My Father Loved to Cook
He was a tough sailor-kind, who had served in the North Atlantic Squadron, a gunner on the Royal Canadian Navy ship Coaticook, during the Second World War. His mainstay over his working life, was as a manager in the lumber business, first in Hamilton and then in Bracebridge, Ontario. He loved to have a social drink after work, with his chums, over at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch. He had smashed his knuckles many times at other watering holes, when someone bandied an insult of one kind or another in his general direction. He was Irish enough to be a boxer, gentle enough to be a good father. Earlier in life, he had been a rather accomplished hockey player who was recruited to play international hockey, in Scotland I believe. And he was a well known fastball pitcher in Toronto. He decided to remain in Toronto while some of his mates went to play hockey overseas, and the last game I saw my dad pitch was in a mens league game in Burlington, Ontario in the early 1960's.
It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say I came from a male dominated household. My mother Merle, while a tough lady who had many accomplishments in the banking industry, was both a good mother and kept house with the same pride as her mother Blanche Jackson had maintained the family home in Toronto. Like many kids in the post War period, home life was ever-more important and even though we lived modestly in an apartment on Harris Crescent, in Burlington, I was nicely spoiled by their interest in giving me.....what they hadn’t enjoyed in their own respective childhoods. From early photographs, especially at Christmas, I did okay in the toy department.
What came as quite a shock to me initially shouldn’t have......enlightenment came much later in life, about sharing of household responsibilities. My wife Suzanne might question just how enlightened! Actually I went as far non-traditionally, with my own young family, when I became a full-fledged "Mr. Mom" when my wife went back to her teaching job after our sons’ respective arrivals. When my father Ed (Edward) began taking more control over Sunday dinners, I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Merle’s role in the kitchen through the week didn’t change....she looked after the meal grind from Monday to Saturday. I don’t know where his passion for cooking came from but it had fully matured by retirement, and my mother was delighted. What began as Sunday meal preparation generated into a seven-day-a-week culinary protocol. It was his amazing Yorkshire puddings and gravy that won me over as a kid, and what kept me wandering by their place on Sunday afternoons, long after I had moved out, hoping for an invitation. There was always lots of food in the Currie kitchen. As my mother was on a restricted, low-sodium diet, and had problems with her gall-bladder and hiatus-hernia, I ate the menu items that Merle couldn’t, so my dad was always glad I showed up to try his latest recipes.
My father has been gravely ill now for the past month. It began on the 15th of December 09 with a small stroke but has worsened over the past weeks due to other unrelated illnesses getting in on the trouble-making. He has been near-death on numerous occasions, and at this point the prognosis for a recovery is slight at the most optimistic. When I began work on my web-site to promote the preservation and collecting of "handwritten recipes," Ed offered much reference assistance, and showed me many scrap pieces of paper, and some others scribbled onto journal pages and the inside covers of published cookbooks, that he had penned since those roast beef and Yorkshire days back in the early 1960's. He had shared many recipes with his other culinary arts friends, everything from making the perfect pickled pig’s feet, pickled eggs, dill pickles, chutney, chili sauce, spaghetti sauces, fabulous full-course dinners and desserts, and the list goes on. Since we have most recently had to pack up his apartment (my mother died two years ago), I have spent several enjoyable hours, despite the melancholy of the move, sorting through some of his keepsake recipes, many from his own hand. There are of course handwritten recipes given to him by his apartment building chums, who were fascinated by this former naval gunner/lumberman’s passion for good food.
I asked my mother, one day, if she was jealous about Ed’s takeover of the kitchen. "Not at all..." she fired back, letting me know that I shouldn’t ever think of rocking the boat, with a situation so wonderfully seaworthy as a man taking more responsibility in the kitchen. Her only complaint was that he often cooked things that were too spicy or too rich for her stomach to handle but it was a minor objection. His complaint of course is that she was too fussy and could handle more than she would admit. I was there to mediate. I recall that during the period of the late 1970's and early 80's, it was Ed’s kitchen magic that kept me fueled. As a lowly paid reporter I sure benefitted from his desire to cook for others.
He didn’t cook in a state of the art kitchen. It was small and very much run of the mill. Nothing special. Everything special was contained in those handwritten recipes, stuck inside the many volumes of cook books he got as gifts every birthday and Christmas from his family. He used the published recipes to develop a framework for a dish but he would add ingredients he fancied, and ones he thought we did too, hence the handwritten versions he used....... that while not entirely original, had been adapted to his and our taste.
The funniest cookery story I have of my father, dated back to our first days living in Bracebridge, Ontario. We had just moved from Burlington, Ontario, to the mid-Muskoka community, where my father had accepted a job with Shier’s Lumber,..... a legendary name here in the logging industry for many decades. Shortly after we arrived however, my father got into a dispute with the owner, and quit on the spur of the moment. What made it a tad more complicated, is that we were living then, in a company-owned house up on the extension of Toronto Street. While we were given time to pack-up, we didn’t have much in the way of financial resources to survive. While my mother had found work at a local bank, Ed, when he wasn’t trying to hustle up another job, did try his best to be a creative cook on a tight budget. We have laughed at it many times since but he did have one major folly.......a recipe someone had given him for.....get this.....peanut butter potatoes. These were baked potatoes, scooped from the skins, mixed with peanut butter, put back in the skins and baked again. My mother and I tried to be brave but it just didn’t fly. At first he did seem to a little hurt by the fact we couldn’t swallow the concoction.....but joined us for a chuckle later on that evening. Whether it had come from his Cabbagetown roots, (Toronto) or not, we never found out......and we don’t mean to suggest that this wouldn’t be fine for some folks......just not us! Ed’s attempt to stretch the food resources cost us some potatoes and peanut butter that first winter but gave us a longstanding good humor about culinary trial and error that would last literally a lifetime.