The Day My Daughter Took Back Her Tongue

“M is for the many things she gave me…”
From the song M-O-T-H-E-R, written in 1915 by lyricist Howard E. Johnson

I am a mother. It’s a condition I do not take lightly.

Falling in love immediately when the maternity ward nurse handed over my baby for the first time—a baby born with a full head of black hair and a face resembling a 100-year-old Inuit—I made a promise to fight like a tiger for her continued well-being, to introduce her to the Beat poets when the time was right, to get a dog and to make sure she was fed and always fed deliciously.

As the years went on, I saw to it that my child was not only supplied with food but when food hit her taste buds, it would trigger a passionate reaction. The objective was to see her eyes light up. The goal was for her to eventually make the enlightened decision that eating could be magical. Transcendent even.

Other mothers might pooh-pooh palate stimulation, limiting their kiddies to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and such during the formative years. But I raised a protest among those other mothers, saying, “My child is not a seal that one tosses a mullet to occasionally,” and I meant it.

She had her first bite of caviar at age five. It was served on a hamburger at a restaurant in Denver.

There are so many things a mother can teach a daughter, but my main focus was her mouth. What I figured was, the mouth—once stimulated—has a light bulb that flashes On just as surely as the brain does, so I set about looking for the light switch.

Being dedicated to forwarding her gastronomic instruction took time, planning, prep and execution. I spent close to 18 years in the kitchen.

Like a mad scientist, I was feverishly obsessed with transforming my kid’s tongue into the discriminating palate of a gourmand. The kitchen was my lab; she was the creature upon whom I conducted my experiments.

My days went like this: Up at dawn to make breakfast and to prepare a lunch for her to take to school. The essential first meal of the day varied. Either lox, cream cheese, capers, crumbled hard-boiled eggs and diced onions served on an English muffin, or cheese toast (Wisconsin sharp cheddar) with a side of sautéed red peppers and mild Italian sausage, or shirred eggs baked with pancetta, grated manchego, shallots and cream, or a homemade granola bar mixed with Texas honey, toasted almonds, dried prunes and blueberries. Occasionally I would cheat with a warmed-up leftover pork chop, but I did take the time to fry potatoes.

Boxed cereal was as unknown to my daughter Chablis as the dark side of the moon.

Moving on to lunch. Each school day, on a disposable plastic plate, I would arrange a variety of delectable bites in a circle, with a featured treat placed at center. A bit of pickled herring here, an Asian chicken salad there, a three-bean combo dressed with lemon and pomegranate juice, homemade pimiento cheese, stuffed grape leaves, cold roast beef with horseradish dipping sauce, mango salsa with pita chips, ratatouille, tapenade—and at center an oatmeal cookie made with dried cranberries, coconut flakes, walnuts and 72 percent cacao chocolate.

With a plastic fork nestled in, this lavish picnic on a plate would be covered in Saran Wrap and aluminum foil and then carefully lowered into a large grocery sack. The lunch worked exceptionally well through elementary school, but in middle school—because my lunch wouldn’t fit in her locker—Chablis had to balance the enormous bag on top of her books and carry it around for the first four periods.

Occasionally she would come home from middle school and tell me that her friends thought she was weird, and could I please just stick the food inside a small Scooby-Doo lunch kit? Because she was so young and still in palate training, I laughed off her request and continued to send her out as laden with exotic comestibles as a New York deli.

High school brought the rebellious clash. At that historic juncture, I noticed that her eyes would roll and her lips sneer when presented with the big bag. What finally broke the camel’s back was the salad bowl.

As a surprise, I had placed a large wooden salad bowl inside the sack, along with matching servers, five baggies of chopped salad ingredients and a Thermos of bleu cheese vinaigrette.

It’s not necessary to mention what happens to bleu cheese when left unrefrigerated for five hours. Plus, that she was expected to stand conspicuously on display in the school cafeteria, mix in the stinky stuff and toss the salad in front of classmates. It drove her to do the unthinkable.

“I traded your salad for Howie Farnsworth’s peanut and jelly sandwich,” she told me without a tincture of remorse.

At that point I realized, since her taste buds were out running loose at the noon hour, lunch would henceforth be out of my control. But I still had a grapple hold on dinner. Her palate would still be mine at the final meal of the day.

I had Cornish game hens marinating, potatoes dauphinoise layered with gruyere and heavy cream slow cooking at 300 degrees, and kale sprinkled with balsamic and extra virgin olive oil ready to be crisped in a turned-up oven.

“Why can’t we just have tacos, like other people?” she asked.

The punctured hot air balloon of my high expectations hissed and sputtered crazily overhead, then landed like a rubber worm on the toe of my shoe.

After all is said and done, I am the one who came away from the attempt at grooming a palate with a lesson learned. This is it: The tongue is a personal issue. If you let it go where it would go, it may come back tomorrow night for the kale.