Of all the dishes my mother made for special occasions, the one I remember most fondly was Texas Salad. The ingredients:
1 head of iceberg lettuce
1 large can of pinto beans
1 tomato
1 onion
1 large bag of Fritos
1 block of cheddar cheese
1 bottle of Kraft Catalina dressing
Notice anything about those amounts? Texas Salad represented a class of recipes that were easily passed around and replicated, and, most important, remembered because they were built on single units. No measuring required.
For my mother, who spent about four decades cooking for her family, it was a godsend to have dishes she knew by heart and could make quickly. Another was something she simply called broccoli cream cheese casserole: 1 head of broccoli, 1 onion, 1 block of cream cheese, 1 stick of butter. The only break in the one-unit measure was with bread crumbs, which went on as a sprinkling.
My mother was a child of the Midwest, born in the late 1920s in an Indiana town a couple of hours’ drive from Chicago. By the time she was cooking for me and my sister Julie, the last two kids left at home, we were in San Angelo, Texas, because my father had been stationed there as an Air Force pilot, after a tour of bases throughout much of the South. And by that point, she had cooked for six other children and two husbands. In my memory she approached cooking as a labor of love — but labor nonetheless. She didn’t seem out-and-out tired of it — that would come later — but merely not too excited. Who could blame her?