Honoring Mothers: MY
MOTHER'S CHUTNEY
by Joyce Maynard
Originally
published in McCall's Magazine, 1996
When my mother died she left lots of stuff behind: Soaps and shower caps (and the occasional towel) from every hotel she'd ever visited. Packets of glitter and rhinestones and interesting bits of rickrack she'd set aside to use in craft projects with my daughter, who, more than anything, loved spending a weekend with her grandmother. Child of the depression, my mother could never abide waste, or throwing anything of quality away, and so, if an outfit went out of fashion, she salvaged pieces of the fabric for doll clothes first, and always cut the buttons off to put in her button jar. Defrosting her refrigerator, after her death, I found a couple of dozen packets of chicken necks, hearts and livers -- enough giblets to make broth enough for five hundred meals, I bet.
But it was in her cupboard that I found my mother's greatest stash. I'm guessing that at some point, a friend's tree must have yielded a great quantity of peaches, and the friend had known just who to call. Now were thirty-one containers of peach chutney canned, according to their labels, just a few months earlier, in the fall of 1988. Until the diagnosis came that she had an inoperable brain tumor, anyone who knew my mother would have supposed she'd be around for decades.
I disposed of the giblets, and plenty besides. But I packed those thirty-one jars into a cardboard box and brought them home with me.
At first I used my mother's chutney liberally. I spread it on toast. I set out a big dish of it at Thanksgiving. I even gave some away. But mostly I used the chutney in a particularly fine recipe she'd taught me for a curried chicken salad.
Years passed, and the number of chutney jars on my shelf dwindled down to the single digits. Sometimes, now, I'd make my chicken curry salad with Major Grey's chutney, rather than opening up one of the few remaining jars that still bore labels in my mother's handwriting. Other times I'd combine a couple of dollops of my mother's chutney with the store-bought stuff. I can't truthfully tell you that my mother's chutney was better. It was made by my mother, that's all.
Of course these moments when I opened up the chutney were hardly the only occasions in which my mother came to mind. Now and then out on the street I'd see a woman in her mid-sixties (the age my mother was at her death), and something about the purposefulness of her stride or the way she stopped to inspect a bargain would summon her back, and I'd feel the way I can imagine a landlocked sailor might, suddenly catching a gust of wind that smelled of the sea.
One time I took the older of my two sons to a jazz concert in New York City in which the singer Ruth Brown was appearing. When she stepped onto the stage and began to sing, tears streamed down my cheeks. Though Charlie was only ten at the time, he didn't need an explanation. Although Ruth Brown was much better at staying on key than my mother ever had been -- not to mention black, where my mother was a Russian Jew -- something about her style and manner and her command of the stage reminded us both of my mother. After that I took to buying tickets to see Ruth Brown whenever she performed near me. Every time I hear her sing I cry.
Moments like those, it's as though I'm catching hold of my mother for a moment. But as the years pass and more distance lies between where I am now and where I was when she died, this has been getting harder. If my mother showed up on my doorstep this afternoon, she would no longer know me the way she used to. I'm not the same person anymore that I was seven years ago.
It's been a few years since I've reached into the pocket of some garment of hers, that used to smell of her perfume, and no longer does, to find a coupon from a store in Toronto or a scribbled shopping list. By this year -- the seventh since my mother's death -- what was left in the way of tangible evidence of her presence on this earth were a few pieces of her jewelry. Books. Photographs. Chutney.
This spring I made the decision to move from my lifelong home in New England to Northern California. Crazy to haul my one remaining jar of chutney three thousand miles. The time had come to finish it off.
I didn't make a big deal of the whole thing. I waited until I had some leftover chicken hanging around. Nobody was coming over for dinner and my children didn't like my mother's curry chicken salad. So this meal was going to be for me alone.
I took the jar down off the shelf. Imagined my mother spooning this very chutney in the jar eight years earlier, feeling the slightest twinge of dizziness or throbbing in her head maybe, but chalking it up to some diet she was on, in her perpetual pursuit of getting into a size twelve. "If I ever get a brain tumor," she used to say, as far back as I can remember, "I'm going to give up counting calories."
I cut up the chicken and the green pears and the slivered crystallized ginger. I spooned in the mayonnaise and scattered the golden raisins on top. I sprinked in chopped coriander and walnuts and curry. I opened the jar.
Inside, mold. Nothing for it but to dump the whole thing down the sink.
I would never again taste food prepared by the hand of my mother.
That afternoon I went to the store and bought an expensive jar of gourmet chutney. Stirring it into my chicken-mayonnaise-celery mixture, I thought about another kitchen lesson from my mother. With store-bought food, she used to say, there's one ingredient that's always missing. The food may taste great, but it wasn't made with love. Simple as that. Major Grey makes a terrific chutney alright. But I can't call him up and ask him what to do about lumpy gravy. Of course, I can't call up my mother any more either.
Still, I feel her
presence in my kitchen every time I cook, no matter which coast I'm living
on. I hear her voice at my elbow -- offering scathing opinions about baking
with margarine or processed garlic powder, over-handled pie crust, any
recipe featuring Cream of Mushroom soup as an ingredient. I hear her voice
when I clean the giblets out of a chicken I'm preparing to roast, and
wrap them in plastic, and stick them in my freezer, for soup. I heard
her voice as I cleaned out my closets before I moved. I got rid of my
old clothes. But first I cut off a few of the best buttons.
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