Last week, my granddaughters asked me at what age their mom started to cook and at what age I started to cook. I could not remember when Anna started, although I remember that by the age of nine, both Vlad and Anna were cooking on a regular basis, and we had a schedule of who was making dinner each day.
As for me, the biggest problem was that in order to cook, I had to turn on a gas burner on the stove, and the burners didn’t have ignition. To start the burner, you had to strike a match, turn a gas knob up and move a burning match close to the burner. The scariest part for me was lighting a match. I was scared to scratch the head of the match with a force enough to produce sparkles. My mom was teaching me, and these lessons would end up with me crying and with her yelling at me. I do not remember why and how I overcame this fear, but it was definitely after I turned eight.
Even warming up the food was not that easy because microwaves didn’t exist (at least in our lives), so I needed to use our gas stove to warm up my food after I was back from school. The food would be most often “cutlets” (now I call them “Russian meatballs”) with potatoes or pasta, and I had to warm it up on a skillet, adding some butter so that it wouldn’t get burned and stirring constantly. I remember that for a period of time, my mom left one burner on (on “low”) in the morning so that I could turn it on “high” when I came home from school and warm up my meal. (There were other adults at home, so I do not know what was the deal and why others could not help me). This was supposedly “dinner,” but all this meal naming was a separate story.
Back to cooking. My help in the kitchen while I was limited to some low-skill level tasks. One of the things I was often assigned (and I hated it!) was to “watch the milk.” The unpasteurized milk from the barrel had to be brought to boil, and I had to stay by the stove and watch, and when it started boiling, I had to turn it off. Otherwise, it would “run away.” Of course, I would look aside precisely at the moment when it happened!
Another chore was making mannaya kasha, which pretty much meant stirring non-stop, making sure it was not burned. And another one was potato peeling. It was always done with a knife, and the quality of my work was judged by how cleanly I peeled potatoes and how thin the peel layer was so that the waste would be minimized. More than fifty years later, I am still a potato peeling champion.
My historical posts are being published in random order. Please refer to the page Hettie’s timeline to find where exactly each post belongs and what was before and after.
Hettie's Reflections 