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Susan Portera is quiet a woman, who exudes a sense of calm that her adult daughters, Cynthia Lyon and Stephanie Bristow, admire.
“Mama is very patient,” said Bristow, “she never loses her cool and was always willing to let us be in the kitchen with her.”Portera joins us having just baked a cake for her mother’s bridge club, as her mother is no longer able to bake for herself. She comes in bearing a collection of family recipes on worn three by five cards, and the three women begin to reminisce as if the recipe cards were old photographs.All are accomplished cooks. Each over time has found her niche in the family’s culinary portfolio. Lyon loves to prepare the meat coarse and received a significant amount of training in understanding cuts of meat and the processing of meat in culinary school and a stint at New Orleans’s famed Commander’s Palace. Bristow prefers savory dishes and has somehow over time become the salad maker of the family. Her first degree was in home economic, just as her mother’s was years before. All three are graduates of the Mississippi University for Women, or Mississippi College for Women as it was called in Portera’s day.
Portera, a second-generation home economist herself, is known for her desserts. “She makes the best desserts ever,” said Lyon. Both daughters shared that their mother will never double a baked recipe. If she has to make more than one recipe for a large gathering, for example, she has the patience to bake multiple recipes of the same dish to make sure it turns out perfectly every time. “Mama is the baker in the family. She has the patience for it,” said Bristow.
Growing up in the kitchen was a fundamental part of growing up Portera. “Some mothers shoo their children from the kitchen. I guess I was kind of hands-on. Yes, it was a mess, but they’d have fun. They learned to clean it up too. I’d share my kitchen with anybody. I don’t think I ever made them get out of the kitchen.”
“On Sundays, we could do whatever we wanted in the kitchen. I remember baking pound cakes as a little girl,” Bristow recalled. Lyon learned to make the coffee as a toddler and would bring the paper into her parents. “She was baking cookies at six,” her mother recalled.
Baking her beloved desserts was something she especially shared with her three children when they were growing up and now does the same with Bristow’s three children, who are old enough to pitch in. Portera’s son, Brian and his wife, Jennifer, who live in Starkville, have two little girls, who can’t quite reach the counter yet to join in the baking process.
“Stephanie and Cynthia have fond memories of going to their grandmother’s to cook,” said Portera, so it’s important to her to carry on that tradition with her own grandchildren. She often makes the cookie dough ahead of time, so the children won’t have to wait for it to rest in the refrigerator. They help make a batch of dough, not realizing chilled dough awaits them. “They want to make the cookies right away,” she said.
Suppertime was and is an especially important time for the Portera family. “Mama cooked three meals a day when we were growing up, and we always had dessert,” Bristow remembered. Both girls recall homemade pudding being a favorite dessert, and both, independently, agreed they did not like pork chops growing up. “But that was daddy’s grilling, not mama’s cooking!” Favorite supper dishes included Italian dishes of manicotti and eggplant Parmesan from the Portera side of the family as well as fresh seafood dishes from their mother’s side of the family.
Family recipes are precious to this clan, and when Bristow married, Portera compiled a cookbook of family recipes on the original cards and copied them. She then mounted them into a book of handmade paper and attached a photo of the corresponding family member across the page from the recipe. “It was important to me that Stephanie have the recipes in the original handwriting,” she said. The book reads like a family history.
Suppertime was about more than just the food. “It’s time when you come together,” said Bristow, “and time for our big family to see each other. Growing up, supper was in a separate room, there was no TV, we talked—mostly about Brian—he played sports, so Daddy wanted to know about his day, what the coaches said! After supper we helped clean up the kitchen together.”
It’s also a special place where life lessons are learned from table manners to family values. “I know it’s hard for families when both parents work, but I think it’s sad not to sit down as a family to have a meal together and experience that,” lamented Lyon.
“By four, we knew how to set a table,” said Bristow. Both women have continued the tradition of the nightly family meal in their own homes.
Portera’s mother, Barbara Richardson, was a home economist, and her father served in the military. Both were native New Englanders, but her family moved all over the country with the military. Not loving cold weather, Portera decided to come south for college when she became friends with a girl from Memphis. Thinking Mississippi College for Women was closer to Memphis than it was, she enrolled but her friend backed out at the last minute. Portera came anyway, met her husband-to-be, Joe Portera, when she was a sophomore, married 39 years ago, and has lived in West Point ever since. Her parents eventually retired to North Carolina, where they had a vacation home on the Outer Banks, so the Portera children grew up enjoying summer vacations near the Atlantic Ocean. Their grandfather set out crab pots at night and harvested them in the morning. “We’d have fresh crab for breakfast,” remembers Bristow. Fresh clams and fried shrimp rounded out the summer menu. Portera’s mother now lives in West Point, and she and her husband, Joe, help care for both of their aging mothers. “They are very good to their mothers, both of them,” said Bristow.
To her daughters, Portera is the epitome of the ideal daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother. “I’d give anything for one hair of her patience,” said Lyon.
“She’s very satisfied; it doesn’t take a lot to make her happy. She’s not a selfish person, never jealous, just very devoted to her family,” said Bristow.
ERMA RICHARDSON’S DATE-NUT BREAD
1/2 pound pitted dates
1/2 cups nut meats
1 cup boiling water
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pour boiling water over finely cut dates. Add baking soda and butter. Cool. Beat egg and sugar. Add to dates. Add flour and nuts and bake in a 300-350˚ oven for 1 hour. Yield 2 loaves.
SUSAN PORTERA’S EGGPLANT PARMIGIANA
1 medium eggplant
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg beaten
1/2 cup oil
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
1 pint spaghetti sauce
2-6 oz. pkgs. Mozzarella cheese, sliced
1 pound ground chuck, optional
Peel eggplant and cut into 1/2” slices. Combine flour and salt. Dip slices into egg, then into flour. Brown in hot oil. Drain on paper towel. Place one layer of eggplant slices in a 10 x 6 baking dish. Sprinkle half of Parmesan, then sauce, and half of mozzarella cheese. Repeat layers. Bake uncovered 400˚ for 20 minutes. May add browned meat to the sauce to make it a heartier dish.
ETHEL PORTERA’S CHOCOLATE SAUCE
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup Pet milk
1 stick margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 square chocolate
Put all ingredients into a heavy pan to melt butter and chocolate. Bring to a boil and boil five minutes. Serve over ice cream or desserts.
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