The Macaroni Years

While growing up in the 60s one of the recipes in my mom’s repertoire was macaroni and cheese.

Hey! Smack that image of a box of Kraft neon orange noodles right out of your head and replace it with my chubby, grey-haired, Scandinavian Grandma Pearl…

There she in a floral print dress wearing cat-eyed glasses, table side donning oven mitts, holding a steaming casserole and placing it proudly on a trivet in front of her son (my dad) before scooping him out a serving and putting it on his plate next to the roast beef and overcooked carrots. His eyes sparkle as she adds a ladle of beefy gravy over the top.

This is my dad.
I see a pack of Pall Mall
cigarettes and Black Label beer
when I look at this picture.
If you know, you know.

While that may have been the 1940s way of serving mac & cheese, my mom served it as a main dish with a fresh green salad, but she only used Grandma Pearl’s recipe. When she went back to work in the mid-70s, she would assemble the casserole in the morning, leaving after-school instructions for one of us girls to pour milk up to the last layer of elbow macaroni, then pop it the oven. By the time she was home from work, it was ready to go. And the house smelled like heaven.

Before baking. Layers of goodness plus a good pool of milk.
Saltines and dots of butter on top.

And leftovers? My sister Paula included the recipe for Granda Pearl’s Macaroni and Cheese in her fantastic family cookbook, The Meshuggeneh Cook, and wrote this description about leftovers: Mom would heat up a little butter in a frying pan, throw the leftovers in and cover it. This was almost better than eating it the night before because as it cooked it formed a satisfying, golden brown crust.

I’m making Grandma Pearl’s Macaroni and Cheese to bring to my mom this week. She’ll have to reheat it in the microwave as her oven/stove has been disconnected due to too many smoke alarm incidents. At this point, we’re just trying to keep her in her own apartment and out of government assigned assisted living.

Bottom line, I’m trying to bring a little happy memory to my mom. Not so much about her mother-in-law, but about our happy times – the macaroni years.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a magical though not perfect childhood and I give so much credit to my mom. Despite my her moodiness and my shyness and my parents separation when I was five years old, 1961 until 1976 were great years for us. Some normal life bad things happened, the kind of stuff that made you a stronger, more self-sufficient human, but I don’t think I formed any deep scars during that time. And nary a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese was ever found in our cupboard.

At age 15, our idyllic years ended when my mom remarried and moved us an hour away introducing a strange new family, a violent step father, a new school and neighborhood and leaving my oldest sister behind. That’s when the scars came in. But those are stories for another day.

These visits with my mom, feel like I want something from her to heal from that time. I don’t expect an apology. We all make bad choices. Maybe I’m looking for an acknowledgment of some kind. I’m not sure what I want yet. Maybe it’s just for me to forgive her.

BONUS! Bean recipe from my sister Paula’s cookbook!

Back to the recipe shown above. I hope it’s easy enough to just click on it and print it or view it or something. I just don’t feel like typing it…although here I am typing away aren’t I. Anyhew, you may be surprised to see minced dry onion. Just do it. AND the Worcestershire. There are no measurements, but be liberal with it all.

Sadly, regardless of gravy or golden brown crust, I predict my husband will not be impressed with Grandma Pearl’s Macaroni and Cheese. I mean, this is a guy who thinks a Smorgasbord is just sandwiches! So I may sauté some prawns, onions and red bell peppers in a little butter and garlic to add to his. In fact, you could change up this recipe a million ways: green chiles, ham, peas, tuna (where’s the vomitting emoji when you need it), gruyere, parmesan, etc.

Good solid wedge of Macaroni and Cheese.
My husband had three servings. No additions necessary.
That Grandma Pearl…she knew the way to a man’s heart.

Maybe as I enter my 60s, I’m just getting caught up in nostalgia. The past six-ish years have been tumultuous and I gotta throw in that these-kids-now-a-days who grow up with cell phones and microwaves and Megan Thee Stallion are living in a totally different world. So perhaps I’m just an old gal with a fondness for the “good ol’ days”. Even if you ate Kraft Mac & Cheese from a box, I swear it was a better time. And I did walk a mile each way to and from school. I measured it recently with the Google map app on my phone.

(Pearl Orth-Lindstrom-Jacobson was born 1899 in Wyoming. Her mom was from Norway and her dad was from Finland. Her dad died when she was very young and her mom remarried a Swedish fellow and they moved the family to Aberdeen, Washington state. She lived in our basement apartment in Tacoma for a couple years. I remember her letting me dunk sugar cubes in her coffee. She died in 1964 when I was three.)