“Would a supper dish by any other name (to paraphrase Shakespeare) smell as sweet?”

My father renamed “Sloppy Joes,” a Saturday night favorite back in the 60s, “Casual Josephs,” having reached the conclusion that any food with the word “sloppy” in its name could only undermine his never-ending efforts to teach his often-unruly children appropriate table manners.

Mother clearly didn’t care for the name “Sloppy Joes” either, given that she called this recipe “Wineburgers” when she put it in Plain & Fancy, the P.T.O. cookbook she co-edited in 1966 for Saint Luke’s parish school in Erie, Pennsylvania. (I'm quite sure she used water, not wine, in the “Casual Josephs” she made for us.) Mother took her editing seriously, names and all. Our 1966 Christmas newsletter begins:

This has been a hectic year, mostly because Pat has been co-editor
of the parish P.T.O. cookbook. We have the feeling she has always
had the urge to write a book, but at this point it seems a try at
the great American novel would have been simpler.

Mother often wrote our Christmas newsletters in the third person, but I’m guessing these are Dad’s words, as he told me he’d done a lot of pinch-hitting for Mother over the years. Despite her experience on the staff of her high school newspaper, she wasn’t much of a typist. He was spot on about Mother’s literary yearnings. As I mentioned in the introduction, I found out many years later that Mother had indeed always wanted to write a book. But it was a cookbook with her name on it that she dreamed of, never the great American novel.

Although she gave me everything I needed to become a poet and essayist, and even a typist and editor—including frequent trips to the library, gifts of books on Christmas and birthdays, and shelves of her own childhood fiction to read—food was always Mother’s true passion.

Honoring that passion, Mother, ever committed to variety, quality, and appropriate quantity of menu items—even, mind you, in the P.T.O. cookbook—filled in with her own recipes where fellow parishioners had left gaps. Years later, looking through Plain & Fancy, I kept coming across my grandmother’s and my Aunt Genny Lou’s names. A real-life mystery, as they’d both lived in Cleveland, Ohio, and had at no point been members of Saint Luke’s parish in Erie.

Mother, when I asked her, had a perfectly reasonable explanation. Her name, she said, was in the cookbook under an embarrassingly large number of recipes already. What else could she do but resort to some finessing? So, she was, in a manner of speaking, a fiction writer after all. My mother and Shakespeare, two writers who, along with my dad, understood the power in a name.

Mother’s Wineburgers, AKA Dad’s Casual Josephs

• 1 medium onion, minced
• 1 tablespoon butter or oleo
• 1 pound ground chuck
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 (10¾-ounce) can condensed tomato soup
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• ½ cup Burgundy or other red wine (or water)
• ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 6 to 8 buttered, toasted hamburger buns