When my mother was 24, she had a baby and lived 2,519 miles from her hometown. She was an accomplished dancer and choreographer.
I turn 24 today. Recently, I’ve been desperately trying to chart my obsession with food, cooking, and domesticity. Sometimes it doesn’t track.
When I think back on my childhood, I don’t have many memories of my mom enjoying herself. There were always chores. Questions. Kids with scraped knees. Errands. Screaming matches with my dad. More errands. Another band-aid. A carpool. Vacations even looked like hard work.
Growing up as a girl is complicated in many different ways. I felt as though I were constantly asked to doubt whether my needs really mattered. I watched my mother work herself into the ground. And I watched my family let her.
I have always known my mother is a strong woman. I used to think that meant she was simply a martyr. Feminine strength, to my mother’s generation, looks like self-sacrifice for the good of the family. It looks like disappearing.
When I was in middle school, I remember telling my mom that cooking and cleaning weren’t worth my time. I said my husband would have his own bedroom because I would need plenty of my own space. I didn’t want to disappear.
But my mom was always present, somehow, despite anybody’s ideals of femine strength. The carefully folded laundry, the delicious meals, the bedtime stories were transformed by her touch into little rituals that made our lives meaningful.
And that unwavering presence is another kind of strength, maybe the one I’d been confusing for meekness. To each scraped knee, each hungry kid, each vapid errand, my mother brought herself and with her, her love. Her love for us and for our needs, but most importantly, her love for herself. The task at hand, no matter how seemingly empty and monotonous, meant something when she came to it. I can’t speak for my mother and say just exactly what it meant to her, I only know what I felt on the receiving end: loved, cared for, nourished. It takes a certain intention and care to imbue these little realities and annoyance with meaning.
When my mom visited me for the Thanksgiving holiday, we had a few full days in the kitchen, puttering around, discussing the intricacies of just how many slabs of butter a good meal needs and then I convinced her to sit down and do a formal interview with me, on the record! We talked about a number of things, most of which I thought would somehow end up in the next edition of the newsletter. Instead, the piece that keeps coming to me is succinct and rings with the sort of truth that I feel in my chest:
“I always felt good about cooking.”
I realize, as I address the question of how I came to love the kitchen, that my mother was creative, confident, radiant––herself––there. I realize now, after talking with her, that the source of the meaning I felt in our home was this good feeling, this enjoyment. What if enjoyment were the opposite of disappearing? What if enjoyment requires us to be ourselves?
Growing up, I witnessed my mother’s knowledgeable, gentle hands manipulate endless tools and ingredients without hesitation. In the kitchen, nothing my father said made sense and everything my mother did looked like pure magic. She was in her element. The ability to express herself, to be herself, to feel her knowledge moving through the world felt good. She felt good about cooking because we felt good about her cooking. Because she knew she was good at it and that no one could take it from her. She provided for us. She had given me a role model: someone with wisdom, and spontaneity, with experience and a playful attitude. Even as I pitied the role of women in a household, she showed me what it means to find strength, to be yourself.
Now that I’m cooking, too, my mom says, “It’s fun to see things that give me pleasure give you pleasure.”
Pleasure. A word that seemed foreign on her lips – a word that didn’t quite square with the martyr I had always imagined in her place. I think this may have been her most radical act yet: finding joy where others ask her to find dullness and in doing so, offering that joy to me. I was scared that when I grew up, I wouldn’t know how to be the right kind of woman and even that being a woman was an odd form of punishment. What is pitiable here is not the work of women, but rather the pathetic emptiness which I believed it to embody. Today I’m finding pleasure and joy where I never thought I could, and allowing myself space amidst the work of living, like my mother taught me.
These domestic activities, deemed “essential” by the new vocabulary of the pandemic, are also called “life-making” activities within social reproduction theory (Alicia Kennedy wrote on some of these tensions earlier this year, drawing on work by Tithi Bhattacharya). I’ll put it this way: if my mother didn’t perform the task, life did not go on. So when I cook, I feel unarguably in touch with my capacity to make life. Not in the sense that I’m biologically capable of having a child, but in the sense that what I do nourishes those around me. That capacity brings me joy as it brought my mom joy before me. It is not enough to simply do the chore, it is important sometimes to love the chore itself.
