I feed people. This is what I do. Come sorrow, come change, come happiness and tumult, I can be found in the kitchen, whirling around, stirring sauces, gazing calculatingly at the contents of the open refrigerator, chopping, pinching spices and salt into pots of reducing concoctions, burning my tongue and fingers snatching hot tidbits from pans to taste, opening and closing cookbooks, melting and setting fire to objects I’ve absentmindedly set atop burners, and thinking. Thinking about cooking, and nothing else, which is why I’m there in the kitchen in the first place.
I was always confused by a Pearl Jam lyric I heard when I was young, “she feeds him/that’s why she’ll be back again,” but as I grew older and found myself in that very position I understood completely what Mr. Vedder meant. I have a need to feed — boyfriends, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers. It’s why I’m so well-suited to working at a grocery store — though I’m not cooking (I’d be a mess in a commercial kitchen, what with the science and organization and exactitude involved, no thanks), I’m feeding. It’s why I was drawn so easily into my last relationship. My ex, a cyclist in training, had a professional need to eat constantly. “Why don’t you come live with me and do all the cooking?” was all he had to say to charm me enduringly. I spent most of the time we were together immersed in the process of constantly preparing meals. I could be found on any given afternoon (having been graciously relieved of the necessity of having a job) strolling down the street to pick up some needful something-or-other at the confused (oftentimes well-stocked with wine-pickled herring and gigantic wheels of parmigiano-reggiano but mysteriously out of eggs) little market on the corner, and once a week picking through the funky produce at the local farm CSA, trying to figure out what the hell to do with three pounds of kohlrabi and garlic curls (which I am still absolutely convinced are just overgrown garlic). I thrived on epicurious.com and DVD’s of The French Chef I borrowed from the library, happily esconced in the kitchen of his ranch house, my kitchen, reclusive save for playing hostess to our many dinner parties. I kept this up until the very end, the tumultuous last hours of our relationship before I boarded the plane for home, swearing I’d be back (though I knew I likely never would). I cooked him breakfast. Strata.
And so on, throughout my history. Despite various other hints of heritage trickling through my veins, I am an Italian mama (a demographic recently made sexy by our patron saint, Giada DiLaurentis. Thank you, Giada!) to the core.
Lately I haven’t been cooking a whole lot. I’m busy with work and an actual social life (not revolving around me feeding people) and all of the tactical diversions in the name of higher learning and endurance sports I have employed to keep reality (I’m twenty-seven and single! Childless! With no education! Working at a grocery store! Living in southeast Michigan!) at low-tide. I started eating vegan a couple of months ago so that precludes any fun with meat or seafood, not to mention that I just feel guilty imposing my remarkable lust for cruciferous vegetables upon anyone else. Plus, for a good long time this winter, cooking just made me feel sad.
I’ve been staying with my 97-year-old grandma this weekend while my parents are on vacation. Mom left a nice array of frozen grandma-friendly dinners in the freezer drawer, knowing that I’d be running around like a cat-herding stressball, and tonight when I came home from work, tired and hungry myself, I thankfully fished out a Marie Callender’s pot pie and put it in the microwave while I boiled water for my cauliflower (knowing as I do that Grandma don’t tolerate vegetables, of any kind, anymore).
I felt uneasy and guilty about the whole operation as I listened to the Spacesaver’s bored hum. I opened the door halfway through, revealing the pitiful-looking mini-pie. It smelled weird, so I threw it out. May as well boil some noodles instead.
Once the water for the noodles had got to boiling, though, I figured I had better figure out something to put on them. I searched in the pantry for errant packets of powdered sauces, but came up with nothing. Just butter, then. I fished out the tub of Natural Balance and set it on the counter, remembering Grandma’s affinity for real butter and how its golden presence atop and inside nearly every food item on her table elevated her cooking, in my childhood estimation, to a level far beyond any I understood in my world of healthy hippie food. I clamored and pestered her for pancakes and mashed potatoes to be consumed in her kitchen of aqua-painted beadboard.
I figured at that point that, at a loss for the powdered variety, I may as well make a white sauce. I love making white sauce almost as much as I love beating eggs and chopping garlic and as I whisked the flour and Natural Balance in the saucepan I wondered why it had been so long since I engaged in this alchemical kitchen act. The sauce, with the addition of Guernsey milk, called for some cheddar I had seen in the fridge and the noodles and the sauce together called for a little oblong ramekin I saw in the pantry and the whole thing together called for the broiler and so it was that Grandma got homemade macaroni and cheese, with a side of asparagus (simply for decoration since it went untouched) for dinner, which she accepted with the same glee she reserved for my childhood cooking experiments — the expression of joy conveying that, no matter what she may introduce to her tastebuds as a result of my (at times ill-advised) experimentation, she would not simply feign pleasure out of the act of eating it, she would actually convince herself, out of Grandmotherly duty, that it was in fact delicious.
A lot of times I see my Grandma and I can’t see past her failing body. I can’t see past the fact that, for so long, she’s been a ghost of a woman I once knew. While I was away for six years, the part of her that made buttery mashed potatoes and knitted afghans and did the crossword and swore like a miniature truck driver and asked me pertly, “what’s cookin, toots?” when I called withdrew more and more, leaving a feeble stranger in her absence, a stranger at our dinner table whose presence I often resent, sometimes fear, and more often than not, ignore. For all intents and purposes when we are together we are two women, seventy years apart, with nothing to say. She was never the kind to proffer sage advice (beyond “don’t wear white shoes past labor day!”) or ask after my love life (thank God!). Instead, she made me mashed potatoes. She took me out for hot turkey sandwiches when my parents went away on vacation, back when she could still drive. I was too young to ever know her beyond these feeble memories. There are things about my Grandma that I will never know or understand. There are secrets and thoughts and feelings and memories that will die with her, and rightfully so, because they are hers. There is never going to a be a time when we will have much to say to each other, and if there was, it’s gone now. Instead we sat in the living room eating our respective dinners, listening to Chet Baker and the sounds of each other’s chewing.
This is why I do what I do. This is why I feed people. Because I can’t know and understand everyone, or even, really, one person, perfectly. Maybe I have a warped relationship confusing food with love but, damn it, it’s so ingrained in my being and in the beings of the women by whom I was raised that it’s useless to try and exorcise it now. This is how I give and this, essentially, is how I love.
I wish I could say that she finished my homemade culinary masterpiece with relish, declaring it the best meal she’d had in ninety-seven years, but she didn’t, and I was ok with that. I know the difference between feeding people and making them like or eat what you give them. She picked at it politely and I’m sure she would have been just as happy with the microwave pot pie — she didn’t give a shit about dinner, she was waiting for the cake.
