Adrienne Gallagher
I was going through my photos, looking for ones to include in a digital family cookbook I was compiling when I realized that I had nothing from our first winter in Chicago.
The backstory is that we had moved from Houston in 1979, practically as newlyweds, and had leased a house on Chicago’s North Shore for two months thinking that would give us enough time to find a home and move in. Instead, the almost 100 inches of snow that winter made it nearly impossible to find a home to buy.
One month in, our real estate agent connected us with another of her clients, a recent widower who wanted to move home to Dallas, but had also been inconvenienced by the weather. Melting ice had damaged his home, and he needed someone to empty the buckets under his leaking roof until repairs were made. We met Charles and agreed to move into his home in Glencoe, not far from Lake Michigan.
We easily folded our new responsibilities into our routine. His English country home with oak-beamed ceilings and leaded-glass windows was a delight. We especially loved the raised wood-burning fireplace in the kitchen and the cookbooks that we found on the bookshelf. On Sunday afternoons we dove into Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and tried some of her recipes. We considered the kitchen practically gourmet.
It helped that Charles told us to charge whatever we needed for the house (and have it delivered) from the local hardware store and to order more firewood whenever we ran low. We lived practically for free, meaning that we increased what we could put towards a new home. On the other hand, we had to make a conscious effort not to contrast where we were living with the much less grand homes we could actually afford to buy.
One caveat was that Charles asked that we vacate on the occasional weekend when he came back to pack. But after doing that only once, he realized that the house was big enough for us all.
During subsequent weekends when he returned, we developed a genuine friendship. Sometimes we went out to eat together, and sometimes we cooked for one another, which brings me back to our family cookbook. Our recipe for blueberry pancakes comes from Charles. He taught us to add sour cream to make them fluffier and more delicious.
I didn’t have a photo from that time to go with the recipe. But I remembered that the home had been built for the German consulate so possibly it warranted notice from the Glencoe Historical Society. I contacted the society, and its research team provided my husband and me with an eye-popping amount of material, including the real estate listing from 1979. A photo of the home during that snowy winter is perfect for my cookbook.