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Food and drink: Mom's the word

All we are saying is give mom a break

My best gal-pal gave me a fridge magnet years ago that reads, "Well-behaved women rarely make history."

Well-behaved women also make a lot of meals.

Yes, Mother's Day is a social invention but it's also become a social convention and it's rapidly approaching this Sunday - you haven't forgotten have you? - along with the requisite Mother's Day brunch or dinner to give mom a break at least one meal out of the year.

And so I dedicate this column to all mom's everywhere, especially those who remain the chief cooks and bottle washers around the house despite holding down jobs, on average, at 79 per cent of men's earnings for the same work (Conference Board of Canada), depending on who they are, where they live and what they do for a living.

Do a quick survey of your friends who are moms and, whether they work outside the home or not, you'll likely get a story that mirrors Statistics Canada's: women still do most of the housework and that includes making most of the meals, or at least organizing the flow of food into the house, even if that means string cheese, frozen pizzas and granola bars.

Just over 80 per cent of Canadian women report working outside the home but, unfortunately, men doing equal duty when it comes to housework hasn't kept a reciprocal pace.

I remember my mom and I calculating the number of meals she'd made over 62 years of married life and, yes, she worked part-time for 20-some of those years.

Three meals a day for 22,630 days adds up to a whopping 67,890 meals. This in a household where dad's cooking runs the full gamut from poaching a good egg to heating up leftover spaghetti when he's on his own.

Mom and I tried to be realistic in our calculations, knocking off a couple of thousand meals for vacations, lunches and dinners out for whatever reason and, of course, one meal off every year for each Mother's Day. But even if you end up with, say, 65,000 meals that she's made over the years - and this was a few years back - that's still one heck of a lot of cooking.

While we were doing the calculations, she made an interesting remark: I don't mind cooking, she said, it's all the meal planning I get tired of.

What are we having tonight for dinner?

That's a good question. Even Una Abrahamson in her book, Domestic Life in Nineteenth Century Canada, devoted an entire chapter entitled "The Dinner Question" to the matter.

And what are we going to have? Answering this is something so overlooked and taken for granted that we barely make any meaningful acknowledgement of it and the incumbent time, thought and effort it takes. I wonder, for instance, if it ever gets accounted for in the rates of daily participation in housework that Stats Canada tracks (89 per cent for women and 59 per cent for men, by the way, according to 2005 figures).

First there are the issues of what goes with what, considering taste and texture, along with the overall considerations of nutrition and food group mixings and matchings.

If you start with something like a pan of lasagna or some leftover mac 'n' cheese it's doubtful you'd add mashed potatoes or a side of porridge. Or maybe you would if you're baching it, but most meal-planning moms would think twice. Likewise it's doubtful they'd serve a strong-tasting cole plant like broccoli or mustard greens with a delicate dish like sole.

What does everybody feel like? The collective mood and the weather dictate lots. A heavy casserole doesn't work on a hot August day, nor does a green salad with cold cuts cut it when monster winter storms blow in.

Then there's the time and effort of making sure what needs to get used up is used up before it goes bad - checking those fresh produce drawers in the fridge and opening those used yogurt containers to see what's really inside to plan accordingly and make the most of everyone's money.

Plus someone has to check supplies on hand and keep some kind of grocery list going, even if it's done in the broadest of brushstrokes with the vaguest of items like "veggies" listed so you'll have on hand what you think you'll want to cook up and what you just plain want, and what will generally keep everybody in the clan happy and prevent the next household skirmish from breaking out whether it's between you and the kids or you and your housemates. Just so long as everyone is cooking from the same page.

Cooks and household managers, otherwise known as housekeepers, in the 19 th century and earlier, also had another huge consideration weightier than any other: class.

Lord help you if you had guests and didn't pull off a dinner with the right serving dishes served from the right side, the right cutlery and the right food itself, which spoke to good taste, and I don't mean flavour, good manners and good upbringing, meaning you knew better: a mayonnaise of salmon, a lobster salad, game or pigeon pie, a leg of mutton, cherry tartlets, a raised pie and perhaps a ratafia pudding, made with sponge cake, milk, eggs and ratafia cookies, which are something like macaroons, made with my latest fascination, a delicious meringue.

Although we think we're no longer slaves to it, class still very much comes into play today (what do you think foodie fascinations and phobias are all about?) along with the age-old custom of serving your guests the very best.

Even if it's just your pals dropping in for a casual lunch, bet you'd never consider serving them a bowl of soup from a tin with a slice of crappy bread.

Nor would you do the same for mom on Mother's Day. So go for broke. Take her out to the finest, when only the finest will do, or start planning now for a Mother's Day feast that will leave enough leftovers to get you all through the next few meals with mom never lifting a finger or using a brain cell to plan the next meal.

Now there's a treat every mom, well-behaved or not, will go nuts for.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who was never too well-behaved.