A Belated Appreciation of My '80s Mom’s Cooking

Image via ABC.

By Amanda Kludt

Dinner in my household in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s looked like this: well-done hamburgers with creamed spinach and mashed potatoes. Noodle casserole with cottage cheese and a side of canned peaches. Spaghetti (served on the stove in the pasta water) and meatballs in Progresso sauce with Kraft Parmesan in the green shaker on the side. Endless iterations of chicken cutlets and pork chops with Stove Top. Fruit cocktail for dessert, and a tall glass of milk to wash it all down.

My mother made dinner every night, always in the hour between when she got home from work (and picked my sister and me up from after school) and when my father walked through the door. I never thought much of her cooking or the effort it took at the time. I loved her lasagna, disliked her cabbage, and, like most kids, would always rather be at Pizza Hut. 

Later, when I started getting into food writing and restaurants after college, I regarded her repertoire of simple American meals, heavily dependent on frozen vegetables and boxed and canned ingredients, as unsophisticated and (I’m ashamed to admit) lazy. I was learning that time and technique, prized ingredients, deep flavors, and connection to culture were what we were supposed to value in cooking.

I would read stories in Gourmet and Food & Wine about families creating elaborate meals together, spending time and energy sourcing ingredients — most often in picturesque markets in the French countryside — cooking with passion, savoring meals with joy. Recipes were passed down as heirlooms, techniques taught as part of family tradition.

I taught myself through cookbooks and magazines how to make Sunday sauce and carbonara, salt-baked fish and chateaubriand. I spent a decade throwing multi-course dinner parties and rooftop paella feasts.

Then I entered my thirties, had kids, stopped cooking so elaborately, and realized what a feat it was that my mother fed us at all.

My mother’s generation, and the one right before hers, were lucky in that they were able to work outside of the home without (much) pushback. But they were not fortunate enough to live in a society where partners were expected to take on household duties.

So my mother worked and was responsible for almost the entirety of the domestic load. She stayed home when we were sick, drove us to school when we missed the bus. She bought our clothes, did the grocery shopping, volunteered at church bingo night — and she did all of the cooking. Every day, this woman had to get her kids ready for school, make sure they got there, work a full day, pick us up from aftercare, and make dinner for our family of four — always with a meat, a vegetable, and a starch — by 7 p.m.

I think about this now as I share a blissful 50/50 domestic split with my husband and still chafe at my inability to find enough time for my projects and passions. I can barely handle getting my sheet-pan dinners and one-pot meals together on the rare nights when I’m on duty. The task of cooking a multi-dish meal every night for the next decade would crush me.

I also now understand why my mother never taught me how to cook or passed down any recipes. For her, cooking was something she did because she had to. “I didn't think ‘Oh, I'm just not cooking tonight,’” she told me recently. “You have two kids, you have to cook.” We weren’t interested in learning, so she didn’t care to teach us. 

There are plenty of moms out there who have to work and put dinner on the table and still find and hold passion for passing on their gumbos and stews and meatloaf and roti recipes. But that wasn’t her. And I’m realizing it isn’t me either.

She rarely cooks now, since she doesn’t have to. But when we come to town, she can still put a meal on the table — meat, veg, starch, salad — in under 30 minutes, without opening a cooking app or breaking a sweat. (And I still love her lasagna.)