My friend Linda has been married for a year now. She and Mark live apart from her parents. But her mother-in-law often comes to visit with checks. And all would be well if my daughter-in-law and mother-in-law did not clash in the kitchen in the fight for the title of best cook.
Linda resents the fact that her mother-in-law never eats anything she doesn’t cook and, wrinkling, tosses off her plate into the trash. Linda is a very good cook, though. She always tries to cook something new and to please her husband.
And when my mother-in-law comes, so does not depart from the stove, in the hope that now just something to surprise.
Mother-in-law every time Linda puts a plate with her next culinary masterpiece in front of her, starts the same speech. That sushi, rolls, gazpacho, shrimp in Mexican sauce and arugula salad is not food. Especially not for a man.
She used to make borscht for a few days and fry cutlets for a week.
– This is a real and hearty meal, taught her daughter-in-law.
– Well, cook her your special borscht and feed it to her every time she comes, I said, laughing to my friend.
Mark doesn’t like it. He had enough cutlets with borscht as a child for a hundred years. And now he happily runs to the table, knowing that he is waiting for something new, not my mother’s borscht.
And my mother-in-law, after her visits to the children, sitting on a bench near the house, was indignant to the neighbors. That her poor son lives hungry. He got all gaunt without his mother’s borscht.
– And it’s the fashion to order borscht in restaurants. The woman was indignant.
– What’s healthy there? Only harm in those pizzas and hamburgers.
One day she even enrolled her daughter-in-law in a cooking course and paid for the training, as a birthday present. Let her go learn how to cook normal food. But no, she went and transferred to a course on the best cakes and desserts from around the world.
– What’s a man need with all those eclairs and tartlets?
A man needs meat and proper soup, with potatoes and pasta floating in it, and preferably thicker. Human food. Not some slurry of spinach or tomato paste with unpronounceable foreign names.
And so the war of borscht and sushi has been going on for a year now. Mark laughs and says it will get better, it’s just that my mom is jealous of her son.
And what do you think, will it work out? Or will the borscht win out?
