This battered Boston Cooking School Cook
Book, published in 1942, was the only cookbook I remember seeing in my
grandmother’s kitchen; it was the only cookbook that Annie Sagan ever used.
My
mother used to talk about other cooks my grandparents hired in their Eliot
Street house:
There was Mary, who cooked and
cleaned during the 1920s with such fervor that she exhausted everybody in the
house! Mary won my grandparents’ devotion when she rescued my mother, who had
gone down the street to attend a wake (she was about seven years old) because
she heard there was a “boddy” there and she’d never seen one…
“At least she left a note,”
Mary said to my grandmother!
And there was Kathleen, who was there through the 1930s and whistled all the time; drove my grandfather nuts, my mother said, but he let it slide because she made the best pudding he ever had, and a good pudding was worth a few tunes.
And then there was Annie Sagan, who arrived
when my mother was away at college and stayed until the late 1950s, when my grandmother
died and the house was closed up and, eventually, sold, marking the end of an
era, the end of a way of life.
I remember Annie Sagan.
I remember visiting my
grandparents – the long drive down from Maine, the crunch of gravel under the
tires in their driveway, the hugs from my grandparents on the front porch. And
I remember tearing down the hallway, past the sitting room, then the dining
room and around the corner into the kitchen to hug Mrs. Sagan, who smelled like flour and hot bread!
And, best of all, she had a wen,
a big one, right on her face near her nose! I was absolutely fascinated by it—it
had a hair growing out of it, for
goodness sake!—and she tolerated my examination of it with great patience. She wore flowered dresses, an
apron (always an apron!), and sturdy, sensible shoes. She cooked and
cleaned for my grandparents, did the laundry, helped my grandmother in the
gardens.
She used to run the carpet sweeper (remember those?) every day; would let me sit on the top of it, wrap my legs around the pile and hang on for dear life as she worked over the rugs -- boy, what I ride that was!
I sat on the steps down to the laundry room and listened to her tell stories of her childhood -- she used big bars of yellow soap and a scrub board for stubborn dirt and stains, then ran it all through the electric washing machine.
I was allowed to turn the crank
for the wringer…
Those days are long gone, but I still have
Mrs. Sagan’s cookbook, her rolling pin and her pie crust recipe, written in her
own hand and glued to a larger piece of paper my mother kept for years.
“Mrs. Sagan made the best pie
crust on the planet,” everybody said; it’s still the truth today, but my brother finishes a very close Second Place!
