The Memories of My Mom, Hidden in Pierogi Dough
At the Intergenerational Memoir workshop, I wrote about my mom and the power of food memories. It was mostly ramblings about pierogi, but after reading Regina’s memoir I wanted to turn it into something real.
My mom picks and chooses how she remembers her family. That’s the only luxury of them no longer being around. While my dad’s family boasts all six of his younger siblings, their seventeen kids, five grandkids, and his over-eighty-year-old mother, my mom’s family has been depleted by dementia and cancer. Worse may be those relatives who’ve just been lost to time, completely forgotten, to be remembered only through foggy hindsight once they’re physically gone.
My mom jokes, like most people do, that her family is weird, but in actuality, they’re gamblers, liars, and con artists. It’s hard to imagine this is Jeanne Lamb’s lineage. The woman who wouldn’t let me cheat at Pretty Pretty Princess, concerned it would lead to bad habits. The woman who once drove an elderly stranger around my neighborhood until she remembered where she lived. If there’s anything seedy in her past, she’s hid it well, but that wouldn’t surprise me. My mom’s memories are hers and hers alone, locked away, possibly forever. I know only what she wants me to know.
My mom will talk about her mom, Lydia, who tap-danced and played softball well into her seventies before Alzheimer’s made her forget who she was. My mom never will, though. My nanny and poppy, James Philo—a Boston Bruins farm player, hotelier, and a chef—are in every recipe my mom has managed to salvage over fifty-nine years.
My mom makes pierogies every Christmas Eve and it’s in the preparation of those delicious Polish dumplings that I begin to understand where she came from. The care she takes when mashing the potatoes with a hand-me-down medieval tool and grinding in her ruby-red KitchenAid the brisket that she scoured multiple stores to find. That agony of finding the perfect replacement four-inch-diameter glass to cut the dough after the one my nanny used shattered. It’s all to keep the best parts of her family alive.
My mom used the “wrong” flour one year. “It’s always Gold Medal,” she said, barely audible over everyone’s chewing. But I understood, it didn’t taste like her mom’s, another sad reminder of how easily she could lose them all over again.
My mom keeps those memories hidden in that dough, tucked away so she doesn’t have to say them out loud. For now, I will quietly eat them, pretending that is enough.