Beyond dinner

Cooking for pain, for loss, for heartache, for life.

By Susan Straight

Jan 19, 2000 | I will be peeling and cubing potatoes for a long time tonight, arranging them in large baking pans like Im cooking for a restaurant, but Ill be thinking about breast cancer, about illness and death and fear.

I will be cooking for an acquaintance from my daughters elementary school. I dont know her well, but we have talked in parking lots and at birthday parties for five years. She is a single mother, like me, and she works with disturbed and autistic children at school. This week, she will have surgery for breast cancer, followed by seven weeks of chemotherapy.

I will take her one dinner a week for two months. Its not a church assignment, or a pity assignment. Its life.

I'd always seen the phrase "company dinner" in magazines and newspaper cooking sections. My oldest daughter recently read the novel "Betsys Wedding," which Id read years ago, where the main character agonizes over developing her own company dinner. Every woman should have one meal that reflects her taste, her cooking, her life, right?

Somehow, my life and those of my friends and relatives have not included company dinners. For my friends and me, many of us single working mothers struggling to get by, company means all our kids playing in the yard and ordering pizza to eat outside. But as Ive grown older, I have discovered the keep-you-company dinner, the one that can be eaten right then or reheated when youre hungry or exhausted, the one someone brings you when you or someone in your family is ill or fading.

I love to cook, to make dinners big enough for many. I didnt grow up like this, because with three children, two foster kids and a husband, my mother cooked dinners that were just enough for us. No leftovers, few friends invited over to eat. But when I met my future husband at 14, and began visiting his house regularly at 16, I watched my mother-in-laws style of cooking for the multitudes.

She taught me to make a 20-pound baked ham, to cut up several chickens for barbecuing, to cook side dishes in those institutional-size baking pans that take up half a table. For holidays (including Super Bowl Sunday, a national holiday for my in-laws), we had 50 to 100 people in the kitchen, dining room, yard and the sidewalk. Each person held a plate heaped with food, and my mother-in-law smiled with pride and contentment.

Five years ago, when I was pregnant with my third child, my mother-in-law had a series of strokes, and in only two weeks, she was gone. It was not my first funeral, but my first time being a bereaved daughter-in-law. We cooked and cooked, for family while she was in the hospital, for visitors to the house, for everyone. I perfected my bring-to-potluck dish then, turning it into a heat-up-from-the-hospital dish. It was curried rice cooked with sausage and black beans  one of my mother-in-laws favorites.

Church women cooked for the reception after the service, but we daughters-in-law and female friends and relatives cooked for more solemn home gatherings, and then we cleaned the whole kitchen, our way of mourning.

A few days later, my neighbor Jeannines husband was killed in a car accident. They had met as teens, like my husband and me, and we had lived across the street from each other for seven years. Jeannine and I laughed and gossiped, and she had given me hand-me-down clothes, a used Barbie limousine (bright pink) and plenty of advice on strep throat and puberty and how to fit three girls in one room. Now she was a widow at 35, left to raise four kids while finishing nursing school.

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