I create the meaning, the life, within these activities, as many women have before me. As my mother does.
Reading:
Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard
On Hospitality, Alicia Kennedy
What I’m Cooking:
Roman Style Spinach from Chez Panisse Vegetables
Classic Buttermilk Cake from The Simple Art of Perfect Baking
Triple-Baked Rye Cookies from Dessert Person
Glazed Gingerbread from Tartine: A Classic Revisited
This week’s recipe is my mom’s vegetarian stuffing – the key is to try to keep all of the ingredients diced to a consistent size so that each bite is filled with all the flavors interacting.
Ingredients –
½ cup of butter to be used with cook’s discretion*
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 celery stalks, diced
3-4 cloves garlic, diced
1 lb mushrooms of your choice (I often use cremini), diced
1-2 sour green apples, diced
1 bunch sage, leaves only
1 to 2 sprigs thyme, leaves only
Optional: roasted butternut squash (A cup or so of ¼”cubes)**
2 cups wild rice, cooked until tender
½ 8-inch round, stale cornbread broken into bite-size pieces (about 2 cups crouton)
½ loaf of day-old sourdough, broken into bite-size pieces**
1 C apple juice
1/2 C roughly chopped pecans
Directions –
Begin by heating a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add butter or oil to coat the bottom of the pan.
When the oil is hot and glimmers a little more than before, add half the onion (save the rest), carrots, and celery. Let the onion cook for a while until soft and translucent. If the sofrito starts to brown, you can lower the heat or add a little splash of water to prevent accidental pan-frying.
Meanwhile, prepare the rice. Rinse the rise 3-5 times under cold running water to reduce the starchiness.
On the stove, put a small pot over medium-low heat and add butter or oil to coat the bottom of the pot. Again, when the oil shimmers, add the other half of the onion and 1 clove of your diced garlic. Once beginning to soften, add the rinsed rice. Let the rice marry with the flavors of the onion and garlic for a few moments before adding the water, stirring. When the rice starts to stick to the bottom of the pan and become smore difficult to stir, add water to cover by about 1/2-1 inch. Salt until it tastes like the sea Lower heat and cover for 15-20 minutes.
Once the veggies are coated in oil, beginning to soften and the onion is translucent and sweaty, go ahead and create a circle in the middle of the pan, pushing the vegetabels to the edges. Add the garlic, sage leaves and thyme to the center with a little more fat if the pan seems dry. Bloom the garlic and the herbs for 1-2 minutes. When the first notes of garlicky goodness hit your hose, stir the aromatics into the other ingredients.
Next, add your mushrooms and cook until tender (7-10 minutes more).
At the very end, you’ll add the apples. You don’t want to cook them until completely tender because they give a nice crispness to the otherwise buttery, soft ingredients.
Once the apples are cooked to the degree you’d like, turn off the heat and let cool slightly,
At this point, the rice should also be cooked. You can combine the rice, the cornbread and sourdough “croutons,” and the sofrito mixture in a large mixing bowl. Add the roughly chopped pecans, and if you choose, fresh, roughly-chopped cranberries. Now is when you would also add the butternut squash, if using.
Pour the apple juice over the mixture. You want the mix to be soggy, but not to the point of wet. Taste for salt and pepper and transfer to a baking dish. We use a 9x13, but given the inexact measurements in this recipe and the variables unique to your kitchen, you can go with any size casserole you have on hand or think would work well.
Now, throw it in the oven at a high heat (400°F, or so) until the top is crisp and browning and serve warm.
*My mom uses a lot of butter, I use a pretty good amount of butter and some people prefer to skip the butter and go only for olive oil. Only you know how much butter you want to eat, trust your butter judgment.
**I roast the squash tossed with olive oil and salt at 400°F, it can take from 20-40 minutes depending on the squash. Keep an eye on it and check for doneness by testing with a fork. It should be soft and creamy.
***If the bread is too fresh, you can tear or slice into squares and toast in the oven until dried and crisp. I prefer tearing because the jagged edges give some unpredictable and exciting texture.