Sweet Dreams
Once upon a time, a stock of cookbooks and a world of Saturday afternoons allowed Nicole Plue to find her place in the family as a young baker.
 
By Nicole Plue - Gourmet, October 2000

My mother taught me how to cook. Now that might conjure up an image of mother-daughter matching aprons, me standing on a stool, my elbows working parallel with hers, carefully measuring and combining ingredients. "Scoop and level, sweetheart," she might say, guiding my hands as I tried to measure a perfect cup of flour. It was nothing like that. After the dishes were cleaned on a Saturday morning and chores had been divided and completed in our Southern California home, there just wasn't much else to do. We were on our own, and for me, that meant all alone. There were no neighborhood kids my age to play with. My closest school pals were a long, hilly walk away. My older siblings were off doing older-sibling things. And my mother was sewing or paying bills while my father circled the house, absorbed in his mission to fix and repair.

Sundays we'd celebrate the family unit, all seven of us, with an afternoon of sailling, from which we returned home salty, sunburned, and relaxed, ready to start the school week. But on Saturdays, alone and barefoot, I'd sneak off to the kitchen and reach for my mother's cookbooks.

I would sit, legs folded beneath me on the cool tile floor, with a stack of cookbooks, pick one, then another, and slowly flip through the pages. I'd linger over the dessert sections, with their photographs of layered and decorated wonders, all circus-bright lime green and peppermint pink. I'd stare at each fluffy monument, imagining the taste. Then my eyes would wander to the text, which demanded near-patriotic duty in baking the perfect sweet: "Whether you serve these cakes with or without ice cream, you'll find the entire family will say, 'Make this again,'" or "Piecrust is one of the great kitchen discoveries of all time. Women who transform flour, salt, fat, and water into flaky, fork-tender, golden pastry are magicians in their own way," This was a magic I wanted to be a part of - to bake a superior cake, surprise and delight my family, win the hearts of friends, be admired by all.

Magic aside, a more practical consideration guided me toward dessert. My ingredients were limited to what I could scavenge. An economical, health-minded cook, my mother kept our pantry stocked with nutritious essentials, nothing fancy. Still, we almost always had flour and sugar and some kind of leavening agent - be it eggs, baking powder, or baking soda - and we had drawers of nuts and spices. Dried fruits could be dug up from the back corner of a cabinet, their torn bags held together with rubber bands. Chocolate was a strange and glorious thing and only rarely would I luck upon a box of unsweetened baker's chocolate and whisper its name reverentially. Even so, I had a refrigerator full of fresh fruits, and imagination full of lemon chiffons, peach crisps, and pineapple upside-down cakes - and a passion to make something good. Dessert it was.

"Tablespoon, tablespoon, tablespoon," I would chant. Then, with blood bangs flopping and measuring spoons clanking, I would run to find my mother at her desk or sewing machine. "Mom, what's a tablespoon?" I'd ask.

"It's the big one, dear."

Back I'd go, only to come up against a larger question.

"How do I zest a lemon?" I'd have flour on my nose.

"Use the smallest side of the grater." She'd lick a stamp.

"What does preheat mean?" There'd be sugar in my ear.

"Turn the oven on, Nicole." She'd hit the "Total" key on the adding machine.

"Clar-i-fied butter?" I'd be scratching egg yolk into my hair.

"Oh, don't bother with that." She'd wave me off.

So it went. Only occasionally did I stump her and have to show her the recipe. Rarely would she come to the kitchen to untangle my mistakes. Which is not to say I was a natural. Most times, my early creations were technical disasters; oatmeal cookies that spread into a single thin, continuous web; lemon bars, flat and sizzling for lack of sugar; angel food cake, a leaden heap.

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