Cooking Was In My Blood

A bit of backstory about us hardscrabble Hale people.

Shirlé with her Mom and their dog Copper - Huntingdon Valley, PA 1980

Before I jump right into stories from my Personal Chef life, I thought it best to let you know where I came from, what my background is and how I got into the Personal Chef game. I think knowing these things will help you, my dear reader, to understand why I ended up becoming a personal chef, and why I have an insatiable desire to work so hard. This will be a two part post because there’s a lot of information I feel you should know. Also, I find it SO fitting that on this day, May 8th, I post about my mother who passed away on this very date 13 years ago. I dedicate all the stories I write to her memory. I miss her so very much each and every day, as well as my father who passed 12 years ago next month.

I was born to Depression era parents who had been raised poor. They had only gone to the eighth grade, had both lost a parent when they were young and both came from the Southwest. They had heavy Southern drawls and they rode horses to school every day. All of this made my parents very strong people.

Our family consisted of four kids, my brother Dennis, 13 years older than me, was born in Arizona, my sister Judy, 7 years older and my brother Dave, 6 years older were both born in Los Angeles, California, as was I. My parents met in Arizona, but a few years after my oldest brother Dennis was born they left for California. My Mom’s oldest brother, George, was living in L.A and told her there was work there for my father. They packed up and “moved to Beverly”. Well, not Beverly Hills, but Torrence, California to be more exact. In the summer of 1965, when I was only six months old, the Watts Riots broke out. The city was on fire and my parents got scared. My Dad’s brother and his family were living a quiet life in a small town outside the North East Philadelphia region of Pennsylvania . My Uncle Chuck owned his own gas station and offered my Dad work. We packed up our red and white fin-tail Cadillac with whatever could fit, left the furniture and all its belongings to my Uncle George and drove across the country towards our new home. This is where I grew up. Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania. It was a beautiful, safe place to be a child growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, with one of the best education systems in the state.

My father, also named Dennis, who was originally from Oklahoma and had lost his father when he was 8 years old. He had 4 siblings with one dying at the age of 5, his baby sister Gerty, who suffered severe burns from a pot of water falling off the stove onto her. He became a long haul truck driver for most of his life. He had a gift for talking to people and a quick wit which I still admire to this day. He never feared hard work and was mechanically inclined, always figuring out how things worked or why they weren’t working. He adored all things Native American as well as having a fine taste in turquoise jewelry. He loved reading books, especially westerns by Louis L'Amour. He also had a true calling to the great outdoors. He was an avid hunter, both game and fishing.

Six year old Shirlé fishing with her Dad - Poconos, PA 1971

One of my earliest memories of childhood was being with him while he was snapper turtle hunting. I think I was about six years old. We had a creek across the road from our house. We had a train that ran no more than 200 feet from our house and the train tracks spanned a bridge across the creek. My father had a crossbow with steel tipped arrows on a reel. I would ask him if I could help him “go fishing for turtles”. We would walk down the long gravel driveway past his parked 18 wheeler and cross the two lane road and walk onto the tracks. We would stop midway across the bridge with our hunting stuff in tow. One large plastic bucket, a small axe, a long metal poker style tool and my father’s crossbow. My father would keep an ear for the sound of the train coming, but I’m sure he also knew the trains schedule. Sometimes he would pick me up and run across the trestle to get us out of the way of the oncoming train. This activity frightened my mother to no end, I’m sure. He would watch the surface of the water for what seemed like forever…then, in the distance he would spot a stream of bubbles coming up in a straight line. Readying the bow on his shoulder, he would aim in the bubbles direction, following the path. Then he’d pull the trigger and WOOSH! went the arrow with the line whizzing behind and following into the murky water. With precision he would tug on the line to realize he had something. His hands in gloves, he would begin pulling up the line, one hand over the other. Out of the water would come a huge turtle. He would get it onto the train tracks, take the metal poker tool that had a split forked end and get the turtles head out. Then with a quick wack of his axe he would chop its head off. My Dad would then hand me the poker and tell me it was my job to keep the turtle on the track while it bled out. Under no circumstance was I to let that turtle fall back into the creek. After all movement stopped, my Dad would put them in the big bucket. Once he had caught two or three we would go back to the house, drop off the equipment and head to the local tavern that made snapper soup. My Dad would sell them to the tavern owner for good money. For our efforts we would always take seats at the bar, my Dad drinking some beers and me drinking my Shirley Temples until my Mom would call the bar to tell us to come home for dinner.

