My mother, said my mother, in the same tone of voice as she says, ‘your father’, didn’t have a single sensible thought in her head. She was always, continued my mother, laying cards, all day she would lay cards, and sit there, chewing and cracking coffee beans, and if it wasn’t coffee beans she would be biting her finger nails, muttering over the cards, reading her fortune. And she would forget all about cleaning the house and there was dust under the cupboards and under the bed and I knew I didn’t want to live like that. And to underline my grandmother’s foolishness, my mother went on to say, if I wanted to skip school on Saturday morning, my mother wouldn’t object at all and I would dictate an excuse note to her, which she would sign, so that I could take it with me on Monday morning. And she could never hold on to money, and was always spending it on clothes and shoes that were too small. And she didn’t like fruit, there was never fruit in the house, except apples for my father, for his packed lunch, and fruit was all I wanted to eat as a child, said my mother. Then, as final confirmation of her mother’s, my grandmother’s lack of sense, my mother told me about her mother’s cucumber salad.
She would cut the cucumber into very thin slices, said my mother, and place them in layers in a large bowl and between the layers she put salt, and then a plate weighed down by a stone would be placed on top and the cucumber and salt left for a couple of hours. The accumulated liquid would be drained off and water poured over the cucumber slices and then the bowl would be drained again. After that the cucumber slices would be mixed with sour cream. And you couldn’t taste a thing, said my mother, just the salt
Whether my grandmother made it successfully or not (and you should probably add some dill) and whether my mother liked it or not, this is, in fact, a standard eastern European salad recipe. In Polish it’s called miseria, perhaps because it was seen as a poor people’s dish or a dish for hard times and because cucumbers are cheap to buy in season.
Perhaps my grandmother was not a good cook, but I loved and grew plump on the endless plates of rice with melted butter and cinnamon, of pancakes made with sliced apples, of potato pancakes sprinkled with sugar, of chips and fried eggs that she made for me. And that no doubt was further proof for my mother of my grandmother’s thoughtlessness, but my mother was out working and so it was left to my grandmother to feed me.
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