Talkin’ Funny: Kitchen and Life Lessons from My Mama

My mother has been gone so long, she seems like a figment of my imagination. Almost seventeen years. Seventeen years is a long time. On the days I grieve the most, I can smell her down-home cooking. On my lowest of days, I can still hear her voice.

I always loved her, but it took me years to love her voice.

* * *

I loved my mother fiercely but I took her blatant Southern-ness as a personal affront. The way she would drop the ‘g’ from words like ‘running’ or ‘cooking’ or thought fixin’—as in “I’m fixin’ to go to the store”—was an acceptable phrase to utter in front of my bemused little motley crew of friends made the color rise in my cheeks and was no doubt the catalyst to my rather nasty habit of chewing on the end of one of my long pigtails whenever I was embarrassed or nervous. All of my friends loved her—everyone did—and they delighted in her dropped g’s and the way she called them sweetie pie—except pie sounded like pah.

Make no mistake—she had a voice that could calm a rattlesnake. It struck the perfect balance between that slow cadence that is the hallmark of the Southern accent and a certain plain spoken-ness that immediately put you at ease. It was that voice that lulled me to sleep with many a bedtime story, but when you’re a child whose friends are of the New Englander sort with crisp, clipped speech that would make a linguistics professor weep with joy, it’s hard to love your mama’s twang.

In my family, I had the dubious honor of being the only Northerner; having been born on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon Line was my invisible scarlet letter. When I was a little girl, we would visit family in my parents’ small, non-descript hometown in rural Georgia and if I committed even the tiniest of offenses—an accidental spilling of juice, a dropped egg—my paternal grandmother would blame it on my “Yankee blood.” Somewhere in the superstitious fabric of Southern thinking, to be born a Yankee is to be born with certain disadvantages, not the least of which is clumsiness. It was because of this that I was usually relegated to the far corner of my grandma’s kitchen.

My mother’s kitchen was a different story. It was her classroom and, often times, I found myself the student. One night, she rummaged through our cabinets collecting ingredients for one of our weekly cooking projects. Not yet tall enough to reach the counter properly, I searched for the stool. I crushed cookies for the crust; she stirred a pot on the stove. She was teaching me how to make chocolate pie—a staple dessert in the annals of Southern cooking—and the kitchen smelled of hot fudge.

At an early age, my mother knew baking wasn’t going to be my forte (and she was right); it was too precise an art. I liked experimenting too much and lacked the discipline and years to appreciate the subtle nuances of baking, so she picked the easiest possible recipe that I could handle.

“This pie is so easy to make—takes nothing at all to remember what’s in it.” Pah.

“Mommy, you talk funny.”

She feigned outrage but her shoulders shook with an easy, good-natured laugh.

“Strange, cuz you talk funny to me.”

I talked funny?

I was confused. She was the one with the accent. Yankee blood and private school would ensure that I never said fixin’.

“Always listen through the other person’s ears before you judge, Mickey.”

The way she used my nickname made me smile and, as I turned this thought over in my mind, our buttery fingertips met as we pressed out the pie crust. We laughed and talked about the silly, nonsensical things that make those mother-daughter moments so precious. Well, mainly she talked and I listened. I listened for that accent, tried to detect the lazy way her tongue would hold on to words a beat too long but I couldn’t hear it.

I never heard it again—not because the accent had suddenly disappeared but because I had stopped judging.

Chocolate Tart with Salted Pecans

Ingredients (for filling)

1⅓ c. white sugar

3 egg yolks

¼ c. unsweetened cocoa powder

¼ c. all-purpose flour

¼ tsp vanilla

3 tbsp butter

1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350°F. Sift together dry ingredients and combine in a deep saucepan. Beat egg yolks with milk. Slowly add to sugar mixture; add vanilla. While stirring with a flat-bottomed wooden spoon, cook over medium heat until thick. Remove mixture from heat and stir in butter until melted. Pour filling into baked pie crust and top with salted pecans*. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and allow pie to cool.

*For the topping, mix ¼ cup crushed pecans with 1 tbsp of melted unsalted butter and ½ teaspoon of sea salt

Ingredients (for crust)

1⅓ c. (about 30 cookies) Biscoff cookies (graham crackers work as well)

1 tbsp sugar

Pinch of salt

¼ c. (½ stick) of unsalted butter, melted

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350°F. Coat 9-inch glass pie dish with nonstick spray. Mix finely ground cookie crumbs, sugar, and pinch of salt in medium bowl. Add lukewarm melted butter; mix to blend. Press crumbs onto bottom and up the sides of dish. Bake until golden around edges, about 10 minutes. Cool completely in dish on rack before filling with chocolate mixture.