Cooking Up Connections
My mother’s poppyseed cake – moist and bittersweet, with bits of lemon rind poking through the centre and a glaze of shiny dark chocolate covering it – was famous, with friends of hers always begging for the recipe. She would eventually tell me that she didn’t enjoy cooking; she only liked feeding people. (Something we might have guessed from her habit of boiling vegetables to the point of greyness.)
Standing in the kitchen, making sure that the duck was roasting just so, was my mother’s language of love. Yet as a working mother, she placed little value on domestic tasks. She made me peel potatoes or shell peas, but never taught me how to make a dish from beginning to end. I didn’t learn to cook until I was 33.
Two decades on, I’ve become quite an adept cook. I don’t think anyone’s ever left one of my dinner parties hungry. But cooking always retained that chore-like quality until – like the rest of the world – I found myself under house arrest, faced with a hungry family, closed restaurants and a fickle collection of ingredients in my pantry. I’d never encountered such high demand for my food with so little at my fingertips.
Perhaps the magic happened with the first chicken soup. I was trying to show my children that when the world is in chaos, you can always rely on some stable factors: what your identity is, what traditions are important to you.
In my case, it was the weekly Friday night sabbath dinner, which I’ve always loved for its accoutrements: the gleaming silver candlesticks on the table, the pair of sweet challah loaves hidden under an elaborately embroidered cloth, the cups of sacramental wine. But I’d always relied on my siblings and in-laws to share the cooking load. Chicken soup was the first recipe I needed to make to remind everyone that not all their touch points of comfort had shifted.
“I was trying to show my children that when the world is in chaos, you can always rely on some stable factors: what your identity is, what traditions are important to you.”
I had fewer ingredients than usual – it wasn’t that easy to summon up 20 chicken necks when supermarkets were raided and kosher butchers were closed – but I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with such pure intent. I learnt that you can taste love in a dish, and it tastes of a viscous broth filled with egg noodles as fine as a rich lady’s whisper with plump, meat-filled dumplings that bob to the surface. It’s a soup that cooks for hours and hours and doesn’t completely come together until you taste it and determine what last-minute herbs and spices are needed. Even then, this happens best if you’re lucky enough to have thousands of memories of your mother making you chicken soup as you lay sick in bed, or when you caught the whiff of it simmering after you snuck into the kitchen on a Friday afternoon as a child, hoping to steal some of the rendered chicken fat pieces – grieven – from a plate.
For a long time, I was only joined to my mother’s cooking through the aspects we mutually disliked; when I was sequestered indoors for weeks on end, I bonded to her spirit through our shared love of all it represented.
Now I cook differently. I don’t need everything to emerge from the oven in Jamie Oliver-esque perfection, but I do need to connect with why I’m doing what I’m doing, and what it evokes for me. And I think that’s why so many of us turned to our kitchens recently. Not just because we had time on our hands, and not just because we needed to eat.
There’s a reliability in cooking that author Nora Ephron wrote about in my all-time favourite book, Heartburn. (Which, incidentally, I once got her to sign for me, but that’s another story.) “What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick!” said the protagonist in the novel. “It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where no one is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.”
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Photo_ Gaelle Marcel/UnSplash