For many years, my sole guiding tenet was not to be like my mother. It has taken until now, almost five decades into my life, to concede that she did exactly the same thing. This is not easy to admit, that we might have had in common this need for independence from the women who came before us. Even more, that the rebellion in both cases expressed itself in the kitchen.

I'm speculating to some extent, because my mother is no longer here for me to ask and she likely would not have answered, anyway. As a cousin once said: "Our family talk about something? You must be kidding."

But I think I have some evidence on my side.

My mother's mother was a cross between Betty Crocker and Gen. George Patton. At Thanksgiving dinner, I half expected to see her carrying pearl-handled spatulas. The tablecloth beneath her gleaming china was as smooth and sparkling as a skating rink. Everything from the turkey to the gravy to the rolls to the cream cheese-stuffed celery on the relish tray was made by her hand.

My grandmother had collections of tablecloths, which she embroidered, and dainty recipes for ladies' luncheons. She regularly had her canasta club for lunch, and she didn't serve tubs of deli chicken salad, either. Canasta club luncheons were asparagus and a creamy sauce over toasted English muffins or creamed chicken on homemade biscuits. She purchased luncheon sets of china (smaller sized plates, if you don't know) solely for canasta club use. One set, which I have, has 12 luncheon sized plates with a matching pitcher and goblets, all in white milk glass embossed with grapes and vines.

My mother would refer to these luncheons with a barely concealed sneer, deeming it a lot of trouble to go to for a bunch of old biddies. She claimed her resentment was rooted in the fact that she had to clean up after the parties when she was still at home (these monthly gatherings went on for decades). But I think it went farther than that.

In general, my mother thought if the plates were clean, she'd done enough in the table decoration department. She saved the round plastic plates from a frozen dinner popular in the '70s to reuse for pimento cheese sandwiches at lunch. I tossed several when cleaning out the house after she died in 2003. Survivors of the Great Depression never throw away anything.

Interestingly, she had china and silver, which she began buying before she got married. She even ended up with two different sets of dinnerware, one of which included an array of serving pieces from jam pots to relish trays. And there was service for eight in Candlewick crystal, with water and wine glasses, and odd little cocktail glasses.

As a kid, I saw the china and silver once a year, at Christmas. The Candlewick never came off the top shelf of the knotty-pine kitchen cabinet because, apparently, it would break if I breathed my destructive child-breath on it. I was so conditioned not to touch that crystal that when she finally gave it to me, my stomach flip-flopped as I wrapped it in newspaper.

Our house was very small; a boxy, one-bath, 1950s ranch in a Winston-Salem neighborhood of similar houses. There wasn't room for parties and my parents weren't party people. Caring for my sister, who had Down syndrome, demanded my mother's time. But besides all that, I felt there was a backlash against what my mother perceived as my grandmother's fussiness about food.

At mealtime, my mother took the shortest distance between two points, and that meant traveling a familiar road. A handful of dishes rotated regularly: meatloaf, baked chicken and rice, macaroni and cheese with beef (the ancestor of Hamburger Helper), spaghetti (devoid of seasoning other than a shake from a five-year-old jar of oregano), frozen Salisbury steak and fried chicken (really good). It was steaks on Saturday night and a roast or roasted chicken on Sundays.

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