If your mother wasn't a kitchen goddess, would you love her any less?

Reading magazines and newspapers on days like Mother's Day is boring with a capital "B."

There is a plethora of stories whose writers reminisce about their precious mothers in predictable ways.

The most predictable way to give one's mother a seal of approval as the "right" or the "good" mother (and sometimes the "annoying" mother), is to remember her through a culinary lens.

As novelist Jessica Soffer writes in her story of her loving yet non-cooking mother, the "conflation of parental love and cooking" is ubiquitous, in "commercials, films, books," leading us to believe that "mothering can be smeared onto a sandwich, nurturing tucked between the wings of a garlicky roasted chicken."

Soffer's own mother was "stuff that dreams are made of, minus the meatloaf and marble cake," yet the fact that she didn't do the "meatloaf and marble loaf" thingie embarrassed Soffer to an extent that she spun her novel, Tomorrow, There Will be Apricots, around the characters of an older woman and a girl who find solace in the kitchen and in each other. Soffer allowed a perception, that the older woman's character was inspired by her mother, to grow.

Food used to be a trigger for memories of time past, as the madeleine is a window into halcyon days in Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. But today, as intelligent writers like Soffer remind us, it has become a repository of value judgment; in the case of motherhood, it's as though you are barred from loving your mother if she weren't wrapped up in your memory as a veritable kitchen goddess.

I like Soffer's tribute to what her mom really gave her: the fostering of her intellectuality:

The fact that she preferred talking to me while paging through the Times’ Book Review than while stirring a caldron of Bolognese did not mean that she loved me less, was any less motherly.