You don’t have to be a good cook to be a good mother

I didn’t go to college specifically to become less ignorant, but it happened anyway.

My freshman year at Vanderbilt, I told one of my friends, who was from Nashville, that it must be nice to run home every now and then for a home-cooked meal.

“Not really,” my friend said. “My mother is a terrible cook.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“She’s a great mom,” he said. “She just can’t cook.”

I remember wondering at the time if such a thing was even possible.

Like I said, I was ignorant. Today I know quite a few excellent mothers who pick up casseroles on the way home or, better yet, let the man of the house handle the cooking.

After all, cooking skills don’t make somebody a good mother. I mean, would you want Anthony Bourdain or Mario Batali to be your mother?

Didn’t think so.

Still, I’m thankful my own mother is a great cook.

Really, she’s a legend.

How she would wake at dawn to fry chicken and make deviled eggs and pimento cheese sandwiches for us to take to college football games with our father.

How she would always call my dorm before I came home for the holidays to ask if I had any menu suggestions. Yes, I did.

How on one of his birthdays my brother requested a lemon cake with lemon filling and butter cream frosting, with one layer for each year of his life.

Oh, and it was his 18^th birthday. Of course, Mom made all 18 layers, but the cake was taller than it was wide and we had to put it on its side to cut it.

Mom had lots of ways she showed me and my brother and sister that she loved us.

But those meals were constant – at least three times a day – and today still hover in our memories as a kind of standard by which we judge everything else we eat.

My senior year, I was taking a girl named Bess to the movies. We hadn’t been dating long. I went over to her apartment and she said, “Just a minute, I’ve got to get something out of the oven.”

Great day in the morning! It was a scratch apple pie! Even the crust was homemade.

At that point in my life, I wasn’t looking for a wife or thinking about the mother of my future children. And I didn’t start thinking about it then.

I just thought, “This is the best apple pie I’ve ever tasted in my life.”

As it turned out, Bess and I got married slightly more than a year later and she joined me in Germany, where I was a new Army officer. And yes, she made me another apple pie and lots of other things.

I’m not going to compare her cooking skills to my mother’s, but let’s just say they’re in the same class.

Now Bess is a legend to our four children.

She pushes them to do their best, and she’s instilled in them her love for music, nature and, yes, good food.

They don’t always appreciate it. When our youngest son was 4, he started watching shows on Food Network. One weekday we were eating tuna casserole for dinner and he turned to Bess and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but…”

He hadn’t been alive long enough to know you should never start a sentence like that, especially not to your mother.

He’d just watched Paula Deen put a hamburger patty, a fried egg and two thick strips of bacon between two Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but sometimes I wish Paula Deen was my mother.”

It was a teaching moment for the young lad.

Anyway, Happy Mother’s Day to all of you moms out there.

You are loved and appreciated.

This story was originally published May 12, 2017 at 6:36 PM with the headline "You don’t have to be a good cook to be a good mother."