My mother cooked, waited tables, managed or owned cafes most of her adult life. These establishments were cafes, not restaurants. The word "restaurant" implies certain levels of ambiance, class and sophistication, attributes which could not be associated with the places mom worked. Please don't get the wrong impression. Mom never worked in anything that could be considered a "dive". She had too much class and self-respect for something like that, she was the consummate professional. Her career spanned the years following the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War. She worked in places frequented by working class men and women. The cafes served wholesome food that tasted good at prices people could afford. Mom worked in cafes and learned to prepare simple food in flavorful ways.

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One of her most popular dishes was Ham and Beans with Cornbread. In the last cafe she owned, The Red Barn Cafe, near Kimberling City, Missouri on Table Rock Lake, we regularly had folks stopping in and asking "Is this the place with the Ham and Beans?" These were people from St. Louis, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Oklahoma City and a multitude of distant cities and towns. All the "locals" already knew to go to "The Barn", as it was affectionately called, for the best Ham and Beans around.

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As a young teenager, I once asked her why her Ham and Beans were so good. She told me she had a secret ingredient that she used in many of her dishes and said she would tell me what it was but I had to promise to not divulge the secret to anyone. Of course I promised and when she shared her secret ingredient, I was completely disgusted! Her secret ingredient was . . . GARLIC!  I thought that was awful! But the food was good so I didn't stop eating. 

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One day, many years later, but still last century, my wife came home from work one afternoon and loudly announced, "I QUIT!". Since I was unemployed at the time and she was our only souurce of financial support, I panicked. I demanded to know if she had really quit her job. She replied that no, she had not quit her job. When I asked what she meant by her declaration, the explanation was even more frightening. She stated that since she was employed and working and I was not, she would no longer be cooking, or cleaning, or performing any of the other household chores traditionally assigned to "the woman of the house". Those tasks were now mine!

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Well, I knew where the kitchen was and I vaguely remembered installing a washer and dryer in a room somewhere in the house years ago, but the only vacuum I was familiar with was the shop vac in the garage. I was totally adrift at sea! She expected me to cook? Worse yet, she expected what I cooked to actually be edible!?!?

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Fortunately for me, and for the family, Mom was still alive and was living with us at the time. Due to physical limitations, she was no longer able to cook, but she was able to provide much needed basic guidance to me. Over the next weeks and months, I was able to overcome my dread and fear of the kitchen to the point that I was able to keep everyone fed without poisoning anyone. Don't get me wrong though, I was not then, am not now, and never will at any point in the foreseeable future be, a chef. I am a cook. My mother was a very good cook, my wife is a very good cook. Me? I'm a cook, just a cook. I generally turn out fairly decent, if somewhat basic, meals and have a good variety of dishes I can prepare without embarrassing myself (except for Lemon Meringue Pie). I've even developed a few good recipes of my own. That, in short form, is how I learned to cook.

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All of this lead to the development, no, that is a much too technical term. Let us say, all of this conspired to inspire the "creation" (much better word) of Brand X!

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As I progressed from panic to fear to relative confidence and comfort in my efforts to prepare food, I found that I was adding essentially the same seasonings to many of the dishes I served. Some were horribly over seasoned, others woefully mal-seasoned, and some, on rare occasion, were well seasoned. But many were seasoned similarly. Salt, pepper and garlic (I had overcome my revulsion of garlic by this time), were the mainstays of my seasoning repertoire.

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And then I discovered Hickory Smoked Salt! Ta Da!! If a recipe used salt, hickory smoked salt just HAD to make it better. I put that salt on just about everything I cooked. For the most part, it worked out okay. After learning to adjust the total amount of salt I used, my wife was pretty much alright with the hickory flavor. My son was more or less ambivalent (he was a teenager and impossible to please anyway). Mom was decidedly NOT impressed!

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As a young girl during the Great Depression, her family had basically been itinerant laborers. Almost all of their meals were cooked over open fires and she had a deep seated dislike for flavor of wood smoke, any wood smoke. Her dislike was so intense that my sister and I never realized food could be prepared outdoors until we had left home. Our family had never cooked out or grilled anything. So, after more adjustments to the amount of hickory salt I used, mom was able to tolerate the flavor and I believe she eventually came to appreciate it as well. At least she no longer complained as loudly.

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After all this, an epiphany struck me (and I still have the scar to prove it). Instead of adding four different seasonings from four different containers, why not mix them, put them in one container and only add the basic seasonings once: BRILLIANT idea!  Of course, it had only taken me a couple of YEARS to come up with that "brilliant" idea. Now getting the mixture right, the ratio of salt to pepper to garlic to hickory salt, was another exercise in patience, both my patience and the family's.

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Finally, after much trial and error and a great many discarded incorrect batches, the mix was deemed usable. The basis for what would become Brand X Seasonings had been created! But I'm still not certain whether it's my mom's fault for sharing her secret ingredient or if it's my wife's fault for putting me in a position where I had to learn to cook.  Either way, I thank them both every single day.