"The Tools of the Trade"

The tools of the trade are not what they used to be.

For better or worse, the beauty of this is in the eye of the beholder.

In my growing up years in Southern California, my mother, a renowned "good cook" of our Mexican-American culture, relied on the simple and classic to get her good meals on the table. Except for a cast-iron pan, most of these mainstays have gone by the wayside in favor of "new and improved" tools. Let's discourse a little about that.

Take the simple art of salsa making. For the indescribably best product, a whole lot of green chilies need to get roasted. A melange of personal favorites (experimentation decides this, one cook at a time) snug up in a skillet, but with less intimacy than one might think. You can't crowd them too tightly, and you can't rush the proper blistering of chilies with quick, relentless heat. Try this once and you'll suffer the loss of superb ingredients as well as  deflated anticipation. Skins that will not release take all the good flesh with them--straight into useless, straight into the garbage can.

No, you gotta baby things along. Fire up that seasoned (cast iron) skillet, nice and hot to start--but lower that burner to steady and almost slow, and nurse those blisters into billowy pockets heavy with "just right" blackening. Ideally, the skins (upon cooling) will pull away with most of the flesh intact while retaining just enough blackened peel to embolden your salsa with flecks of char.

Food art, but delicious, flavorful art. I can still see on my mother's counter her "molcajete," the tool of the trade for stripping down roasted chilies and blanched tomatoes. A molcajete (if you are unfamiliar) is a volcanic rock bowl with three tapered legs, the whole thing being one piece. The unit is accompanied by a tejolote, a smaller shaped rock meant to be manipulated as a hand grinder against the peppers and the walls of the molcajete.

Somehow salsa made that way seems "crafted" to me, but in a recent conversation with my mother, she confessed readily that she hasn't made it that way for many years. She even further blasphemed my memory by saying that not too long ago she made some for the family in a blender, the now-accepted (really?) way to do things. (Along with a food processor, I suppose.)

She softened the blow with the qualifier that the blender has to be pulsed "just so," in a "skilled" way so as not to mush the ingredients.

My stabbed heart sheepishly recuperates, because except for salsa that I chop from fresh uncooked ingredients, of course I make mine in a blender too........so much for THAT romancing of the volcanic stone bowl.

(After reminiscing about the beauty of a molcajete I started to browse online for one of my own, but soon decided against it. With my personality and ownership of such a cultural object, I would likely be pressed with the urge to turn my Wisconsin farmhouse into a hacienda, and just don't get me started.)

Another tool gone is the in-counter breadboard that was once included in even the humblest of kitchens, all across America. Young people now are kind of amazed by them; a sturdy, functional board that easily pulls out to provide extra work surface. These days if you want such a helper in your kitchen you have to ask for it and pay dearly for the luxury. (I recently saw a smallish, shabby, actually coming-apart cabinet with a breadboard on an online vintage-specialty site--priced at well over $2000.00, shipping not included.)

In our house my mother didn't make bread, she made tortillas. I can still hear the slap-thunk, slap-thunk of my mother's rolling pin on such a board. She worked up a big mound of dough, and from that tugged off smaller elastic balls. These she whomped and stretched into round discs, then (this time more slightly) charred and blistered them to perfection on her trusty cast iron surface.

The simple, old tools of the trade--they didn't require electricity and most of them were invaluable to most women, regardless of their cultures. No pioneer woman worth her salt tried to cross a prairie without her iron skillet, and I don't know that a pie crust in that age or now can make it across a pie pan without the help of a timeless rolling pin. Whipping cream didn't always result from a motor (see the "Beauty and Purpose" entry on this blog) and certainly not from an aerosol can.

Do I really think that old ways and tools of the trade make for the very best flavors? Do I really think food prepared now on my very modern stove is somehow lacking?

Not when I'm hungry I don't. Sure I love atmosphere and the appeal of timeless things and ways. It is true that old objects and the methods they provided somehow immerse my mind with appreciation for the skills and talents of the many predecessor cooks I never knew. But the food I put on the table now is prepared with enthusiasm (most of the time) and always with a sense of wanting to nurture my loved ones--so what could ever improve on THAT?

Revisiting my mother's own methods wasn't just a warm and fuzzy thing. My witnessing of her simple, priceless talents meant that I could do those things, too. Yes, store-bought tortillas are surely very handy, but the ones I'm planning for our supper tonight.......well, you can imagine.

My fourteen-year-old granddaughter has now witnessed my making of handmade tortillas countless times. Someday, in her own home, I can see her "rolling her own," and it'd better be tortillas!

"Aunt Bea"

I'm now well past the age my Aunt Bea was when I considered her "older."

It was the late sixties and I was fifteen. Aunt Bea was fifty-ish, but Mayberry was not her town. MY Aunt Bea was not pleasantly frumpy or plump. She was beautiful in her own way--attractive, energetic and even somewhat cool. She and I worked side-by-side in the family restaurant her sister and their husbands had established in Placentia, California.

