Mom's Home Cooking
October 20, 1999 My mom was a great cook—as long as you were company. One of my parents’ chief concerns was that we would be spoiled and one of the ways we were saved from this moral crisis was simple food. Take for example, our school lunches, the very model of efficiency. Mom made school lunch sandwiches for the four of us—Betty (my nickname), Mary, Bill and Emmett, in September and January. She bought 12 loaves of thin-sliced sandwich bread and lined it up on the long, tin-topped table in our large, very old-fashioned kitchen. She’d make eight loaves of peanut butter and grape jelly and four of our favorite, cream cheese and chopped olive, a cocktail hors d’oeuvre popular at the time. She wrapped them in wax paper sandwich bags, stacked them thirty deep in brown paper grocery bags and put them in the freezer chest. A chest style freezer looks like a big trunk. To get to the bottom sandwiches, we’d have to jump up and hang over the edge. The peanut butter ones were purple on both si