When the Sous Chef Becomes the Master
This year, for the first time since the early 1950s, my grandmother is not throwing a holiday party. Two strokes this summer meant that she had to give up her home and move to a senior citizen complex with her sister. It also has meant that my grandma's famous cooking has changed because she cannot remember the when and how. (I still can't believe that I'll never sit in my grandmother's kitschy living room again.)
Yesterday, my roommate and I threw a very successful joint holiday party. Over 40 people showed up, including two of my nearest and dearest (waves at stinaleigh and arianaeh). The day before, I made sweet potato pie for only the second time in my life. (First time was a disaster.) It's a long, labor-intensive process, especially if you make the crust from scratch.
I was proud of myself once the filling was made... until I grabbed a spoon and tasted it. I'll never forget my disappointment. It was sugared and spiced just right... but there was something missing.
Frantic, I called Grandma and Auntie.
"What am I doing wrong?"
Auntie, ever calm and sweet even at seventy-nine, patiently asked after what I did so that I wouldn't panic. I gave her a blow-by-blow: peeled/boiled/mashed the sweet potatoes ("don't forget to cut off the ends so you don't get the strings!"), carefully added butter, then evaporated milk, beat the eggs separately, then mix them in, then sugar-nutmeg-dash-of-cinnamon. I have watched them do this for three decades. The mixture was the right consistency -- can't be soupy, can't be lumpy -- but when I tasted it--
"There's something missing."
Auntie considered. "I can't think of a thing. Let me ask your grandmother..."
Grandma called out, "Ask her if it's bland." It was. Then, "Tell her to put in a little salt."
Salt? Auntie: "Okay, put the salt in and call us back... just a little bit..."
I did. Mixed it. Tasted it. Fingers flying on the phone--
"That's it!" Melting on my tongue was Grandma and Auntie's sweet potato pie filling. I couldn't believe it. Talk about turning water to wine... this was a miracle of Biblical proportions!
At first, I thought they did stuff like that on purpose: throw in a weird ingredient so that you couldn't replicate the taste. But after commiserating with my mother, I've come to the conclusion that it's not deliberate sabotage. They learned from their grandmother, who learned from her grandmother, and so on. Asking them how to do things is like asking anyone how they breathe, Mom suggested.
We learn in the kitchen by becoming sous chefs in minature. Mom, who hates to cook, pointed out that it was always Danielle and I in the kitchen, chopping-slicing-throwing-this-here-shaking-that-there. I have very clear memories of how tiny my hands were compared to corn that had to be shucked, beans that had to be snapped, and potatoes and apples that had to be peeled. The sweet potatoes were the worst of all. They are huge, and I was always afraid that the paring knife would slip. I would watch my mother and grandmother in wonder as they chopped those orange monsters with huge knives. I thought I'd never be able to get that sous chef job exactly right.
Now I peel things while I chat on the phone with my friends, catch up on my journal reading, or watch Oprah. Cooking and baking famously skips a generation in our extended family; me, Danielle, our stepsister, and two of our girl cousins can replicate almost everything that Grandma and Auntie make. Sometime during the past five years, something clicked... and the prep work is a relaxing blur instead of anxiety producing.
But the masters are going away. First my father, who didn't often cook but was better than Mom at it... he taught me how to rub meat for grilling and roasting a good 20 years before it was all the rage on the Food Network. "Love the food," he'd say. "Gotta put the love in it." Now my grandmother and aunt aren't cooking anymore. They came for Thanksgiving dinner, and Grandma actually forgot to bake her dump cake. ("Next time, I'll do it," says Danielle.)
It's been a great year, but one of passage for our family. I have grown up so much over the past 12 months -- over the past 6, even -- until I see the person who was dreading 30 up until midsummer as some odd stranger. I love being "almost thirty" and am looking as eagerly forward to my birthday next year as I always did as a child. Last school year, I was mourning 1999, 2000, 2001... this fall, you couldn't pay me to be in my early 20s again. And very young adults don't feel like my same aged peers anymore, either. I listen to them, realize that the same stuff used to come out of my mouth (or be posted on my LJ), and I remember what a boss I couldn't stand told me once: "You're a baby adult." She was right, I must admit. My friends and I don't have conversations about the hot clubs or what we're going to do when we grow up any longer. Many of them are getting married, or becoming first-time parents, and even those of us who are remaining single are starting to slow down, brace, nest.
