Especially now that Amelia had invited her into her ultimate domain: the kitchen.
It was a foreign environment. Fran had told her one thing and one thing only about cooking: Don’t start. “Once you’re cooking for everyone, they expect it of you.” Her mother, Rachel’s grandmother Esther from Philadelphia, had been on call in the kitchen her entire life. “And what kind of life is that?” Fran said.
She repeated her mother’s only culinary wisdom to Amelia.
“I feel sorry for your mother that she would feel that way.”
“Oh, it’s fine. I’m just saying I really don’t have any cooking experience. My grandmother did cook a lot, but she lives on the East Coast and we see her only once a year for the Jewish holidays.”
“Where was her family from?”
“Russia. Poland. Eastern Europe. So her cooking was pretty meat-heavy—lots of brisket. And potatoes. And this stuff called kasha varnishkes.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
Rachel nodded. “I did.”
“I bet if you had it right now, you would feel like you were at that house. And you would feel like a child again.”
She smiled. “Probably.”
“Food is so powerful. It connects us to the past. It sustains us. It’s personal but also communal. So I am happy, deeply happy, to teach you a few Portuguese dishes. We have such a rich culinary tradition.”
“I love Mediterranean food,” Rachel said.
“Our dishes use the flavors of Mediterranean cooking—the olive oil, the bay leaves, coriander, onions, paprika. But it’s the way these flavors are combined that make Portuguese dishes unique. Our food is influenced by many cultures going back centuries: the Phoenicians, the Turks, the Moors.”
“Sounds amazing. I’m just warning you that I have zero technique.”
Amelia laughed. “It’s not a matter of technique. We cook com gusto—‘to your liking.’ The way I do it might not be the way a neighbor does it. Forget about right or wrong. I’ll show you the way my mother taught me and the way her mother taught her and so on. And someday, you might show your daughter.” Amelia pulled out a white tin box from one of the cupboards. She lifted the lid and showed Rachel what had to be a hundred index cards separated by divider tabs.
“You should look through here. Familiarize yourself. Let me know what interests you the most. It’s organized alphabetically but the recipe names are in Portuguese, so write things down as you go or you might lose track.”
“Nadine’s lucky she grew up with this,” Rachel said.
Amelia’s face clouded. “Nadine did not have much interest in the kitchen. Maybe she does now, living in Italy. I don’t know. But I did not get to share most of this with her—not the way I learned with my m?e.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what else to say. She looked out the window and saw Blythe digging around in the ground.
“What’s Blythe doing?”
Amelia glanced outside. “She’s trying to figure out a way to grow a vegetable garden back there.” She turned back to the task at hand. “So. The first meal. As you have seen, we cook once a week for Thomas. Bart has two jobs—running the art gallery and directing the theater company. And Thomas has bad days where he can’t get out of bed.”
Rachel nodded. “Luke told me he’s really worried about him.”
“We all are. This town has been so afflicted by the AIDS crisis. But we have learned as a community how to make this a place where people can live with the disease. Painters can paint and writers can write and not worry about where their next meal will come from.”
“I want to help.”
“And you will. We’ll make a roast chicken for tomorrow night. And Thomas likes my homemade cheese. It needs to sit for twenty-four hours, so we’ll get that going and then move on to the main course.”
Rachel had never considered the notion of actually making cheese. Cheese was something that simply existed. She shared this thought with Amelia, who told her, “When I was growing up, making cheese was a weekly Sunday-afternoon activity with my mother. She took her cheese very seriously. When I first met my husband, Otto—your grandfather, by the way—and he came for lunch to meet her, he declined the cheese and I don’t think she ever forgave him.”
Rachel laughed.
“I’m quite serious,” said Amelia. “I’ll admit, it doesn’t look that pretty if you’re not used to it. But a good Portuguese man should have known better. It was a sign.”
Cheese is important. Noted.
“We only use three ingredients: whole milk, rennet tablets, and coarse salt.”
“What’s rennet?”
“Rennet causes milk to become cheese by separating it into solids and liquids—the curds and the whey.”
“But I mean, what is it? Is it a chemical?”
“No—it’s all natural. It’s an enzyme, usually extracted from the stomach lining of young calves.”
What? Oh no. This was a problem. No, she wasn’t vegan—she would eat dairy and eggs. But this was pushing it. Really pushing it. She would have to refuse the cheese, repeating the bad juju started by her grandfather decades ago. “Um, Amelia—I’m a vegetarian. I can’t…I just…”
Amelia shook her head. “What’s with all this vegetarianism? I don’t get it. If you ask me, women need red meat.” And then, maybe seeing Rachel’s look of agony, she relented. “You don’t have to eat the cheese. You just have to watch and learn. Deal?”
“Deal,” Rachel said, smiling.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I can’t believe you’re still collecting all this crap, Mother,” said Nadine, watching Amelia carefully organize her latest beach finds into their appropriate bins.
“And why not? As an artist yourself, you of all people should understand.”
“It’s hardly the same thing.”
Amelia rolled her eyes. Thirty years might have passed, but Nadine was the same recalcitrant daughter, always finding a way to needle her.
“I would like to say I am extremely pleased to see that you’ve made a life of creative work. It feeds the soul even through tough times.”
“Yeah, well, it feeds the soul but doesn’t always pay the rent,” she said. “And what can I say? It’s in my blood.”
“That it is.” Amelia had the urge to reach for her, to pull her into her arms as she hadn’t in decades. But she didn’t want to push. “I was surprised to find that Marin and Rachel don’t do anything creative.”
Nadine snorted. “Why? I mean, how do you know they’re really even related to us? Where’s the proof? These people just show up out of nowhere. You have to wonder about their motives.”