Which brings me to my mother, Frances, or as everyone called her by her childhood nickname “Lolly” because of her love of lollipops as a child. My Mom had been born in Texas, in a podunk town called Corsicana, just below Dallas. She was the last of 5 kids and had lost her Mom to cancer at the age of five. Her father was a farm worker and lost his job shortly after my Grandmother died, with no prospects of work nearby. My Grandfather decided to pack up their belongings and move to Arizona in hopes of work. Once there, he managed to find temporary yet sporadic work and set his family up in a large tent with cots for beds. All six of them lived in that tent for almost two years struggling to make ends meet. My uncles found work and dropped out of school as well. Although a hard life, my Mom always had good tales about the way they lived. For instance, she told me about her Mexican friend’s Grandmother who taught her how to cook beans in a cast iron pot over a fire pit in the ground and also taught her how to make flour tortillas from scratch. Another story of how her and her “Sis” would try to kill a chicken for supper in an attempt to surprise her Dad and brothers, only to have everything covered in blood, while the chicken had run around from a botched beheading until it had dropped dead. And how they once lived off “hardtack” for a month, a dried pancake-biscuit type thing the pioneers used to take with them on long journeys, made solely from flour, lard, salt and water. She would actually continue making these often when I was a kid as a snack for us.

So, as you can see, I came from people who had to work hard to stay alive and who had raised their kids to do the same. But, by the time the Seventies rolled around we were living good lives in Pennsylvania with minimum struggle. My father was a long-haul trucker and my Mom was a stay-at-home wife with four kids to raise. We always had food on the table, a roof over our heads and a safe place to live. Looking back to those days, I realized how lucky I was to have been born so much later than my siblings, and how that placement in time helped me have a special bond with my mother.

Since I was so much younger than my siblings when I was born, they were primarily in school all the time, leaving me with just my Mom for the first 5 years of my life. My Mom absolutely loved kids. She was one of the most caring, creative people I know and when it came to children she had the patience of a saint. She loved teaching me to cook often pulling up a chair to the kitchen counter for me to stand on to help her. She would tell me childhood memories of how she learned that particular recipe. And oh, how she loved to bake. She would make four to five pies a week. An apple pie for Dennis, a cherry pie for my brother Dave, a lemon meringue for Judy and always a lemon with NO meringue for me. She would make pie crust from scratch each week which, and to this day, I still cannot replicate. We made our own butter from fresh cream we got from a local farmer by filling a large glass jar and shaking it for what seemed like an hour. In the refrigerator, there were always bread & butter pickles, cucumber salad and jello. The house always smelled of fresh baked bread or cookies. In the oven, were two cast iron skillets sitting filled with bacon grease or Crisco, always at the ready to make fried chicken. None of her recipes unfortunately were ever written down. When I would ask her for a recipe she would say “Oh, a little of this” or “you’ll know when it’s done when its done”. She was an intuitive cook, just as I have become. Cooking was in my blood, passed down from my mother.

As for her creative side, I remember her making my first dollhouse out of shoe boxes she had taped together, complete with wallpaper and fully furnished. She passed on her love of gardening to me and showed me how to grow my own food. We would always be working on something. She could literally create something either delicious, or beautiful or useful from literally nothing. I think this is where I acquired my love of making things. Having her all to myself in my formative years had a huge impact on who I became as an adult, and for that I am forever grateful.

The age gap between me and my siblings also had an impact on me in other ways. By the time I was 6 years old, my oldest brother had joined the Army, had gotten married and started a family, becoming an aunt when I was only 7 years old. By the time I was 11, my sister, with whom I had always shared a bedroom, left home to become a race horse jockey in Brigantine, New Jersey. I now was left to sleep alone along with my imagination of creatures under the bed or in the closet. My brother Dave, closest in age to me but still six years older, didn’t leave home until after I had left but he was always hustling and starting various businesses. I think that he and I were both born with the same entrepreneurial gene.

So, I hope this gives you a feel of my roots and where I came from.

Next week’s read will be all about wanting to be a rockstar, being forever grateful for having “bonus parents” and how I got into cooking in the first place and becoming a Personal Chef.

Until next week,

Shirlé

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