I had to admit, I felt a little bit cheated. I’d been led to believe that I was eating her famous blue-ribbon potato-water bread all along—when I was usually eating bread made from commercial frozen dough. Most of the magic must have been in the kneading and the rising, because even her Rhodes bread was memorable. I suddenly saw where my mom had picked up the habit of sometimes changing a quantity or two before passing on a prized recipe to a friend. She’d inherited the proprietary-recipe gene from Grandma. But Addie couldn’t do that to me now because I was forbidden from writing anything down. In my notebook, following “add the potato water” was a great blinking expanse of white paper.
When I eventually wanted to reproduce her homemade potato bread, quite a few years later, I was forced to call on my sense memories, which came dribbling back to me: the long, stretchy gluten arms, the tight squeaks emitted during kneading, the whoof of living, breathing air that escaped when Addie punched down the first rise, the way she coiled up the dough before tucking it snugly into its twin bed of a loaf pan. I called up the taste of the nut-brown heel smeared with butter and its stubborn chew, my teeth on it like a growling puppy that wants to prolong the pleasure of someone tugging on her toy.
Along with the bread came other memories, older ones, of the leggy bird marionette that Grandma piloted into the kitchen to entertain us young kids, its big head drunkenly veering toward me, nodding enthusiastically. I remembered sitting on my mom’s lap, the edge of the kitchen table pressed deep into my belly. As the adult voices swirled in the atmosphere above me—my dad laughing deeply, my grandma coy, my mom smiling sideways—I felt invisible. I nibbled on a rectangle of poppy-seed coffee cake, giving its rubbly streusel top my full attention, and even though I felt as inconspicuous as a fairy, I could feel that my consumption of it gave my grandma great happiness. I was eating what she wanted me to eat. Being good.
I don’t remember ever seeing my mom eating the poppy-seed coffee cake. In fact, I think she had stopped eating it for a while—the same way that as a young adult I stopped eating my mother’s wonderful homemade caramels. It didn’t matter that they still tasted like buttery liquid happiness floating down the throat; they transported me on a direct flight back to my youth, from which I needed some distance. Maybe that’s why you have children after all, to provide new recruits who can be counted upon to take down the signature sweets. There comes a time when you need to bring in the fresh troops.
—
Years later, I went to see my grandma in the nursing home in Pierz. We were sitting in the hallway in chairs lined up against the railing for what she called “another one of these damned mock tornado drills.” To break the awkwardness of our hall exile I asked her, “How do you make a piecrust with leaf lard again?” It was a question to which I pretty much knew the answer, having made a couple according to her phoned-in instructions, but I wanted to hear her tell its story. She sat there a beat, then pursed her lips.
“You don’t know how to make a piecrust?” she hooted. “And you call yourself a cook?”
I was somewhat prepared for this. In her old age, her comic bossiness had settled into a more cantankerous groove. At “the home” no one wanted to sit with her at mealtimes because she complained so much about the food. She hardly ate, and on the days that one of my cousins could take her out to Patrick’s Bar, she ordered just a single egg roll—“fried very crisp!”—washed down with two White Russians. Some days, she didn’t even bother changing out of her housedress.
She had probable cause to jab me. After she moved out of her house, my visits became, regrettably, less frequent. I cursed my inattention, but it just wasn’t the same without her kitchen, and we both knew it. There were no basement runs to send me on, no jars of pickles or bags of frozen sugar cookies to retrieve. When Addie left her house, she lost her household machine and, with it, a lot of her spirit. I was in mourning for that.
She wasn’t done with me. “I don’t know why I spent all that time cooking. Acch…” Her disapproval ratcheted up in her throat. “I wish I had spent more time talking to people and not so much time feeding them.” She had concluded what she wanted to say and looked down the tunnel of the hall.
My obsession with cooking, my passion for digging into the historical topsoil of every recipe I loved, many of them taught to me by the woman now sitting before me…what she was saying made no sense. Except maybe as a provocation.
“You don’t mean that, Grandma,” I said. I thought of her tiny kitchen table encircled by well-fed revelers clinging to her freewheeling hospitality like so many rescued souls around a life raft. “You love feeding people.”
“At one time,” she said, closing the book on the subject.
No, I thought. Sitting around an overflowing table with too many people in a too-tight nook had been her life. I’d been raised to see that as living.
I knew one thing, that she was like me, or I was like her. Our automation was everything. Her cooking hands, my mom’s, and mine all functioned as the turning motors for our minds. The legacy she passed on to both of us, the compulsion to make wonderful food no matter how much extra work it required, was as heavy as a professional responsibility. Once she broke her flow and started sitting all day without a purpose, she lost her taste for the work, food, life, everything.
I kissed her on her white floury cheek, soft and deflated, and she smiled up at me, grabbing my small warm hands in her cold rock-jointed ones, and we said good-bye. For years before she died it felt as if I was always saying good-bye for the last time, again and again.
The conversation we had that day followed me around for a long time, like a challenge. She had obviously been trying to remind me to focus on the people I was feeding instead of the food; she knew the domineering nature of her own cooking complex well enough to try to save me from the same fate.
But one day something else frizzled into the light: What about the recipes? Her holy box of recipes, many of them hand-lettered in her bloomy cursive and imprinted with a scrawled “very good” in the corner…How could she say they didn’t matter to her?
Her recipes—which old early American cookbooks sagely refer to as receipts—patiently stacked in long-forgotten metal recipe boxes, remained the only hard paper evidence of the dinners she made for us and the memories we shared around her table. As I shuffled through them, I saw that her gift, as a frugal, widowed mother of three, had been to cook as if there was no end in sight to the food. As if it were bottomless. That kind of irrepressible generosity couldn’t be stoppered; it was still flowing like a slow leak through my mom and me.
Despite what Addie said about cooking being a waste of time, she slipped it to me that she believed the reverse to be true. Her surliness was the key: If something deep down inside her hadn’t known that all her cooking had been worth it, she wouldn’t have brought it up.
12
THE OLD TIME OF MY YOUTH