Every morning when I walk into my kitchen, I think of my mother, and I'm sure that busy as she must be in culinary heaven, she'd be happy about that.

At the ready near breakfast makings is a worn, slightly battered tin measuring cup that she gave me decades ago. It was probably one I used when working with her in cooking and baking back home in St. Louis. She was a terrific cook, a master at preparation and presentation. Most of the time while I was at home, my task was to measure and chop and clean up, but something of her fascination with food must have rubbed off on me.

Over the years my husband, Joe, and I have spent in Ventura, my parents used to join us for extended holiday visits, and many times Mom came bearing gifts, for the kitchen, of course: the tin cup, a pressure cooker, our first toaster-oven, a combined salt-and-pepper shaker. Deep in her heart, I'm sure, she didn't want me to disgrace the family tradition.

It didn't start with my grandmother, I fear. A hard-working single mother, she didn't have time for gourmet touches, but she was a heck of a cook when it came to chicken and dumplings, fried chicken and chicken soup, plus a nod to her Czech ancestry, tasty little kolache pastries folded around prune or apricot fillings.

But Grandma must have had at least a subliminal influence when she worked at several popular restaurants as a prep cook during Mom's early years and probably had some hand in the fact that Mom as a teen once had a job flipping pancakes in the storefront window of one of the restaurants, a task I can readily envision her acing, both with her cooking skills and her ebullient personality, neither of which ever left her.

Just 18 when she married my dad, nine years older, she settled down to cooking her heart out for all of us, though we kids probably didn't know how lucky we were. We occasionally complained about this ingredient or that, but Dad never said a negative word about anything she cooked.

It was a family joke that she could put something burnt or worse in front of Dad and he would calmly eat every morsel.

Later in life, when my brother and I were in high school or beyond, she put her talent and personality to work on weekends demonstrating food in grocery stores, starting with biscuits and expanding into anything that her employer was paid to promote.

She became a top saleswoman in what was then a fledgling field — and I must admit I'm still especially friendly when I see demonstrators in today's stores because I know it's not an easy job.

My part of the bargain was to actually cook something for dinner at home on the days she was out working. I became an expert at tuna salad and tuna casseroles, about the only actual cooking I did before I was married.

Once, in my teens, I brought home an apple pie-crust and -filling mix from the wholesale grocer who had hired me for the summer to type up price lists, and baked the pie while she was out.

When she returned, she wouldn't believe that in any way I could have baked a pie. I had to pull out the box and jar to show her that I, not our neighbor, had put it together.

Late in life, Mom took to dreaming about opening her own restaurant because she felt, and rightly so, that much of what she could cook was better than we were served in restaurants. Her potato pancakes were to die for, and after tasting a creme de menthe pie at the old Colonial House in Oxnard, she researched recipes all over, in days when such research was much more tedious than in today's electronic age, until she came up with the perfect pie.

It became a staple at home for special occasions. And she could make a mean marble cake, which she did every year for Dad's birthday. A big, square, solid cake that we all loved. I can still see her passing a knife through the batter to make it marble, then through the chocolate streams on top to make it "marble" too.

She never got to have her own restaurant, but she never gave up on preparing food well, even when she and Dad moved into a senior apartment complex that provided a fine nightly dinner. She scoffed at other women who moved in and immediately converted the stove top into a counter top, never again cooking anything. To her, that was a mortal sin.

Mom never quite got over the fact that I once wrote a column about Dad, when he became the first male member of the Greater St. Louis Women's Contract Bridge Association, but never quite got around to one about her.

Here it is, Mom, and you've got the old tin measuring cup to thank for it.

— Rita Moran of Ventura is a freelance writer for The Star.