Hallie mines a pathway from the kitchen to memories

HALLIE EPHRON: It's WHAT WE'RE WRITING and as usual, I get to lead off

Last week I made lists. On the list: Make chicken paprika. When I was done, I ticked the box. Does that count as writing? Actually, it does.

True, I was preparing to host old friends for dinner. But I was also developing a project I’ve just begun to tackle: how food opens gateways in my memory.

Making chicken paprika always conjures memories of my mother, Phoebe Wolkind Ephron

. “Mother,” never “Mom” or “Mommy.” She of the designer suits and Cherries in the Snow lipstick. I can’t remember her ever dusting a table, making a bed, or washing a dish.

She was a Hollywood screenwriter who'd grown up poor in the Bronx and prided herself on being able to buy her own mink coat. We had a live-in cook and a nanny and, as she once told a New York Times reporter on the eve of the Broadway opening of a play she’d written, she only set foot in the kitchen “to get ice cubes.”

Here's a picture of her leaving the Twentieth Century Fox commissary with my dad.

Dinner in our house was always delicious (our live-in cook Evelyn Hall was brilliant) but basic. Three courses starting with grapefruit or melon or canned fruit cocktail. Then meat (roast beef, lamb chop, fried chicken…) with rice or potatoes or corn, plus green beans or a salad. Nothing with sauce. No vegetables as exotic as acorn squash or eggplant or cabbage. Salt and pepper and Lawry’s Seasoned Salt.

Me and my three sisters could eat or not eat. No tantrums if you didn’t like what was on your plate. The only rule was you sat pleasantly at the table, and if you didn’t finish your milk, you didn’t get dessert. There was always dessert and it was a powerful incentive.

And then, one day when I was about nine, CHICKEN PAPRIKA drew my mother to the kitchen on cook’s night out.

I try to imagine her, lying in bed the night before. Paging through THE JOY OF COOKING which sat alongside a pile of OZ books and an Agatha Christie on her bedside table. Landing on the recipe for Chicken Paprika.

I can see her heading into the kitchen on a Sunday night. Maybe she wore an apron – for my imagination, that’s a bridge too far. What I do remember is how she taught me to chop an onion – skinning it first, cutting it in a checkerboard pattern nearly all the way through, and then slicing off narrow the layers. The recipe has as many onions in it as it does chicken.

There was much fanfare in the dining room where my father, in his usual role, ladled our plates with flat noodles and chicken paprika, topped with a dollop of sour cream. There was silence as we tasted.

A dramatic pause.

Then we oohed and aahed. It was delicious and so totally unlike anything I’d ever had before.

Inspired, she described her cooking adventure. Act by act, beat by beat, how she’d chopped and sauteed and thickened. Where she’d followed the instructions and where she’d improvised, tasted and seasoned.

This woman who wrote scripts for romantic comedies and dramas, who “put in a full day at the office” (as she told that New York Times reporter) and turned out pages and pages of dialogue and set directions, typed in triplicate, and never gave me even the tiniest hint of what being in that world was like, gave us chapter and verse on what she’d been up to in the kitchen.

Chicken paprika – the recipe is about two inches long in my (mother’s) copy of The Joy of Cooking. It's blessedly simple and direct, as are all of Rombauer's recipes. That page is bespattered with sauce drippings and stained where the red ribbon that came attached to the book had to have marked the page for ages.

I like to think those are the spatters she left behind as she launched a tentative, voluntary foray into domesticity.

Do foods conjure memories of people for you, too? Or is it a smell? Or a place? Or maybe even a word that opens a gateway?