How I Came to Cook for my Mother, or the Adventures of a Daughter dealing with Scarlett O’Hara in Old Age

My stepfather was one of the pioneers of the hotel business in Miami Beach. Long before he met my mother, he and his partners owned a series of hotels. The most famous of them were the theme motels The Desert Inn and The Colonial Inn. My mother and he owned the Lombardy in the 1960s and later owned both the Colonial Inn and the Desert Inn.

We used to swim at the Colonial Inn, done in black and white with a colonial buggy and horse sculptures out in front, for the tourists to take souvenir photos in. 

During WWII, my stepfather had been in charge of the food at an officers’ club in New Zealand. My Stepfather had begun his career in hotels in New York, then he went into the Army where he was in charge of the food at an Officers’ Club in New Zealand. When he returned to the US he went to Miami Beach and got his first hotel.

The hotel had a French pastry chef making the most delicious brownies with walnuts, cheesecake with cherry topping, crumb apple pie, and delicious Danish. When I went away to college, he sent me care packages of mini-danishes. All the girls on my dorm hall waited for those packages which we shared.

The Colonial Inn was famous for its food and for its celebrity entertainment. My stepfather, who looked like the late Duke of Windsor, had silver hair and suits that were tailored in London.

Miami Beach has been through many ups and downs. The Cuban Revolution gave the city a new identity, but in the early days of the Revolution, many Cuban migrants came, professional men who had been lawyers and doctors, taking jobs in the hotels, in order to establish themselves in a new country. The drug trade of the 1980s gave rise to a crime wave, as Miami became the cocaine capital of the world.

The architecture of Miami Beach ranges from Art Deco in South Beach to the neo-Baroque Fountainbleau on Collins Avenue, once a glamorous spot where Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis performed

Many years later, my mother was ill and alone and asked me to take care of her, I could not say no. I gave up the writing life in the big city to return home. We reversed roles. First I had been her baby. Then she was mine. After two years, with the onset of dementia, she was diagnosed with dysphagia a swallowing disorder which can be caused by many conditions, some permanent and some temporary.

BOOM! Once the diagnosis was made, the diet was all puree from that moment forward. The condition of dysphagia is life-threatening because with the swallowing difficulty comes coughing and the aspiration of food into the lungs. The danger is that the patient may contract bacterial pneumonia. This requires hospitalization and is more difficult to cure than regular viral pneumonia. Sometimes if the dysphagia patient cannot eat, they must take in their nutrition with a feeding tube. If they lose too much weight, their immune systems suffer and they cannot fight off infections.

Swallowing disorders affect a million people a year in the US. The community of those with a need for a pureed diet is approximately fifteen million people here.

This was an emergency. As I often told my mother, “It’s a good thing you were such a good mother and taught me how to cook all these dishes. You used to cook them for me. Now I’m cooking them for you.”

I knew there was nothing that addressed the problem, beginning from the moment of diagnosis, so I got into the kitchen and experimented.

It became a challenge. I am an experienced researcher. I did what I always do. I kicked into high gear and began reporting my story. I read everything, I spoke to health care professionals and I shopped like a maniac. I found out that what was commercially available could only be classified as horrible. In an online blog, one caregiver characterized the commercially packaged food products as dog food. I think this is being kind.

I was a rebellious daughter and my mother was a headstrong mother. Think Scarlett O’Hara in old age. My mother was beautiful, she was funny and she had great spirit. She was an independent woman and she ruled her children with an iron hand. She had been much married, thinking of marriage as a sort of a visa. If the men did not measure up or shape up, she simply got a new stamp in her passport, and got a new visa. When I say much-married, I mean it. My mother was in the category of Elizabeth Taylor when it came to the subject of marriage.

Cathie G. was eating happily, she was in good health, she wasn’t losing weight and she had good spirits. The aides smelled the food and tasted the food and wanted the recipes. My mother’s primary care physician encouraged me. I wrote the book that I wished that I had when I embarked upon the journey of preserving my mother’s quality of life.

My mother thrived for three years on this diet and then she passed away. We had a lot of good times in those final years and nothing between us was left unsaid. Before I undertook this journey, sometimes I was isolated in my scholarly work, alone in a room with a machine. Now I give lecture-demonstrations in hospitals for families of stroke victims and I teach caregivers how to make great desserts. Most of the time, the dysphagia patient only gets thickened ice cream or pudding. I tell how to puree cakes and pies. I have a whole new world of connection open to me, I am no longer isolated, I take pride in doing this work in my mother’s memory.

Oh, and by the way, I achieved some kind of an emotional breakthrough in dealing with my mom. Some unknown blockage disappeared. I got out of my head, for the intellectual part of writing came easily to me. My heart opened. My writing got better, deeper and more profound.
Essential Puree: The A to Z Guidebook is not simply a book of recipes. It presents a system for setup and organization of the puree kitchen: the pantry, the refrigerator and the freezer. It tells how to select ingredients for nutritional healing. It tells how to organize a cooking schedule so that one is not chained to the kitchen but a great meal is always on hand. It tells how to cook in batches, label food and store food.

So my book is dedicated to the memory of my mother. I do this work in her honor, that what was created for her may be of benefit to others. It has been a great adventure. So to all my readers: Swirl Away!