Today I’m reading cookbooks. I’m inspired by having just spent the last two weeks working my way through a fine book of food writing: The Reporter’s Kitchen: Essays by Jane Kramer. It doesn’t usually take me two weeks to read a book, but one of the hallmarks of good food writing is that I savor it rather than gobble it up voraciously.

I nibbled The Reporter’s Kitchen a chapter at a time, pausing often to menu plan, cook, bake, and borrow and read cookbooks. I have three borrowed cookbooks on Hoopla as a result, along with a list of dishes from Kramer’s own repertoire that I’m planning to find recipes for and try. Among these:

• Parsnip and pear puree
• Indian cornbread
• Braised red cabbage

Those are all fall/winter foods, so it will be some time before I give them a try. In the meantime, I’ve been finding and experimenting with other new recipes, while also pulling out some of my standby favorites. My husband and I have feasted on all manner of simple delights in the last couple of weeks, including sautéed spinach both with and without pine nuts; pasta in many varieties, most often including grape and cherry tomatoes sautéed just long enough to start to wilt; pub burgers with mushrooms and black olives; fish with whatever seasonings seemed right; sesame noodles; a lovely salad of green beans, cucumbers and basil with lemon vinaigrette; slaws both new and old; apple cake; derby chocolate chip cookies; and no-bake peanut butter cookies.

Mom’s kitchen

I’m working on (as in eating) some of those peanut butter cookies now, which means I’m thinking about my mother. This was one of her recipes, and I suspect it came from a peanut butter jar because I’ve come across at least one other person who was raised on exactly this same cookie but didn’t have the recipe from his mother and asked for mine. It’s dead simple with just six ingredients, and it’s the only cookie I make all summer long because…no baking. As I associate this with my mother, I suspect that my son and probably his friends will associate it with me.

Food traditions are a comfort to me. My mother’s and grandmother’s recipes call them to my mind, and recipes handed to me by friends never cease to summon memories of those friends when I make them. Holidays for me are interchangeable with the food I eat to celebrate them, and I think I would sooner skip Christmas entirely than celebrate it without my family’s traditional Swedish-based meal.

In general, my tastes in food differ vastly from my mother’s. I was raised on a diet of meat, potatoes, and vegetables cooked well beyond an inch of their lives. Aside from the vegetables, my mother was an excellent cook. But my adult tastes lean more toward pastas, rice, lighter (or no) meats, and steamed or grilled vegetables. I’ve inherited or retained my mother’s taste for fish, though, along with memories of standing next to her fishing along a riverbed. I’ve also inherited those recipes, some of which—her lentil soup, for example—I will enjoy till my dying day.