From this setting my work ethic was born. A tad on the shy side, I learned that if you can't blow customers away with wit and charm, you CAN draw them like flames to a moth with good food and service.

The Beatles, Santana, and the Chicago Transit Authority were all musical players in this environment--a surprise to me and at the insistence of Aunt Bea.

"Music for people my age is too dull," she declared, as she prompted me to set the radio dial. "We need music with a beat for people to enjoy their food with and for us to move along to."

Aunt Bea especially like the rhythms of the first-time around Carlos Santana. His music is perfect, she said, for our Mexican restaurant. She considered his brand of Latino-influenced rock a much more natural fit than the Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli tunes she also enjoyed.

Observing Aunt Bea's energetic and fun persona fooled me into regarding her as more youthful than she was, though in this day and age each decade in general seems about "ten years younger" than it used to be. To my sixteen years, fifty-some seemed at the time grandma-ish, for sure.

Aunt Bea was my dad's older sister, and the years don't lie. Whenever she tugged at her elastic-waist slacks, she did herself in. To the untrained eye, she was slender and fashionable enough, but when she yanked on that elastic, her front was foiled.

The trouble with elastic-waist pants, she pointed out, is that they fool you into thinking you're not carrying an extra ten pounds of weight. With subterfuge like that, ten pounds can turn into fifteen, fifteen into twenty, and then smocks become the rule.

These days I know too well what Aunt Bea meant. For the longest time I refused to own anything elastic-waisted, and I still would rather wear gut-wrenching, tourniquet-duty waists than fall victim to the belief that I can afford to gain even one more pound. But sweats and p.j. bottoms are pretty darn comfortable around the house, and shamefaced, I concede they have pretty much become the rule for me at home.

But like Aunt Bea, I'm fighting the good fight. I live in Wisconsin now, and winters present a struggle for me that Aunt Bea didn't know. But she had other struggles in other ways the likes I know for myself I could never overcome. Struggles so hard a niece who loves her as I do will not speak of them widely, in a blog post that can't possibly pay proper tribute to her private travails.

Somehow, to look at Aunt Bea you would not know this. She recently told me how once, in the keeping of a routine doctor's appointment (at well into her nineties) she was in the room with a nurse who begged to be excused because, she said to my aunt, "I need a minute to round up your forms; these here have you mixed up with someone ninety-five years old! I'll be right back."

Aunt Bea stopped her with, "No, that's me. I'm that old."

The nurse did not bother to hide her disbelief or even play it up with falsity. She simply paused, and left the room anyway. When she returned, she had with her other professionals from the office, gawking at my aunt from the doorway. The nurse did not hesitate to say, "See?!! Does this woman look 95 years old TO YOU??!!"

And no, they didn't think so! To their inquiry about the secret of her youth, Aunt Bea only said that she had lived troubles beyond their imagination, but that faith and prayer, exercising, eating right, and that her own mother lived to be 100, seemed to be reasons why.

Aunt Bea loved telling that story, even if she tempered it with, "I never felt like such a FREAK in my life."

I've never so much as once ran a marathon, as Aunt Bea did, almost into her eighties. My kinship with her is about family history and about the music--love for the sort that seems "too young" for us, but in fact, keeps us feeling young.

As fate would have it I also had my own restaurant in my forties until my mid-fifties. Whenever I set the radio there, I thought of my Aunt Bea. I would surf the dial to find music that "popped" with liveliness, and sometimes (when I was alone, before turning the "open" sign around) I would even run over to it and PLAY IT LOUD.

When Carlos Santana was enjoying quite the comeback with the hit recording "Smooth," a collaboration with Rob Thomas, I wondered if Aunt Bea was aware of it, and if she ever recalled our days at the family restaurant. She would have been as tickled as I was to see him enjoy another vibrant round of success; a "using it" and not "losing it."

These days my cooking and serving skills are pretty much reserved for my family and a few friends--but I still love to do my work with the dial set to music that helps me "move along." Some of that music is so lively it defies you to not run over to the radio and "PLAY IT LOUD."

At my age, I'm embarrassed to admit I do that now and again--but then I tell myself, "Aunt Bea probably did. It probably is a reason she forgot to mention, that day in the doctor's office."

Aunt Bea is just this side of 100 years old now! Her younger sister, Nina, is devoted to her and committed to maintaining their lifelong closeness. Both have told me that an original copy of my tribute to "Aunt Bea" is something she hopes will be read at her memorial service, "when the time comes."

I am but a speck in the family sphere now, having lived afar from Aunt Bea for many decades, my story with her miniscule. But just knowing she said that once, is honor enough for me.

Update: Rest in peace, beloved Bea.

Note: 1st photo shows Bea on the right, Nina on the left. 2nd photo is Nina on the left, me center, Aunt Bea on the right.