Just as we are passing from young ingenues to well, just being grown, the other generations of my family are transitioning as well. My baby sister is 22 -- when I started posting here, she was still in high school. She is on the leading edge of the Millennial generation, entering young adulthood. It's so fun to see her and my former students trying out their wings as they leave the nest. My young and hip aunts and uncles are in their 40s, the leading edge of Gen X entering midlife. My stepfather is 60, and my mother will soon be following him. Their Boomer generation is moving from midlife to retirement and elderhood. And the Silents and GIs are slowing down, giving up their hard-earned independence, leaving us.
No generation can pass through the gates of history without bumping the next one up... and pushing previous ones out. My grandparents' generation is entering what Strauss and Howe call "deep elderhood", when all members are in the 80s or older. Said Grandma at Thanksgiving, sadly: "Just about everyone I know is dead." And she is right. (We had our own scares about her this year ourselves.) All of the gray-haired cheek pinchers of those glorious holidays of 80s and 90s have bowed offstage in less than a decade's time, making me wonder: will there be a replica of Grandma's living room in heaven? Will the smell of baked nutmeg and cinnamon fill the firmament along with the sounds of jazz and 50s swing? (No. They won't be as I remember them, bent with age, smelling of peppermints and liniment... just as I won't be as they remembered me and my sisters, little girls with beaded braids, fingertips wrinkled from sticking vegetables in water.)
But as the poet said, childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. There is already a new child generation who comes to the parties that Danielle and I are becoming famous for, as raucous as the ones my grandmother and her sister threw in the 50s when they were young. In another three or four decades, as we are entering elderhood, these children will have children of their own, and I will remember my grandmother and all her colorful friends to them the same way that she remembers her grandmother to me: helping in the kitchen, tiny fingers trembling on a paring knife, never imagining that the wrinkled hands that hold the sweet potato steady were once young, and smooth... and untried.
How do you know so much, Grandma?
Keep living, child. Keep on living.
Yesterday, my roommate and I threw a very successful joint holiday party. Over 40 people showed up, including two of my nearest and dearest (waves at stinaleigh and arianaeh). The day before, I made sweet potato pie for only the second time in my life. (First time was a disaster.) It's a long, labor-intensive process, especially if you make the crust from scratch.
I was proud of myself once the filling was made... until I grabbed a spoon and tasted it. I'll never forget my disappointment. It was sugared and spiced just right... but there was something missing.
Frantic, I called Grandma and Auntie.
"What am I doing wrong?"
Auntie, ever calm and sweet even at seventy-nine, patiently asked after what I did so that I wouldn't panic. I gave her a blow-by-blow: peeled/boiled/mashed the sweet potatoes ("don't forget to cut off the ends so you don't get the strings!"), carefully added butter, then evaporated milk, beat the eggs separately, then mix them in, then sugar-nutmeg-dash-of-cinnamon. I have watched them do this for three decades. The mixture was the right consistency -- can't be soupy, can't be lumpy -- but when I tasted it--
"There's something missing."
Auntie considered. "I can't think of a thing. Let me ask your grandmother..."
Grandma called out, "Ask her if it's bland." It was. Then, "Tell her to put in a little salt."
Salt? Auntie: "Okay, put the salt in and call us back... just a little bit..."
I did. Mixed it. Tasted it. Fingers flying on the phone--
"That's it!" Melting on my tongue was Grandma and Auntie's sweet potato pie filling. I couldn't believe it. Talk about turning water to wine... this was a miracle of Biblical proportions!
At first, I thought they did stuff like that on purpose: throw in a weird ingredient so that you couldn't replicate the taste. But after commiserating with my mother, I've come to the conclusion that it's not deliberate sabotage. They learned from their grandmother, who learned from her grandmother, and so on. Asking them how to do things is like asking anyone how they breathe, Mom suggested.
