I sit here 6,000 feet up in a small town on the edge of the Beartooth mountain range in Montana, making Hungarian potato pancakes on a cold winter night for my neighbors. There is a warm fire and it is cozy. I begin to tell them a story. I say that although I know little of my Hungarian heritage, and never knew my grandparents, I can grasp a sense of who I am from the legacy of my mother's cooking.
I was raised in a blue collar neighborhood in New Jersey. Somehow, I was convinced by friends while in college at Penn State, to apply to law school. To my surprise, I was accepted. I had dreams of traveling the world as an anthropologist, my major, but this sidestep proved too tempting to ignore. It was a big opportunity for me, the first of my family and all my relatives, to take this step towards becoming a lawyer. My mother gave me the belief in myself simply by always saying, "you can be anything you want to be." Apparently, I had exceeded her beliefs when I was accepted because she said to me, "We're glad you got in, but we don't expect you to go..." They were words of caution for her daughter who was testing territory outside of her world. She was Hungarian, first generation, married to an Italian-American. She had learned to cook all the Italian dishes with gusto. The Italian side of my family naturally overwhelmed the Hungarian in it's color, dominating culture of verbal expression, lots of food and lots of warmth. My mother was able to sneak in her two cents however, by her delicious native food that left it's mark on me to this day.
The day finally arrived for my first round of exams. The first year is daunting and the professors do anything they can to discourage you, humiliate you and test you, trying to weed out the weak and the wavering. I was dropped off afterwards, about 8 p.m., after a rough day of testing that lasted until after dinner. It was bad enough that we had to make the long pilgrimage to Newark and back through lots of traffic every week. I was exhausted.
I will never forget climbing up the stone steps of our little house and opening the door to find my mother guiding me silently into the kitchen. Everyone had already eaten, but there on the table was a full meal of my favorite dish, chicken paprika and homemade noodles! The ultimate comfort food! I realized that my mother could not comprehend what I was going through but was making every effort to show her undying support. So, in the middle of the evening, there I was having my own private dinner, a tribute to my mother's love.
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