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68 FLOYD SKLOOT THE FAMOUS RECIPE Cartwheels on the Moon S he might as well have said she had a photograph of my mother turning cartwheels on the moon. Instead, and no less implausibly, Joan said she had a recipe my mother contributed to a cookbook in the late 1950s. Joan had been my brother’s fiancée forty-seven years ago and knew my mother never cooked. She may not have known my mother used the oven as an extra cabinet for stashing pots, pans, platters, and dishes, all wrapped in plastic, but she knew how unlikely it was for her ever to have prepared a dish called Veal Italienne “Sklootini.” My mother did, on occasion, make toast. She would open a can of fruit or container of cottage cheese or jar of jam, cut herself a chunk of Cracker Barrel cheddar to eat with crackers, pour milk into a bowl of cereal, prepare a cup of instant coffee sprinkled with Sweet’N Low. But the oven and stove as appliances for food production? That was not her world. She loved to eat, though. She ate slowly, accompanied by dramatic commentary and gesticulations: Oh! This is divine! She liked rich, creamy, saucy, elaborate presentations in restaurants , or as a guest at someone else’s table, and she wanted everything—from her brandy Alexander through her standing rib roast to her chocolate sundae—amply portioned. Except on weekends, and provided she didn’t have to do the cooking, she didn’t seem to mind eating at home, and her preferences remained intact until her death at ninety-five. One of the last memories I have of my mother comes from a moment a month before she died. My wife, Beverly, and I were with her as lunch was being served in the solarium of the nursing home’s memory impairment unit. Bathed in early spring light, her memory so shattered that she no longer knew who I was or who she herself was, limited to a diet of soft, bland food she barely touched, my mother waited for her mushy meal to 69 Skloot appear. Though she barely spoke anymore, and never seemed to know where she was, she leaned close to me and said, “The chefs at this restaurant are very, very good.” Lo and Behold Joan also knew, firsthand, about my mother’s dedication to disastrous matchmaking, her zeal for bringing ill-suited partners together. This had resulted in my brother’s marrying someone else, someone my mother had found for him during his engagement to Joan. Before long, Joan married my basketball coach, without my mother’s help, and is still married to him. We’d lost touch, but a few years ago had begun an e-mail correspondence. Now, she wrote, she’d been “digging deep to find a certain recipe and lo and behold I found a very old recipe book from the East End Temple Young Married Set and there was a recipe from your mother.” I think she understood the startling nature of her discovery, which is why she prefaced it with “lo and behold,” as in, You’re about to witness the unimaginable! She concluded by saying the recipe was “very typical of her flamboyant personality” and offered to send me a copy. The book, mimeographed and plastic-comb bound, was called 130 Famous Long Beach Recipes. Joan had photocopied the cover and my mother’s recipe, which arrived sharing a page with Frieda Schwartz’s Day After Tongue and Rita Mintz’s Stuffed Cabbage. I didn’t recognize Veal Italienne “Sklootini” as something ever served in my home. Or tasted elsewhere. I wondered where she’d found it and why she’d chosen it over such equally fantastical dishes as, say, Shashlik Sklootovich or Chicken Papriskloot , which we also never encountered. The recipe itself was like the script for a deadpan Bob Newhart sketch. You do what to veal scallops? For how long? Look, Mrs. Skloot, is this some kind of joke? It looked and sounded like a recipe, it involved individually credible ingredients , but it read like a spoof. The very idea of my mother mincing four cloves of garlic...

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