“I’m a dump-and-stir cook.”

That is my mother’s deceptively self-deprecating description of her style.  Self-deprecating because she is not-so-secretly proud of her dump-and-stir-ness, implying as it does a down-Maine disrespect for fussiness, pretension and the use of measuring cups. 

A dump-and-stir recipe might replace key ingredients (biscuit mix for cake flour), make a radical transformation (a casserole becomes a soup) or preach moral revisionism (veal is too expense, we’ll just use chuck).  Mom’s approach emerged, I think, from a hungry child whose mother didn’t cook and a grandmother who fed her, along with teenage uncles, Canadian grandfather, a string of boarders and  anyone else who looked like they might need a bite to eat using war-time recipes based on notions of struggle and ingenuity.  When we were children she canned and pickled, made jam and put up tomatoes. At the same time, she took to the pleasures of the 60s, including cake mix, Campbell’s soup and the new taste for foreign foods like Indian curries and Swedish meatballs. Since no one knew how these dishes actually tasted, they were a paradise for liberal interpretation.

The dump-and-stir ethos has infected my own cooking, which features impromptu substitutions, “eye-balling” quantities, and a general reluctance to heed advice.  This makes me either hugely inventive – as I would like to believe – or chronically undisciplined, as the results more nearly suggest.  As a psychology student I diagnosed myself as “oppositional-defiant” – the disorder of adolescents compelled to buck the rules put down by schools, parents or part-time jobs.  I respond to a recipe the way that kid in the back of the class responds to homework and dress codes; I’m always trying to find a short cut or a way around it.

Sometimes I am ambivalent about my dump-and-stir legacy.  I wish I could follow a recipe without deviation, or restrain the urge to add an uncalled-for ingredient. I would like to make perfect cookies, or even just make the same thing twice. Yet I know that the spirit of rebellion is ingrained too deeply and like the leopard, I cannot change my spots.