Was it a salad? A sherbert? Appetizer, dessert or main course for a ladies lunch?
In my house, growing up, that can of "fruit cocktail" signaled yet another diet that my mother was venturing into. Always "packed in natural juices, no sugar added"and, never served to the family as anything else, ever. Oh, that's not to say that it wasn't served to families as one part of another of a sit-down weekday meal. But, those were the families of my high school classmates, many of whom were totally American or Anglicized or had stay-at-home mothers who also fit the above bill. Mothers who regularly received their monthly copies of Good Housekeeping Magazine in their mailboxes and sat down to read from cover to cover, circling recipes that soon would grace their tables and delight their families and guests as they became staples in their kitchens. Never happened at my house. My mom was more of a National Geographics subscriber.
My mother-in-law kept her ethnicity at an undercurrent level. Yes, she was child of two people who had immigrated from southern Italy and Sicily and yes, she could prove her heritage in her wonderful cooking, but she was a stay-at-home, highly traditional suburban mother despite her inability to drive a car. That aspect of her life more than likely shaped the image of her that I have retained all these years later. A Good Housekeeping Magazine-Mother who, I found out, would oftentimes serve as my inspiration and role model (sorry Mom) as I ventured into wife and motherhood.
And so, I adopted the Fruit Cocktail Salad recipe into my growing repertoire and used it on many an occasion as the years flew by. I still can't recall if it was an appetizer or a dessert however. But I do recall the pretty little yellow loaf, speckled with bits of canned fruit in all its glory. And, I still recall how I felt as a proud new home-maker. I'm sure I glowed.
I haven't made anything that even vaguely resembles that yellow dreamy thing in many years. Fruit Cocktail Salad is now just another of those food memories that elicit a wide variety of memories and emotions. So many of those recipes contain parts of a very special time in my life. As I grew and developed as a mother, I found that it was possible, and preferable, to be my own kind of homemaker. Eventually, I found myself in the role of caretaker to my parents and one day it became my duty to assist my widowed father in paying his bills and managing such things as subscriptions and memberships, bills he would simply just pay as they arrived in his mail box. The mail he never thought to question.
To my surprise, one of those was a request for renewal of Good Housekeeping Magazine. His pantry, once stocked with all the necessary ingredients for "starting a diet on Monday" was now barren.
