Childhood Christmas Cooking Training

When friends ask me about how I looked to cook I tell them I was trained as a child. Not professionally trained, but parentally trained. See, I have a non-cooking mother. My father was the cook, but he also was the provider, so he was not around to cook much except on weekends.

So my father did what he did best and that was train surrogates. As the oldest child he decided that once I could reach the stove I could cook. I was tall so I started cooking very young.

One of my big training schools was helping cook for the many parties my parents through. Every year we had a big Christmas Eve party. All my parents friends, their kids and any visiting relatives of their friends would come to our house for dinner and drinks. This started in the early seventies so drinks were big, but food and feeding people was very important to my father.

As the only southerners in Wilton, Connecticut, my father felt compelled to always have southern Christmas food for all our Yankee friends. I learned at a very young age how many days it took to soak the Virginia country ham in the bathtub to remove the right amount of salt to make it edible.

I became proficient at making tiny ham biscuits with slivers of country ham and lots of butter as those were a huge favorite of our Wilton friends. I also thought that there were only two ways to buy oysters, on the half shell at the oyster bar in Grand Central or in gallon sized paint cans. Oyster stew was always on the menu and we bought gallons and gallons of oysters for this party as we were serving hundreds and hundreds of people Christmas Eve dinner.

My friends Charlie, Tommy and Andy Hurdman could often be found in the upstairs kitchen washing Minton china bowls we served the Oyster stew in because we always had way more guests than bowls. We may have run out of bowls, but we never ran out of oysters.

Since today is the eve of Christmas Eve I still have the feeling that right now I should be cooking something. It was so ingrained in me that Christmas Eve was all about having a big party. It did make Christmas Day come faster.

I learned my love of Christmas entertaining at a very young age. I still have friends who grew up with me who still talk about those parties. I also learned that having two hundred people to your house on a Christmas Eve is so much work and that I don’t have enough child caterers to want to do that now. This is why I have so many smaller parties during the season. It may not be one big party, but all those small parties add up to my childhood Christmases, just without the gallon sized buckets of oysters.