Cooking Backwards
Maybe it’s the recipe’s “lukewarm scalded milk” that spills on the bottom corner of the page. Fountain pen ink swims up to meet it, ghosting the words below. No matter. Mary made her Easter Bread and Nut Roll so many times since she wrote it down in 1960—the date safe and crisp up at the top—that she barely needed to look at the recipe.
1960: the year Mary’s youngest granddaughter was born. That’s me. Sixty years later, in 2020, after finally laying my hands on yeast in the midst of this pitiless pandemic, I turn on the oven to 350 F.
I also grab my reading glasses. Determination and a strong light flush out the ghosts from between the lines. As I begin to pencil in my grandmother’s words, my hand disassociates from my brain, takes on a life long gone. Suddenly my grandma, dead of ovarian cancer at 82 in 1975, is alive again, guiding my hand. It’s odd, so very odd, to follow her cursive characters, elegantly strewn across the lines, all attached to one another. My fingers balk, seek a staccato rhythm, try to break each letter off from its mates. But my grandmother insists, and we end up rewriting the recipe together, a compromise, my interpretation atop her foundation.
It’s April, 2020; we’re in Early Pandemic, though we don’t know that yet. We’re still canceling dinner plans and telling friends, “No worries, we’ll have you over in July.” My partner, Marguerite, and I—the youngest females in our families—have by default become kitchen archivists. Our siblings either lived too far away or declined interest in recipe books when we dismantled our parents’ houses. That’s how we wound up with a book of recipes from my father’s mother, into which my mom at some point added several loose-leaf pages written in her mother’s hand; many of my mom’s own recipe books; a book of recipes belonging to Marguerite’s mom; a photocopied compendium of Marguerite’s Brazilian grandmother’s recipes, typed out in Portuguese; and a few of Marguerite’s dad’s mother’s recipes, sent by a cousin. There is also a self-important little notebook detailing everything Marguerite and I made from March to November of 1994. All of this takes up a full drawer in the pantry.
We’ve decided to cook and bake our way back in time. When the pandemic began I’d just finished a memoir about Wales, where I went for grad school in 1983 and, in spirit at least, never