We learn in the kitchen by becoming sous chefs in minature. Mom, who hates to cook, pointed out that it was always Danielle and I in the kitchen, chopping-slicing-throwing-this-here-shaking-that-there. I have very clear memories of how tiny my hands were compared to corn that had to be shucked, beans that had to be snapped, and potatoes and apples that had to be peeled. The sweet potatoes were the worst of all. They are huge, and I was always afraid that the paring knife would slip. I would watch my mother and grandmother in wonder as they chopped those orange monsters with huge knives. I thought I'd never be able to get that sous chef job exactly right.
Now I peel things while I chat on the phone with my friends, catch up on my journal reading, or watch Oprah. Cooking and baking famously skips a generation in our extended family; me, Danielle, our stepsister, and two of our girl cousins can replicate almost everything that Grandma and Auntie make. Sometime during the past five years, something clicked... and the prep work is a relaxing blur instead of anxiety producing.
But the masters are going away. First my father, who didn't often cook but was better than Mom at it... he taught me how to rub meat for grilling and roasting a good 20 years before it was all the rage on the Food Network. "Love the food," he'd say. "Gotta put the love in it." Now my grandmother and aunt aren't cooking anymore. They came for Thanksgiving dinner, and Grandma actually forgot to bake her dump cake. ("Next time, I'll do it," says Danielle.)
It's been a great year, but one of passage for our family. I have grown up so much over the past 12 months -- over the past 6, even -- until I see the person who was dreading 30 up until midsummer as some odd stranger. I love being "almost thirty" and am looking as eagerly forward to my birthday next year as I always did as a child. Last school year, I was mourning 1999, 2000, 2001... this fall, you couldn't pay me to be in my early 20s again. And very young adults don't feel like my same aged peers anymore, either. I listen to them, realize that the same stuff used to come out of my mouth (or be posted on my LJ), and I remember what a boss I couldn't stand told me once: "You're a baby adult." She was right, I must admit. My friends and I don't have conversations about the hot clubs or what we're going to do when we grow up any longer. Many of them are getting married, or becoming first-time parents, and even those of us who are remaining single are starting to slow down, brace, nest.
Just as we are passing from young ingenues to well, just being grown, the other generations of my family are transitioning as well. My baby sister is 22 -- when I started posting here, she was still in high school. She is on the leading edge of the Millennial generation, entering young adulthood. It's so fun to see her and my former students trying out their wings as they leave the nest. My young and hip aunts and uncles are in their 40s, the leading edge of Gen X entering midlife. My stepfather is 60, and my mother will soon be following him. Their Boomer generation is moving from midlife to retirement and elderhood. And the Silents and GIs are slowing down, giving up their hard-earned independence, leaving us.
No generation can pass through the gates of history without bumping the next one up... and pushing previous ones out. My grandparents' generation is entering what Strauss and Howe call "deep elderhood", when all members are in the 80s or older. Said Grandma at Thanksgiving, sadly: "Just about everyone I know is dead." And she is right. (We had our own scares about her this year ourselves.) All of the gray-haired cheek pinchers of those glorious holidays of 80s and 90s have bowed offstage in less than a decade's time, making me wonder: will there be a replica of Grandma's living room in heaven? Will the smell of baked nutmeg and cinnamon fill the firmament along with the sounds of jazz and 50s swing? (No. They won't be as I remember them, bent with age, smelling of peppermints and liniment... just as I won't be as they remembered me and my sisters, little girls with beaded braids, fingertips wrinkled from sticking vegetables in water.)
But as the poet said, childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. There is already a new child generation who comes to the parties that Danielle and I are becoming famous for, as raucous as the ones my grandmother and her sister threw in the 50s when they were young. In another three or four decades, as we are entering elderhood, these children will have children of their own, and I will remember my grandmother and all her colorful friends to them the same way that she remembers her grandmother to me: helping in the kitchen, tiny fingers trembling on a paring knife, never imagining that the wrinkled hands that hold the sweet potato steady were once young, and smooth... and untried.
How do you know so much, Grandma?
Keep living, child. Keep on living.