Throw Granny off the Balcony

Zlata, my mother, always loved to eat. Even as a baby she had a disgust of mother’s milk and was always reaching for food. One day when Zlata was four months old, Granny returned home from the bank where she worked, and saw a guilty look on my great-grandmother’s face. 

‘What’s happened?’ She asked suspiciously. Then she saw my mother with a ring of red surrounding her mouth. Somehow this baby had gotten into a jar of hot peppers and devoured all of them. 

‘What happened then?’ My sister and I ask Granny. 

‘Nothing,’ Granny says, ‘she was perfectly fine and insisted on eating solids from that moment on.’ 

As much as my mother loves to eat, she has always been a professional woman without much time to devote to the culinary arts. She is a pretty good party cook, since she gets her recipes from her girlfriends who are gourmets, and she can do wonders with vegetables, especially kale and string beans which she makes into great stews. ‘You always ask for those wartime foods,’ she tells me whenever I place a request. 

My aunt was the baker in the family and makes amazing cakes and petites-fours. Mother never quite got the hang of the finer points of pastry making and anyway doesn’t have the patience required for it.

Her first misadventure in the kitchen occurred when she was a teenager and decided to make vanilitse. Vanilitse are round or crescent shaped Balkan cookies, small, two layered, with a wonderful preserve in the middle, usually apricot or raspberry. The dough is comprised of flour, walnuts, butter, eggs, vanilla and sugar. 

One day my mother got it into her head that she was going to surprise Granny and my aunt and make a batch while they were out. As she went through the recipe, she read: kneed the dough and roll it out until it lifts from the counter. She thought about this and remarked aloud, ‘Hmm, my crazy sister forgot to write down –add water.’ 

Of course, when she added a cup of water, she ended up with a sticky mess. So she added more ingredients. I don’t have to tell you how expensive those were at the time. However there was no result; the dough was still sticky, and so she kept adding more and more to it until she ended up with something the size of a basket ball. 

‘Oh my God,’ she said aloud. ‘When my mother sees this, and how much food I’ve wasted, she’s going to kill me.’  What to do, she wondered. Alighting on a novel solution, she cut the dough in half and threw it out the window. She baked the vanilitse, which turned out hard as rocks. 

‘But we ate them anyway,’ she says. 

She must have remembered the window solution later when she was first married to my father. He came home from work one day to find his downstairs neighbor waiting to accost him in the hall.

 ‘Mr. Simic,’ she said, ‘I saw your wife lowering these dishes out the window to the dumpster. She had tied them in a tablecloth. When I untied the cloth and the rope, I saw that they were perfectly fine, so I washed them. Would you like them back?’ 

‘No, no,’ my father replied. ‘ Please keep them.’ 

‘What the heck, Mom,’ I ask her, ‘you were always such a good housekeeper.’ 

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I let them pile up for so long, that it seemed overwhelming to tackle all that encrusted gunk.’ 

Personally, I suspect that she disliked the pattern and wanted to get new dishes. 

Maybe my father got a taste of what was to come later, since she always had crazy schemes and a lot of jobs for him to do around the house, which he would procrastinate on until she went berserk. 

One day when I was already long married, I came to their house and looking down on the parquet floor saw a black blob. 

‘What happened here?’ I asked.

‘Your mother wanted me to re-stain the floor,’ my father explained. 

‘Why is it black?’ 

‘I bought the wrong color at the hardware store.’

 ‘Didn’t you notice it was black?’

‘Well,’ he explained (this was a man with a Ph.D) ‘It was in the same place on the store shelf where the brown stain usually is, and I thought it would get lighter when I started smearing it around.’ 

But she too had had a similar mishap, he was pleased to report. She was making cheese strudel and chocolate cake simultaneously and in a moment of distraction poured chocolate all over the feta and cream cheese combination. 

‘I caught her trying to rinse the phyllo dough,’ he says. ‘She was going to salvage it.’ 

Another time, her friend Mara, who is Hungarian and a world class pastry chef, gave her the recipe for chocolate covered strawberries. When she got to the party that my mother was giving, Mara took one look at the tray with the strawberries and exclaimed, ‘Did you make them with your feet?’ 

Apparently my mother did not realize that a dose of shortening and a little water, unlike the case of the vanilitse, would have been the ticket to unclumping her too thick chocolate. 

‘So they looked like they were covered in mud,’ my mother said, ‘but they tasted really good!’