715. Not much of a cook

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715betty

Betty and Morris were a little old-fashioned when it came to marriage. They hadn’t lived together before the wedding, and they’d tried “to wait” with moderate success.

Betty knew she wasn’t much of a cook. Morris said he didn’t mind. It didn’t matter. Betty’s mother was a fabulous cook. She tried to teach Betty, but Betty wasn’t a natural.

For their first meal home together after the honeymoon, Betty cooked a simple cauliflower soup. She knew it was too salty, but Morris said it was “lovely, Honey” and gave her a kiss.

The next evening Betty made a shepherd’s pie. It was sort of average; a little bland really. It was about the level that Betty could safely manage. She did the cooking because she didn’t have a job, and Morris worked long hours and brought home the money. Besides, Betty was now expecting their first baby.

Then one day Betty was cleaning out the car and found a couple of old takeaway cartons stuffed under the front seat. He’d been getting takeaways. She thought she’d been doing okay, and now he was getting takeaways.

Betty didn’t say anything, of course, but she was worried sick. I mean, she just had to learn to cook better. She just did. Even when she made a salad it was pretty ho-hum. Betty was getting stressed about it. Quite stressed, and then she had the baby and Morris was absolutely over the moon and things were fine for a while.

Then Betty found a job. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep the wolf from the door. Morris at last could cut back on the hours he worked.

Betty thought it was out of this world. From then on Morris did the cooking. He was a fantastic cook.

“You did well, Honey, really well,” he said. “So now you can stop stressing out about it.”

To celebrate, Morris cooked roasted turkey with black-truffle butter and cognac gravy, accompanied by mushroom, leek, and brioche stuffing with green beans, shallots, hazelnuts, and tarragon. For dessert they had a simple chocolate caramel tart, all washed down with a Rosemount Diamond Label Sauvignon Blanc 2014. And after that…

Betty is expecting her second.

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47 thoughts on “715. Not much of a cook”

  1. redosue

    What a lovely story! Food, glorious food! The best lubricant for a happy marriage. That and, well, you know… A social worker once told me if you couldn’t cook you’d better be good in bed.

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          1. Bruce Goodman Post author

            I have a remote ancestor whose baptismal record is in the same book as Shakespeare’s. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the babies got muddled. It’s probably where Shakespeare got his idea from for Comedy of Errors

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              2. arlingwoman

                I started to go into how most of us are Shakespeare’s inferiors in language use and then thought, wait, this is about paraphrasing, which people do all the time (and often get wrong). So I thought of Sgt Friday and one of those talkative witnesses. 😀

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    2. Cynthia Jobin

      Ah…Pauline, Thank you! You seem to understand that it was not his ideas that made Shakespeare, (many a person has had the same ideas) but his poetry…and to paraphrase is to change the language, and to change the language is to destroy the poetry. By the way, where did he say that, about the cook licking his fingers?

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