She's Gone, But At Least I Have Her Tarts

Christmas is the best. And it also sucks.

My mom was not a committed cook. Like her mother before her, I strongly suspect that a leading reason she had a kid quite young was that the sooner I was born the sooner I could take over the cooking.

It made sense why she wasn’t a particularly adventurous cook. Imagine the most picky toddler you know. The one with enough food preferences and opinions to fill a stack of encyclopedias. My mother put them to shame. She wouldn’t eat onions. Or anything that came from tomatoes and wasn’t pizza sauce or ketchup. Or cheese. Or brown bread. Peanut butter. It was a little silly.

But she liked to bake. Not entirely from scratch, but with love. Her pies were of the can poured into the frozen shell type, but they were still better than anyone else’s. I didn’t even know you could make your own pie crust until I was way older than one should be. Her Rice Krispy squares were better than the rest despite being exactly the same. She could do some magical things with several different flavors of Jell-o.

There is almost nothing savory that she made that I long for. With love, I would say to her face if I could that anything she made I can make better. And she wouldn’t disagree. That was her plan all along. But there are a few things she made, contained in the most wrecked cookbook you have ever seen, that still bring her right back.

One is her pancakes. She made the best pancakes ever, and that’s just a fact. I make her recipe exactly, with the only difference being that I don’t use my own fork to feed pieces of them to my dog - and not just because I don’t have a dog. It was truly twisted behavior.

Another thing that takes me right back to her are her butter tarts. They get made a lot at Christmas (Spoiler alert - a few people who read this may find some under their tree), and any other time I need to make something to share. They were my mom’s favorite recipe for a reason - they are incredibly delicious, and much easier to make than you would ever guess from eating them. Those tarts, those pancakes, her rice pudding, and a few other things are the closest connection to her I have.

I was thinking of the butter tarts in the midst of making nine dozen of them yesterday (You can make nine dozen in just over an hour if you have your ducks in a row - it’s very much a mom recipe). The recipe is on a piece of paper that was ripped out of some book or binder at some point. I have no idea which one. The paper is stained with a mystery red substance. It’s typewritten, appearing between a recipe for Chocolate Lime Sivirl, a name which presumably just shows what a pain in the ass fixing mistakes on a typewriter was, and a truly disgusting sounding recipe for lemon cream pie. I have never tasted either thing in my life. I have no idea who gave her the recipe, or where she stole it from. Her only addition to the recipe is a handwritten, and accurate ‘Excellent’ in the margin, and the cooking time - which oddly isn’t in the recipe. There is no single thing that makes me think of my mom more than that recipe, and I have absolutely no idea where it came from or how she got it. It’s both incredibly important to me and a complete mystery.

Like the pancake recipe, I have this recipe completely memorized. It’s not hard - it’s stupidly simple. But you can be certain that I pull both recipes out every single time I make them. They have to be there because she can’t be. I got the pancake recipe laminated a few years ago because it was completely worn out and about to waste away. There are a couple more handwritten copies of the recipe that I think she wrote to give to people that I have hidden away, too, but those are for emergencies.

She was pathologically obsessed with Christmas, and I miss her this week more than any other. But at least I have those recipes. And, as the name of the recipe itself says, I have the ‘Best Butter Tarts’ any time I need to say hi to her.

Merry Christmas!