My mother, Frances Junod, was not just a mother, not just a mom. She was a dame. She was a broad. She went through her entire life as a Harlowesque platinum blond, and I never knew the real color of her hair. She liked to go to the track, and she liked to go out to restaurants. She did not like to cook. That she did it anyway — that she had no choice — owed itself to generational expectations, and to the fact that if my mother was a doll, in the Runyonesque sense of the word, my father was a guy, a pinkie-ringed sharpie who spent many nights going to the New York City restaurants my mother longed to frequent, but who, on nights when he came home, loudly expected food on the table. So my mother put food on the table. She cooked three hundred nights a year.

She cooked spaghetti with butter and cheese. She cooked hamburgers, panfried without added fat on a hot, salted cast-iron skillet, until they formed a hard crust. She cooked scrambled eggs, made idiosyncratic by the addition of a teaspoon of water. She cooked shell steaks sprinkled with salt and Ac'cent — MSG — and she cooked chicken parts lathered in a sweet-sour sauce called Saucy Susan. For dessert she made Junket or Jell-O or My-T-Fine chocolate pudding...