in the measuring cup. It would be accurate once the bottom of the meniscus lined up with the one-cup mark. While in the army, in England, waiting to turn eighteen when he would see action, he worked as a pharmacist’s mate measuring out doses of cough syrup. He acquired a few arcane skills, like measuring, and a small pharmaceutical vocabulary. A word maven, he retained the specialized terms in his working vocabulary and they became ours too. We tossed around jewels like aliquot, ampule, deciliter, sublingual, formulary, cathartic. At home, we used them on each other for fun.
“Hand me an aliquot of butter, will you?” Dad asked my sister.
“Oui oui,” my sister replied. “How about a deciliter of milk with that?”
During the cake making, after getting the correct water quantity, he asked if the water should be hot or cold? Now he asks me?
“It doesn’t say,” I cried. “How should I know?”
“Use your head,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I guess— cold. It’s supposed to be easy,” I said blubbering.
All instructions, he declared, no matter how simple, required study and we should have read them through once before acting, anticipating questions . . . like the water temperature.
“Now for the eggs,” he announced as if I’d be thrilled. “We’ll split the job,” Dad winked at me conspiratorially. He cracked one, I did the other and dropped egg shells in the batter which he made me pluck out with mother’s tweezers. I could barely see the shells through my tears. He patted my shoulder, like the old Dad, the pre-teaching Dad.
“Now you’ve made something.” he said.
It was six o’clock. I’d been crying for over an hour. My sleeves were snotty and my eyes swollen. We put the cake in the oven. Dad let me remove my apron but he made me responsible for the time. When the buzzer sounded and I removed our creation from the oven, my heart sank as low as the cake. An ugly swale ran across the middle, the sides and bottom were too brown and the center was pale. It looked like a cheap copy of our target, the picture on the box. It was a mocker of the Crocker. My sister, a budding scientist, opined that my tears diluted the batter.
“It even tastes salty,” she quipped after tasting it. “Sublingually,” she added, looking back over her shoulder.
Dad didn’t live long enough to see me apply all the lessons he taught me in the kitchen that day. He’d be amused that I cracked more than ten thousand eggs (leaving no shells behind) during my time with the California Egg Commission and that I became friends with the World’s Fastest Omelet maker, an epic planner. Even more surprising, given my resistance to that lesson, that I once earned a living formulating generic cake mixes—low cost copies of those Betty Crocker beauties.
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