Whenever we heard the word layoff, my siblings and I thought of the food we’d soon be eating: watered-down beef stews and jar upon jar of canned beans and tomatoes that had been put up at the end of the previous summer. Meals during a layoff or a strike were always an inferior imitation of the ones we’d been raised on, as if someone had replaced our mother’s cooking with a cheap, generic version, all bland vegetables and thin broth.
Our mother was a fabulous farm cook, able to mix, roll, and cut biscuits as easily as blinking. Her mashed potatoes made us feel so good we’d swear there was some narcotic in them, and her dumplings were so light and perfectly salty that we’d ask for them on our birthdays. Once, some kids from Indianapolis came to our farm and went home with a crock of our mother’s chicken and dumplings. Their mother wrote to thank us and said, “The kids keep talking about your food! They won’t eat anything now without mentioning the meals you made them.” Our mother read the letter out loud to us, then tucked it into her brassiere and said, “See, your mother’s famous in the city for her cooking.”
