Food you make yourself tastes the best, I hear. I consider this while licking matcha buttercream frosting from my fingers.
In my grandmother’s home, using the warmth of her oven and the same stand mixer she used to make cakes with her own grandma in the fifties, I’m making a homemade birthday cake for my brother. Between the airy tango of vanilla and green tea, I can taste the love of creation folded carefully into it, the zest of unexpected success.
I find that cooking is a skill that cheers you on as you attempt it. Where new plants rise at their own pace from seedlings and new hobbies ask that you wade through long, rough tides of practice and possible embarrassment, cooking offers tangible results in a fraction of the time. It’s a deeply personal product: you crafted art, science, and sustenance with your own hands. Every factor of its creation is within your control. This kind of power is delicious in itself.
Control can quickly grow addictive. During the lows of my dieting and disordered eating years (which, of course, I thought were highs) I could only happily consume what I’d made, measured, and justified. This is how I made myself feel safe. You are what you eat, after all.
Even now I can still appreciate this aspect of cooking, but with healthier goals in mind. The transparency of ingredients, calories, tools, flavors, and nutrients in meal prep is beneficial when you’re actually focused on finding balance. It’s time-consuming, but the process feels like following coordinates towards a steadier sea.
On my own, food becomes a means to an end. In some ways, that’s all it ever has to be.
But food doesn’t stay that way. I know this because while making this birthday cake, my grandmother and brother are on the other side of the kitchen, broiling and blending the ingredients to salsa verde. I watch my brother scoop seeds from their serrano pepper shells, the same way he’d prep them at the restaurant he works at. My grandmother is generous in her pinch of salt, checking every tomatillo, ready with tips for trying to make it myself (don’t remove the cilantro stems, always salt to taste, wash your hands after slicing serranos.)
When I’m invited to sample their final creation, I can taste something else in there; akin to the flavor of my own effort.
“Guess what? I had ceviche last night,” my dad tells me over the phone. “For the first time in, like, ten years.”
Tilapia ceviche was one of my mom’s weekday staples. Growing up, she cooked half of all the dinners I ate. Dad would cover lunch; almost always a tuna sandwich with the crusts cut off, served up with a side of carrots. I’d learn after moving out that this meal was the same one he’d be served for lunchtimes as a toddler in daycare.
In response to his excitement, I hold myself back from talking about the dangers of farmed fish, about toxic bacteria, all the unpleasant facts I’d read. I smile and close my eyes, recalling that salty, limey zing that mom once perfected, and dad missed just enough to recreate. I’m not sure I’ll make it for myself anytime soon; not because of the dangers or my lack of skill, but because I’ll notice a missing ingredient with every bite.
It’s funny, I tell him, how some foods hold such firm roots in the past. Sometimes too firm. I learned the hard way that nostalgia is an ingredient that spoils just as easily as it elevates. I couldn’t eat a scrambled-egg sandwich, another of my mother’s staples, until three years after her death.
I suppose I can blame the Proust effect for this: the moment when a sensory stimulus triggers unexpectedly strong memories. Maybe it’s an old familiar melody that does it, or a field of freshly cut grass that smells like recess. Or, like Proust’s Marcel experiences during In Search of Lost Time, it’s due to once beloved flavors, rekindled again.
“Remember her potato flake chicken?” I ask him. I realize out loud, “She used to make it for my birthday.”
How could I forget? It was always top of my list: a crunchy coat of flour and flake on tender thigh cutlets would melt into the tang of freshly made hollandaise. It was the only dish she’d bother making such an extravagant sauce for, but once a year, she’d delight in whisking yolks and butter into emulsified oblivion, in pouring the resulting sunshine on our plates.
I relished all her cooking, but was too short-sighted to think there’d be a time when I’d never partake in familiar favorites prepared the same way again. She never wrote down recipes, always laughing when she’d admit, “No, I prefer keeping them in my head.”
I was mad for too long that she’d kept these treasures a secret. Now, I don’t blame her so much. Homemade meals that were crafted out of love, from true generosity, can’t be recreated the exact same. Even still, I constantly try to.
While staying with my friend Cecelia in Sweden, she made us chia pudding for each day’s breakfast. I’d go on to recreate this lovely meal every morning for over a month after we parted ways.
My future mother-in-law shares foods with us that I’ve often never even heard of before, much less tried, but I find myself asking for the recipe weeks later to try and rekindle such comfort again.
Though it was the last food my mom ever made me, when I taste the salsa verde my grandma and brother worked together on, it doesn’t taste bitter anymore. In fact, I plan to try to make it myself very soon.
Watching my brother finally dig into his custom-made matcha cake, I smile when he quickly sings its praises. This is the thrill of having control over food. Sometimes, what you create will taste better than other’s fare, than takeout, than store bought.
But something occurs to me: I never reminisce about the food I cook myself, unless I’m sharing it with others.
Until next week,
Constanze
It is in sharing that we find the Joy.
Thanks for that reminder ☺️.
Looking forward to next week's read already, Constanze!
Enjoyed reading ! Such a talented writer you are! Keep sharing your talent and delighting us Constanze! Until next week :-)