Marble Cake (and other food legends)

You may think I’m making up these stories, but I swear I heard them directly from Mom and Dad!

When my Mom, Maria Dolores de Faria Paes (Johnson), was growing up, she never had to cook for herself and so she never learned to cook much. She tells us a story of when she and my Dad were first married and living in Germany: Dad had often told her how much he liked marble cake; so one day she decided to surprise him with a marble cake, and asked a good friend of theirs (apparently a jokester) how to make it. The instructions seemed a little strange, but she made it and Dad was so surprised! The cake had marbles in it!

My Grandma Johnson wasn't too excited about my parents getting married at first, but she and my mom turned out to be good friends. Mom loved Grandma a lot. Well, Mom learned her canning skills from Grandma Johnson. Mom tells about when they were canning whole tomatoes; she watched as Grandma squished the tomatoes into the jars. Grandma was very strict about making her canned goods look nice, so Mom was determined to make hers look even better than Grandma’s. She arranged the tomatoes in the jars so they looked very pretty—and not smashed up. Well, after they were processed Grandma had nice bottles full of plump, whole tomatoes, but Mom’s “pretty” jars were full of water with just a few tomatoes floating in them. [That's a picture of my Grandma and Grandpa Johnson—and me!]

Another time, much later, Mom was making some bread but it had risen too long. She went ahead and baked the bread anyway, but when it got hot it collapsed and the loaves came out heavy and hard, with swirlies on the top. (Actually by this time she was already a good cook—this incident was just a fluke.) But, being creative, she told her kids it was “dinosaur bread,” and they loved it and asked for it many times after that.

Mom had some other housekeeping catastrophes—like the time she knitted a cute baby outfit of soft woolen yarn for Peter to wear when he was blessed in church. She wanted it to be really nice and soft, so she boiled it to wash it. She says it came out the size of doll clothes, and she and Dad spent all of Saturday looking for an outfit for Peter to wear the next day. Or the time she decided she wanted a new fur coat, so she cut up her old one to make clothes for Peter and ruined the fur. And she still didn’t get that new fur coat! Or the time she was giving Peter a bath (he’s the oldest, so he got all the really neat experiments!) and he was so slippery that she didn’t know how to get him out of the bath water. So she sat there, holding him in the water and waiting for Dad to come home (singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”) to rescue her and the baby—both of them crying over the now cold bath.

Mom turned out to be a good housekeeper and seamstress and a terrific cook—making lots of family favorites like really great spaghetti (it was our family’s spaghetti that attracted Bruce to me! Well, partly.) And Feijão (Brasilian beans) and Gnocchi—all of which she just figured out how to make by herself. And her love of good food and her skills as a cook rubbed off on her eight kids!

And we all survived those early, learning years!