Fried Egg Sandwich

by: Kristy Regan

“Roasted salmon in a fennel cream sauce,” I say, beginning to recite the menu from the latest dinner party I’ve given. My mother ooh’s and ahh’s over each course. If I’m talking about making carnitas she tells me what an adventurous cook I am. Yet when visiting her in Iowa last Thanksgiving my mother frowned as I threw more salt into the mashed potatoes. “What do you have against salt?” I ask defiantly. “Well, it’s bad for your blood pressure” she says uncertainly. She thinks I’m a better cook now than she is, but her Midwest roots ground her in thinking, “That’s not the way I do it, it’s not the way my mother did it.” Neither of us challenge each other further, instead there’s a lull in our conversation before it changes to another seemingly safer topic. I later think about the sodium laden convenience foods lining her pantry shelves and think that maybe it all evens out. No salt in your potatoes, more than enough in your canned chicken stock. While we differ on our seasonings, menus and methods, we meet in our love of food, whether it entails, eating, cooking, recounting a lovely meal, feeding others, or seeking out the perfect chocolate truffle. My mother was also fond of great “hole in the wall” spots. We always got our fried chicken from a little takeout place in San Lorenzo and when she took me to her favorite burrito place in Hayward I felt like she let me see part of herself I wasn’t privy to before. She once told me a story of when she was a waitress in college. The owner of the restaurant would give her a plate of food at the end of the evening and sit and watch her eat, just to admire her appreciation. In her telling of the story, I sensed her approval of both herself and the owner.

Though she made the stray comment about “aren’t they getting fed at home?”, my mom never turned away a neighborhood kid from getting a snack at our house. She never minded an extra child at the dinner table even though we were underprivileged enough to receive free lunches at school. My childhood food was not exciting, the potatoes bland, the vegetables frozen. But on the weekend my mom was often at peace in the kitchen, stirring a pot of chili or chicken soup on the stove, deep frying donuts for a Sunday morning treat or making spinach jello, an unconventional favorite. My siblings and I quickly picked up the cooking habit, with our specialty being cinnamon rolls made from Bisquick, butter and cinnamon sugar oozing over doughy edges. After school we masterminded horrible instant pudding concoctions in repeated attempts to honor and win over our mother.

But she was tough to win over. With four kids and a divorce by the age of thirty my mother was physically, financially and emotionally overwhelmed. When she came home from work she didn’t always have much to give: the house too dirty, our faces too eager, hands too clingy, our needs too complex.

If she had been in a later generation I believe she would have been a writer, a cook or an artist. She has a gypsy spirit, loves the idea of travel and moving, finding the next great place. I imagine her in Wyoming with the wide open sky and a cowboy lover. She would have been able to do that without us and I wonder if she would have had children in this make believe life. I once asked her about her stance on abortion and she fiercely said she would never have made that decision. I wonder if her ferocity comes from a place of love or also of hardship. Maybe she never knew that her choices following the first one, to have children, would be so difficult.
Many nights after work she would need to escape from us and we would make our own dinner, frozen Swanson fried chicken with corn and a tiny square of chocolate cake, Kraft mac and cheese, or cereal or sandwiches. But when she was home and cooking, it was her way of offering love.

Now, as a post-retirement part-time job, my mom cooks at a fraternity house. Even though she was a human resources director before she retired she says cooking is the hardest job she’s had. Why do it, people ask, why work so hard when you don’t need to? For the challenge she says, to see if I can. I wonder if she wants the challenge or if she’s just grown so used to struggle that she doesn’t feel quite the same without it. But I realize, as with love, our reasons for cooking are complicated, not always easy to decipher.

She cooks for 30 young men. She experiments, sees what they love, what they won’t touch. Sometimes they will ask for their favorites, and she gladly makes them. They don’t want anything fancy, something fried, canned or boiled usually reminds them of what they had at home, reminds them of their own moms.

She says sometimes a boy will come in late and hasn’t had dinner. She’s still in the kitchen cleaning up and she’ll fry him an egg and add it to a sandwich. They’re always appreciative of her kindness. I understand their gratitude and I often imagine myself as the lone boy sitting with the cook, eating the egg sandwich at the end of the day. As the dry toast brushes the roof of my mouth and the creamy yolk melts on my tongue, I think, this is enough, just to be here.