•COOKING FOR ONE•

“I imagine her planning her meals just as she’d done for the family, but buying the lone lamb shank, the single slice of ham.”

At the top of the recipe page for Creamy Seafood in Toast Cup is a quick pencil notation in my mother’s handwriting: “Good.” Cooking for One, a Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, was published in 1987, four years into Mom’s life as a widow. She and Dad were married 50 years, and she’d lived with her parents until the wedding, so it was her first experience of living alone.

Several more “Good” notations are sprinkled through the book: Glazed Ham Slice with Sweet Potatoes, One Pot Spaghetti and Meatballs, Braised Lamb Shanks. I imagine her planning her meals just as she’d done for the family, but buying the lone lamb shank, the single slice of ham. She told me she always sat at the kitchen table to eat, and I can see her setting out a placemat, plates and cutlery, a napkin she’d sewn from a terry-cloth hand towel, a book holder for whatever mystery she was reading.

She lived ten years after Dad died, staying in her Ohio home until a few weeks before the end. My sister and I were both far away—me in Massachusetts, my sister in England. We called and visited and helped from a distance as best we could, but day to day, Mom was on her own. She went to Women’s Club and garden club meetings, had lunch with friends, borrowed stacks of books from the library. Later, as her health deteriorated and leaving the house got more difficult, she still enjoyed a visit from a neighbor, a newsy phone call, a good detective show on TV.

In the last year of her life, cooking anything other than a scrambled egg or a piece of toast became too much for her. Maybe this was when Cooking for One made its way into my cookbook library; maybe she gave it to me on one of my visits that final year, when we set her up with a home health aide and Meals on Wheels. Or maybe I set it aside when we were clearing out her house after she died.

I learned the basics of cooking from Mom—how to hard-boil eggs, dice an onion, cream butter and sugar for cookie dough. I still use her recipes for potato salad, deviled eggs, apple crisp and beef stroganoff, and each time I do, I remember standing next to her in the small kitchen with the turquoise metal cabinets and silvery Formica countertops, helping to chop and mix. I can see her in her skirt and blouse, a kitchen towel tied around her waist. I can hear her commiserating over how hard it is to make a white sauce without lumps.

I am now the age she was when Dad died, and I too live alone. This cookbook makes me think of my mother in her widowhood, her resilience as she went from always nurturing others to figuring out how to nurture herself: surely a good recipe for living, passed along with her love. In her sweet and poignant penciled notes, I read an implicit motherly message: "Try this. You might like it.”

—Lynn Bechtel

My mother, sister and I (in blue), in November 1986—right around the time Mom would have acquired Cooking for One.

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Lynn Bechtel is a writer, teacher, reader and knitter. She worked for many years in the publications department of the Center for Responsive Schools in Turners Falls, MA. Her writing has appeared in Entropy, The Sunlight Press, The Berkshire Review, In a Woman’s Voice, and the anthology grief becomes her.

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