I was incredibly lucky to have been raised by parents who were always fleeing one kind of life, to adopt a completely different kind of life, at a moment’s notice. When I turned ten years old, for example, they traded their 150 year old farmhouse in Tenants Harbor for a 52 foot sailboat, and I started fifth grade in the U.S. Virgin Islands, instead of the quiet streets I was used to. This created a lot of chaos in my not-quite-tween brain, which I’m sure I’ll unpack on these pages in other posts. But for now, just know this: The Bedells suddenly found themselves in a lot of hot climates, where the idea of turning on a stove seemed like the height of lunacy.

I was also lucky to grow up watching my mom cook, almost entirely from scratch or from memory or from some vague recollection of something she saw somewhere, or which someone else had made for her. Her improvisations in the kitchen were a big part of what drew me to cooking; this idea that (unlike baking, which feels much more like chemistry) a dish could start in one place, and then through multiple tastes, and a few shakes of this, a dash of that, a few more tastes, and maybe a glass of wine, end up someplace completely different.

My mom was born in 1944, which makes her currently one of the oldest people alive today. To tease her, I often tell the kids that she is as old as a person can be. She’s not, of course. But when she was learning to cook for a houseful of kids and a husband whose palate swung more to the traditional side of cooking, she called on a pretty broad range of influences, that were specifically “of her era.” There was the cooking she grew up with, the early-to-mid sixties revolution of space age, ready-to-serve products. Then, she traveled internationally through much of the late 70s and 80s, adding overseas flare to her repertoire. And of course, she was influenced strongly by the emergence of 1980s cooking media culture, that weird hodgepodge of convenience cooking and more “exotic” ingredients, watching some of the first television cooking shows, buying her first food processor, and inserting capers and water chestnuts into literally anything she could think of.

My mom was the first great cook I knew. Unfortunately, what she never recorded was a list of her favorite recipes. In this series, my goal is to take my own fuzzy memories of some of my mom’s go-to dishes, the ones she would cook again and again, and formalize them into repeatable recipes. She had no formal process for remembering what went into what, so each time she repeated a dish, it would taste a LITTLE differently than the last time she made it. I’m not asking for her to remember; instead, I’m using my own memories of some of her favorites, and figuring out how I’d cook them now, while remaining as true to what I think was her original intent as possible. My mom created these dishes. I just codified them from my fuzzy memories.

We’re kicking this series off with a dish my mom and dad used to refer to as “Shrimp Cocktail,” which it definitely wasn’t. Instead of big rubbery shrimp hanging lasciviously off of a martini glass filled with cocktail sauce, my mom would chop up all of the ingredients, and combine them into a scoopable salad, which she would serve either in lettuce cups, or on a bed of romaine. She tossed hers with both mayo and ketchup, creating a kind of creamy cocktail sauce that clings beautifully to cooked shrimp. It’s just as well suited for a summer in Maine, as a day in the tropics.

The most important thing is to taste and tweak, as she did. Add another splash of hot sauce, if it’s flat. Add a squeeze of lemon if it feels heavy. Add a little more horseradish if it needs to be zippier. (And yes, these are all of my mom’s favorite cooking terms.)

Midcentury Shrimp Cocktail Salad
Serves 4

Ingredients:

For the salad:

• 1 pound medium shrimp (31/40 count), cooked, peeled and chilled
• 2 ribs celery, finely diced
• 3 scallions, thinly sliced
• 2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
• Bibb or Boston lettuce
• lemon wedges

For the dressing:

• ⅓ cup mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons ketchup
• 1 tablespoon prepared horseradish
• 1 teaspoon hot sauce (Crystal or Tabasco)
• 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
• ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• kosher salt
• freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

Cut the shrimp into bite-sized pieces. Don’t mince them…you want recognizable chunks.

In a small bowl, whisk together all of the dressing ingredients until smooth.

Fold the shrimp, celery, scallions and parsley into the dressing until everything is lightly coated.

Taste. Adjust (as described above).

Cover and refrigerate at least one hour.

Two or three hours is even better.

Serve piled onto chilled lettuce leaves with lemon wedges.