Mama's Rolls

 

You can ask anybody around here and they will tell you that my mama was a good cook.  You can especially hear it from the children she kept in her “retirement” years when she baby sat a couple dozen kids during their growing up years.  And you can hear it from their rueful parents, who will tell you how many times they heard, and still hear, “it’s okay, but it’s not as good as Gertrude’s.” 

The good cook gene seems to have skipped me, although I can do okay with some things.  Maybe because I spent most of my growing up years riding horses, working with my 4-H calves, pigs and lambs and avoiding anything that was too girly.  Or maybe because I had my nose stuck in a book so much of the time or was busy writing my own stories.  I wish I had paid more attention to how my grandmother created her homemade fudge and lemon pie.  I wish I had asked more questions about exactly how Mama mixed up her cornbread dressing and, most importantly, her homemade rolls.  I have the recipe, but the directions are a little vague about some things.

I am almost embarrassed to admit that I am 68 years old and have never cooked a turkey.  Or made Mama’s homemade rolls.  But this year, two years after Mama died, I offered to have Thanksgiving at the house for Mama’s family, a group that could range between a dozen people or two dozen.  My aunt in Maury County had Thanksgiving the last couple of years of Mama’s life, when it got to be too much for her to cope with, and last year we skipped holidays altogether because of the pandemic.  Back in the early fall, my aunt mentioned how great it would be to have dinner again around our big table and I said, before I had time to think about it much, that I would have Thanksgiving this year.  

I have to admit, I had a few qualms about my plans, when I had more time to mull it over.  I had never cooked a meal like this for 20 people.  I had cooked meals for small groups.  For large groups, I had served finger foods, sandwiches, chips, brownies and cookies, but it was casual entertaining at its most literal.  Casual, like telling someone, “the crackers are in the cabinet right beside the sink” or “the glasses are over the sink.”  I used to have a waffle brunch on New Year’s Day, but someone else cooked the waffles and all I had to do was fry bacon and sausage and put out the plates and forks.

This was different.  Turkey, dressing, corn, peas, mac and cheese, my mom’s homemade rolls, two kinds of pie.  And then, just to make things more interesting, I decided to use my mom’s good china and crystal.  If I am going to do this, I might as well go the whole way.

I went to the store every day last week.  I went twice on Wednesday, Thanksgiving eve.  I had decided to make a fudge pie.  After emptying one entire pantry cupboard, I discovered that I had no cocoa.  I also had to empty an entire cabinet to find the container of sage I was almost sure I had bought last year.  So, Wednesday morning, off I went to search almost bare grocery shelves for cocoa.  Then, Wednesday afternoon, I discovered that I had no appropriate cheese for a last-minute casserole I thought we needed. (We didn’t.)

I looked up cooking turkey so often on Google that I started getting suggested turkey sites every time I logged on.  First, I had to figure out how long it would take to thaw.  Then I had to cipher how long to cook the thing.  Fifteen minutes per pound was the most common answer to that, which meant multiplication and thoughts of “that can’t be right.”  A turkey is not the easiest thing to handle, especially when directions call for rubbing it with oil.  I had plenty of suggestions from friends, including to buy a cooked turkey from someone.  That felt like cheating, however, so I persevered through the do-it-yourself route.  As I tend to do sometimes, I became obsessed with cooking turkeys, during my waking hours and my dreams. 

The rolls were another endeavor that became larger than life.  My mom had this roll recipe that produced the lightest, fluffiest, tastiest rolls in the known world.  She made them every Christmas and Thanksgiving for decades.  Since I had already gone for broke on this meal, I decided to tackle “Gertrude’s rolls” too.  Why not?  I did at least have sense enough to make (and eat) a couple of trial batches.  The first was edible, just barely.  The second were pretty good, but not exactly like Mama’s.  I did what I usually do – I researched making rolls on Google to try and figure out what I was doing wrong.  I concluded that the main thing wrong was that I am not Gertrude, but it did seem that I had been a little overzealous in the mixing of the dough.  I hoped the third time would be the charm.

On Monday I took inventory of dishes.  I think I have mentioned several times before that I live in a house that is over 100 years old, lived in by five generations.  Several generations left dishes in the house when they passed on.  So, there was no shortage.  What there was is a shortage of dessert plates.  I would have sworn my mom’s china had dessert plates or bread plates or whatever you call them.  If it does, I can’t find them.  I had options – I could pull out another entire set of china that belonged to my great grandmother.  I could use a mishmash of small plates, or I could just use paper plates for the pie.  I don’t always do well with a lot of options.  I found myself obsessing over dessert plates almost as much as over the turkey.  Turns out, nobody cared what kind of plates they used for dessert and most of them just used the same plate they ate their meal on.

On Tuesday, I discovered that there was a dead mouse, or mice, somewhere in the vicinity of the hallway that led to the kitchen.

On Wednesday, the dogs brought part of a deer they found somewhere and presented it as their contribution to Thanksgiving.  Scout scattered torn papers faster than I could pick them up.

I saw a post on facebook about what to do about dogs during Thanksgiving, to keep them from bothering guests as they eat.  I started reading it but after the first tip, I realized that the author had obviously never owned a dog.  “Feed the dog his meal at the same time the family is eating their meal,” it read.  Unless your family can eat an entire meal in less than one minute, that’s not going to work.  Or maybe it’s just my dogs that can inhale their food quicker than I can unfold my napkin.  I didn’t finish the rest of the article.  My family is used to dogs anyway.

I had a mild mental breakdown Wednesday afternoon, becoming convinced that people might leave the table still hungry.  Something about this house, where I am sure no guest ever left the dining room without being full, must have brought this on.  I can still remember my mama and my grandmother serving three different meats, two kinds of pie, and two kinds of cake when the only guests were the preacher and his wife.  I made an extra pie, then got up Thursday morning and made brownies and a pineapple casserole.  By late Wednesday night, I had stopped hoping for the turkey to be good and just hoped not to kill anyone with it being under-cooked.

Come Thursday morning, the house at least smelled like Thanksgiving.  I broke one of my best casserole dishes.  Four people were subtracted from the guest list because of an ear infection. The turkey turned out tender and juicy and DONE.  The cornbread dressing was pretty good for an amateur, but when my aunt arrived and mentioned gravy, I could only give her a blank, deer in the headlights look.  It was probably a good thing I forgot about it, because my gravy making skills are hit and miss and she offered to make it. Even more amazing were Mama’s rolls.  Either she intervened from above or my experimentation and research paid off because they were pretty close to what she made.  My aunt, two cousins and I sampled them right out of the oven, and we all agreed they were good.  We had way too much food and I am still eating pie and brownies, three days after the feast.  Scout had his first taste of Thanksgiving leftovers Thursday night and now gives me an incredulous look when I fill his bowl with plain old puppy food at mealtime.  I’m happy about the abundance of leftover food, since I am way too tired to even think about cooking anything else. Leftover Thanksgiving food beats almost any other kind of food anyway.

When my aunt was packing up her leftovers to go home and everyone was filling traditional plastic containers of each other’s leftovers to take, we briefly talked about Christmas dinner at her house.  She asked if I was willing to tackle the rolls for that feast.  At that moment, I felt like I had been awarded a gold medal.  Now, if I can just remember exactly what I did that last time.  Maybe I need to make (and eat) a couple more practice batches.  Scout will eat them, even I don’t.  And this time, I don’t have to cook the turkey!