Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

It’s probably something only the cook notices, but blended families make mealtime a real challenge.

The members of a blended family have usually lived with other spouses, parents, or siblings before coming together. They don’t always have long histories with each other; and, in addition, they carry memories of previous histories that would daunt the most fervent believer in reincarnation.

When I married for the first time, I had a college degree but little knowledge about cooking dinner. I could stir up brownies and scramble eggs. If pressed, I could probably have baked a potato and a piece of chicken and had them ready to serve at the same time. But that was the extent of my culinary skills.

The new bride in me really wanted to please her new mate. He came from an Italian background, so I asked his mother for her spaghetti and minestrone recipes and mastered them within weeks of the wedding. From there, I branched out to recipes and meals I knew he liked; and the years we were together he seemed pleased with my cooking. When our two boys came along, they learned to eat what I served. But things happen.

Next I married someone from a Jewish background. He preferred matzo balls to ravioli, chicken soup to minestrone, bagels to Italian bread, and gefilte fish to calamari.

In addition, my new husband’s two girls eventually came to live with us. They preferred anything that came in a can: soup, Spaghettios, sardines, potato sticks. One day, I came home from work to discover they had eaten our entire stock of canned black olives as an after-school snack.

This does not imply that one person’s style of cooking is better than another’s. What it does mean is that many of our food preferences come from our families of origin and are formed when we are very young. It took conscious effort to blend them so that everyone at our dinner table enjoyed the meal.

If I made lasagna, the boys ate it voraciously. After the pasta was devoured, they pushed the garlic bread around their plates to sop up any remaining sauce. The girls acted as if they were company in a strange house, staring at their plates in polite acceptance. My husband rearranged the ricotta here and there to reach the noodles. I believe he was searching for the raisins his own mother put in her traditional noodle dish.

Italian meals were not the only ones filled with land mines. Almost every dinner at our house required acute concentration. If baked potatoes were on the night’s menu, I cooked both sweet and Idaho, as neither kind was liked by all. If I made steak, my husband wanted his plain, the girls wanted A-1 sauce, and the boys wanted gravy.

No doubt regular families have these problems too, but they seemed more acute in a family such as mine. We held a lengthy discussion one night trying to come up with a meal everyone liked. The closest we came was pizza, although we’d have to make plain cheese and cheese and sausage to keep everyone happy.

At one point in the discussion, Stephanie, the youngest, offered her opinion. “Why don’t we just eat dinner out every night?” she said. “Then we’d all get what we want.”

Ultimately I solved the problem by divorcing again, and preparing dinner for only one.