I don’t know how old I was when my curiosity kicked in, but I finally asked Mom: “Who is that, anyway?”
She had given me a chore to do that I attacked with my customary zeal — which is to say that I dragged my feet and mourned my tragic station in life.
And when Mom unleashed her customary comment on my work habits — which is to say that she quipped: “You move slower than molasses in January” — I asked: “Who is that, anyway?” To be honest, it wasn’t curiosity as much as a stalling technique.
“Who is who?” Mom asked, taking the bait.
“Moe Lasses. You always say I’m slower than he is in January.”
Mom laughed and reached up to her Repository for Useless Things — the cabinet high over the stove that no right-minded person would ever use to store anything worth stretching for. She pulled out an old dusty jar filled with what looked to be tobacco juice, or maybe grasshopper-spit, its cap rusted and crusted black. This was before the age of freshness dates, but if they had been in effect this jar would certainly have gone defunct sometime around the Emancipation Proclamation.
“This,” she said, as if introducing me to a long-unknown sibling, “is molasses.”
“What is it?” I asked, horrified, fearing that it contained some new and nightmarish parental regimen, like the jar of cod-liver oil that sat on the bottom shelf of the fridge door that she dosed me with every now and then, just to remind me that life was not always worth living.
“It’s used in some recipes,” she said.
“What recipes?” I asked, planning an addition to my Foods-I-Refuse-To-Eat list. Molasses would fit neatly between “lima beans” and “okra.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t really use it for anything. But I have a jar of it, just in case I need some in a recipe.”
“Let’s find one!” I said. “Let’s make something!” Not that I intended to sample whatever monstrosity would come of such sludge, but watching Mom bake something would be better than whatever chore was waiting for me to stop dragging my metaphorical feet. Which, truth be told, were more nimble than my literal feet.
But Mom was wise to my wiles. She rose up on her tippy-toes, put the jar back on the shelf, and sized me up with a look as if she was planning to make room for me in her Repository for Useless Things. “That’s molasses,” she said, by way of summing up the lesson. “When it’s cold, like in January, it gets thick. And it pours slowly…really slowly. Like you. As slow as molasses…in…January.”
And, to my disappointment, I noticed that the chore still hadn’t gone away and still awaited my attention. Stupid chores.
That molasses jar sat up there forever. It outlived Mom, because I don’t think she ever used even a teaspoon of it in any recipe. She did a lot of cooking and baking, and everything she made was delicious with only a few exceptions (See: lima beans and okra), but nothing she baked or cooked required molasses.
And, in keeping with her tradition, I have never used even a squirt of molasses in any recipe I have ever made.
I’m sure you may be reading this with a gasp of astonishment, because your favorite cookies or pies are probably made with a healthy dollop of molasses, but I am officially declaring molasses useless, even though Mom thought it wise to keep a jar of it around the kitchen.
And while I’m at it, I’m adding dry vermouth to my List of Useless Things To Keep Around the House. Dad always had a small bottle of it on a shelf of the liquor cabinet, but it too was caked with dust.
“What’s that for?” I asked him once.
“It’s used to make martinis,” he said.
Now, Dad was mostly a beer drinker, but sometimes when he got in a downtown mood he liked to pour himself a martini. But while the gin bottle was dust-free, this vermouth bottle had a dusty, molasses-jar look to it.
“It looks pretty old,” I said to him. “Don’t you use much of it when you make a martini?”
He smiled. “Not in the martinis I like to drink,” he said. “In fact, if I keep the vermouth bottle on the shelf too close to the gin bottle, that’s too much.”
Some martini recipes might use words like “dash” or “drop” when it came to vermouth. Dad’s martini recipe used the word “proximity.”
Still, he kept a bottle of dry vermouth on the shelf, just in case some martini-drinking guest came to the house and wanted one made that way — just as Mom kept an open-door policy about molasses in the kitchen.
They were peaceful, tolerant, open-minded souls, accepting of any race, creed, religion or political view that a visitor might bring to their home.
And the proof of it was those dusty, useless bottles of molasses and vermouth.
