How Sweet It Is - Alice J. Wisler [32]
What if no one calls? What if no one even allows me to place my brochures in their shop or restaurant? The more I think about my new business, the more discouragement sets in.
Stop it. Don’t think like that.
I call Sally, just to hear a familiar voice. After the phone rings five times I leave a message on her answering machine. I hope I sound perky and well-adjusted to my new mountain life. She’s probably at a veterinary emergency, but I wish she were home. I just want to laugh with her about anything we think is funny today.
sixteen
The first thing that appealed to me about being a chef was the uniform. I wanted to wear the white smock and the tall white chef hat. Then, I wanted to make sauces. Cheese sauces for vegetables. Sauces for roasts, pork tenderloins, and briskets. Growing up on a pig farm gave me plenty of opportunity to watch pork being prepared. We seemed to have it every day in one form or another. Sausage or bacon for breakfast, ham sandwiches for lunch, and pork roast or tenderloin for dinner.
My mother always made her standard sauce or gravy to go with each pork dish. No matter which side of the pig she served for dinner, the gravy accompanying it was the same as the day before. This flavorless sauce was served in the family heirloom we called “the gravy bowl,” and always placed at Dad’s end of the oak dining room table. The gravy bowl is the color of mildew. My great-grandmother thought it worthy of passing down to my maternal grandmother, and then my mother inherited it when her mother died. I have let my sister know that she is welcome to it when our mother passes on. Andrea told me, “I don’t need a gravy bowl in Taipei.”
They say necessity is the mother of all inventions, and even as a kid, I knew it was necessary to create a new sauce. I was tired of Mom’s standard mixture of milk, butter, fat drippings, and salt and pepper, with a few tablespoons of flour to thicken it. I experimented in the kitchen and came up with sauce à la marmalade (a white sauce with a tablespoon of orange marmalade), sauce au garlic (adding minced garlic really spiced up the palate), and sauce au basil—my favorite—which had fresh minced basil and parsley. Andrea liked the marmalade one the best; Dad raved about the garlic. Mom said she couldn’t decide between the basil and garlic, but if I wanted to cook dinner one night a week, that would be a great help.
Pretty soon one night a week became two, and then it got so I was cooking every night. Mom was proud of my culinary talent, which delighted me. Dad was proud, too, but I could simply breathe and he’d be proud of me.
When I told my family I wanted to go to Atlanta for culinary school, they weren’t surprised. Mother did comment that she wasn’t sure I could get a real job with a degree in cooking. I showed her an armload of books written by gurus who were skilled in cooking—graduates of culinary institutes all across America and around the world. She then nodded and asked if I could make a dessert for the next night.
“What’s tomorrow night?” I asked.
“Friday,” she replied. “And the Jeffersons are coming by after dinner to buy Hector.”
“Daddy’s selling Hector?”
Hector was the largest sow in the history of Georgia, I was sure. She was the size of three hogs. Champion pig—that was Hector. She’d won the blue ribbon at the state fair for four years in a row. When people saw the name, they would assume Hector was a male. When they found out she was female, they’d scratch their heads, let their cotton candy stop bobbing for a moment, and wonder. Dad named the pig. Apparently, he had an uncle Hector who was rather large and pink. When Hector was born, Daddy said the pig reminded him of his uncle. He started to call her Hector, and that was that. People wondered if the real Hector was offended to know that a pig had been named after him, and not even a male pig, but a sow. “Oh, no,” my father would say, “Hector is pleased.” The truth was, Hector had died long before his namesake squealed into the world.
When my mother didn’t reply to my question,