Sweet Potatoes Forever
My mother-in-law was no cook, but she aced one fine dish that has become our family’s favorite on Turkey Day
Thanksgiving was always a cliffhanger at my mother-in-law's house in Boston. From year to year, we never knew whether the turkey would be raw, broiled or replaced at the last minute by a sizzling steak.
That was because our hostess, Patricia Marshall Tate, hated to cook. And why should she be expected to? She was a pioneering artist who broke one glass ceiling after another by painting portraits of senators, cardinals, professors, sinners and saints. She captured not only the likeness, but also the essence, of such varied sitters as Walter Gropius, Art Buchwald, Gore Vidal and Humphrey Bogart's valet. Two of her paintings are in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
She scrambled up several flights of outside stairs in Cambridge to tap on the office window of Gropius, legendary founder of the Bauhaus School and a recent escapee from Nazi Germany. "Professor Gropius, I know who you are!" Housecat said reverently when he opened his door to her that day. The National Portrait Gallery would later choose her painting of Gropius over all other portraits of him, after a nationwide search following his death.
But Housecat, as my mother-in-law liked to be called, would never have relinquished her apron to anyone else.
A Talented Artist, Not a Cook
What I'm trying to say is, my mother-in-law was enormously talented. She hardly needed to prove herself in her chaotic kitchen, which was about the size of a hot dog stand and filled with a forbidding noise. Somehow or other the kitchen timer had gotten permanently stuck in time's-up mode and was forever tick-tick-ticking away like a bomb about to explode.
But Housecat, as my mother-in-law liked to be called, would never have relinquished her apron to anyone else. She adored Thanksgiving, which allowed her to round up the usual suspects — several sons, their families and an ex-husband or two — and share her feast with us. Whatever the feast might turn out to be.
One Thanksgiving, her son Michael (my husband) and I arrived with our baby girl to find Housecat had forgotten to turn on the stove when it was time to roast the turkey. So, there it sat, all pimply and pink, with the bacon strips on top still raw. That was the second year when Michael's brothers, Peter and Richard, raced to DeLuca's Market and bought a big London Broil for our Turkey Day dinner.
A year or two later, quelle difference ! To make sure the bird got cooked for a change, Housecat put her tick-tick-ticking oven on broil and forgot about it for a day or so. Until only smithereens of turkey remained.
She was quaking in her golden sandals that year, waiting for the family fallout. But by then we'd all learned to pack a sense of humor in our suitcases before heading for the airport.
Peter, an English teacher and aspiring novelist, performed delicate surgery on the torched carcass, preserving every last shred of meat he possibly could. Then he artfully draped the remnants over a super-size mound of the kind of stuffing you buy in a box. Voila! Turkey Day was on again after all.
Richard, a law partner in a fancy firm, was also very supportive that day. He put aside his usually litigious nature to exclaim, "House, this is excellent!" Then, leaning towards his wife, he barked, "Pam, get the recipe!"
One True Culinary Triumph
This might seem like the end of my story, but not quite, because I still want to tell you about Housecat's one true culinary triumph.
My bohemian mother-in-law, the first on Beacon Hill to wear blue jeans, had been raised in a most traditional family. Her very proper parents decided to send young Patricia to cooking school, thinking that would help make her more marriageable.
Oh, but they needn't have bothered. Housecat married five times, if you include going down the aisle with the worst of the bunch twice. And after cooking school, she loathed cooking more than ever.
In the years that followed, Housecat shed husbands, raised sons, and honed her skill at bagging portrait subjects. "You look curiously familiar!" she leaned across the asparagus in DeLuca's to accost Mayor Kevin White. Before he knew what hit him, he was sitting in a carved wooden chair in Housecat's home studio, having his portrait painted.
For my family and me there will be no more cliffhanger Thanksgivings. But guess what? We'll be feasting on her signature sweet-potato dish forevermore.
But back to Thanksgiving. I already mentioned that cooking school had failed to domesticate Housecat. Yet one recipe from those days stayed with her through the years: Fannie Farmer's Sweet Potato and Apple Scallop. (I wish I'd asked her why but alas; I never did.)
It's a dish with many things going for it. You'll like it at Christmas as much as you did at Thanksgiving. It takes only a few ingredients to make. And you can't really mess it up. Unless you do what I tried to do one Christmas, and substitute one ingredient for another.
I was a harried working mother back then. There was no time to slice up a bowl of apples. So in their place, I used canned pineapple.
Well, you would have thought I robbed a bank. "Mom, you didn't!" my daughters recoiled in horror. I did, but I never did it again.
Several of those I've mentioned here — Housecat, Peter and my beautiful husband Michael — have since gone to heaven, and I miss them more than I can say.
For my family and me there will be no more cliffhanger Thanksgivings. No more hilarity at Housecat's. But guess what? We'll be feasting on her signature sweet potato dish forevermore.
Housecat's Sweet Potato and Apple Scallop
(With thanks to the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, in which this classic recipe first appeared. The following is our family's slightly tweaked version.)
Ingredients
2 cups thinly sliced boiled sweet potatoes or yams
1½ cups peeled, thinly sliced apples
½ cup brown sugar
4 Tbsp. butter
Salt
Cinnamon
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 1½ quart baking dish and line the bottom with half the potatoes. Then put half the apples on top. Sprinkle with half the sugar, dot with half the butter, and add a dash of salt (and cinnamon, if desired). Then do the same thing again. Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake about 30 minutes more, until the apples are soft. Serves 4.
Susan Lapinski is a writer and the former editor of Sesame Street Parents and Working Mother magazines. This essay is part of a collection of interconnected stories she is writing about her favorite lake in Maine. Read More
