The Recipes
The first meal I made for Helena was a soup in the middle of the night. Half-dressed and standing barefoot in her little studio apartment in Prospect Park, I took what I found in her refrigerator and cabinets and threw it all together. Ever since, no matter the time of day, whenever I make a soup like this we call it 2am Soup.
Over time, the random ingredients have solidified through repetition into a list, almost but not quite a recipe. Start with pork sausage. Brown sausage in olive oil while chopping onions and mincing garlic. Sauté the onions and garlic in the fat. Open and drain three cans of beans. Add the beans to the onions and sausage. Add spices. Add a couple cups of water or broth, whichever is handy. Bring to a boil, drop to a simmer, then wait an hour.
That’s 2am Soup.
My Mom and Dad were high-school sweethearts. Born just two days apart in November on opposite sides of Georgia, once they found each other, they were inseparable. They grew up together.
To hear my Mom tell it, she wasn’t a good cook when she met my Dad. My Dad’s mother, Dollie, was and remains a family legend where cooking is concerned. Her green beans, cooked for hours in a cast iron pot with a ham hock until all the green turned black, are remembered fondly.
Soon after she married my Dad, my Mom went to Dollie for kitchen counsel. Not only did Dollie teach my Mom how to cook, she gave her advice that my Mom sums up as “When the menfolk come in from work, have dinner ready for them, don’t make them wait for you.” Taken at face value, it sounds like a social more we’ve left behind and rightfully so. But what my Mom took away was that preparing food for loved ones is an expression of care as much as it is a practical necessity.
But unlike my grandmother, my Mom had a career of her own. She worked as a clerk at Tennessee Valley Authority. The money was good, and the work was engaging in a way that made her feel like she was making a difference. When she got home, she had to make dinner, as well as tend to the house, pick up after my brother, and do everything else expected of a loving housewife in the late 1950s.
So by the time I was born, some 13 or so years after she sought my grandmother’s advice, my mom had developed a system to keep us all fed through the week. She had it down to a science. Only at a distance can I see the intricacies of it.
It started on Sunday mornings with biscuits and gravy.
Biscuits and gravy is borne out of the Southern tradition of making something from nothing. The gravy can be milk-based or water-based, can include sausage or not. The sausage is cooked beforehand, crumbled into the mix. Leftover sausage crumbles best. It can even be spiked with coffee, the defining ingredient in redeye gravy. The best gravies are a little too salty, a little too peppery, but other spices aren’t necessary. The only constant is flour, one of those ever-present staples in a Southern kitchen. That same flour makes up most of the biscuits. Just add milk — though buttermilk is better — and the other ever-present staple, shortening. At the root, biscuits and gravy is really just flour ladled over flour with some leftover sausage.
Sunday nights meant potato soup. It was the perfect Sunday night meal because it was simple, all fitting in one bowl.
Monday night brought mashed potatoes from actual potatoes. Green beans were usually from a can, though we often ate pole beans fresh from my Papaw’s garden. Cube steak or calf liver rounded out the plate. Tuesday night’s meal was salmon cakes or pork tenderloin. Macaroni and cheese would accompany leftover green beans. Wednesday night featured potato cakes, discs of potato browned on either side in a pan, leftovers in disguise, made from the mashed potatoes of Monday night. Thursday gave us beef stroganoff, ground beef browned and mixed into a sour cream gravy, served over a plate of egg noodles. Friday night might be fried chicken or spaghetti, but those were special occasions, so the Friday meal was often a greatest hits of leftovers.
My mom operated from a limited menu, following a meal plan based on weekly trips to the grocery store. We unloaded groceries from paper bags into known slots and spaces. The pantry had a pattern that matched her calendar of meals, and it was never empty.
My Dad is a fisherman. We spent weekends when I was a kid camping in a mobile home on lakesides in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. Before dawn on Saturdays, my Dad and twenty or more other men would set off in their tricked out bass boats, heading to points on the lake mapped out days before. He was a tournament fisherman and had the trophies to show for it, but when he wasn’t fishing for prizes, he was fishing for a hobby, which meant he’d bring home a mess of fish. He cleaned the fish on our back patio, using an electric knife like a tiny chainsaw to filet the flesh. He rolled the filets in flour and then fried them over a propane camp stove in a stainless steel deep-fry pan he’d bent and welded himself. In the same fry pan went his hush puppies, rolled balls of cornmeal, sugar, and minced onions. Fish was where my Dad’s cooking began and ended.
When I moved back after college, I came home to a kitchen where my Dad did most of the cooking. While I was in college my Dad retired. My Mom “retired” as well, but she kept going to work every weekday as a contractor. When I asked Dad about this new cooking arrangement, he said Mom was letting him do more of the cooking. But my Mom had a different story. He’d decided to cook for her so she wouldn’t have to come home from office work to kitchen work. Many of the dishes were my mom’s recipes, but with little twists here and there.
Their shared history had evolved, but my grandmother’s lesson remained. Cooking was about more than food. When my Mom came in from work, he had dinner ready for her, so she didn’t have to wait. Cooking as an expression of care.
My mother gave me a stack of recipes when I moved to Atlanta the following fall. After the encouragement my grandmother gave her, Mom started collecting recipes, mostly from other women at church, often from the ladies she worked with at TVA. The recipes she gave me were photocopies of originals, which had been typewritten or handwritten in a perfect cursive rarely seen today. It was a survival kit, given to me with love. But that much care and ritual scared me. What if I didn’t do it right?
I put the recipes in a cabinet and ignored them.
Instead, I bought stacks of frozen meals. I bought cereal in boxes and I made filter coffee in a Mr Coffee. I bought milk, but never enough to see me through the week. Every couple of weeks, I’d buy a dozen eggs and leave them unopened until I had to throw them away.
One very late night, too caffeinated to sleep, I went into the kitchen as the credits rolled on a late cable movie and opened a carton of eggs. I play-acted what I remembered. I was my mother cracking eggs against the rim if a cereal bowl, dropping the yolks in. I added salt, pepper, a dash of milk, then mixed with a fork. I added butter into the only pan I owned, waited for the sizzle and poured the mixture in, kicking it around with a spatula. Eggs after midnight might not be the most auspicious beginning, but it showed me I was capable. I ate scrambled eggs twice a day for a week.
Ten years after graduating from college, nine years after moving away from home, I decided to become an adult. Adults got married, took out mortgages and lived in suburbia. Adults had commutes they hated and jobs they tolerated. The drive to become was unrelenting, like the moment before a storm when the high pressure system rings in your ears.
An adult life came so naturally to my parents that it made them seem strange. Most of my friends in high school had stepmothers and stepfathers. I had only my original mom and dad. How hard could it be to follow such a simple model? So when I met someone who seemed just as ready to be the same kind of adult, it made sense to go ahead. I had a yard, a garage, an attic, two bathrooms, and an enormous kitchen. My weekends were filled with home improvement and trips to the mall. It looked like adulthood. It felt like a choice I had to accept, so I carved myself smaller and smaller into a shape to fit the mold I’d chosen.
I saw my parents maybe twice a year. They were two hours away, but there was always something else to do, something else scheduled in place. I’d married someone who held deep reservations about her own parents, and her apprehensions about my parents were even greater. I should’ve stood up for my Mom, for both of my parents, but I instead I used this tension as an excuse to stay away. Visiting them revealed my own shortcomings. In their presence, I could see how little my big adult decision resembled the lives my parents made for each other.
During this time, I made cooking my responsibility. But I never turned to my Mom’s recipes. Adult or not, I wasn’t ready. Instead, I used recipes from magazines about cooking healthy. I followed them loosely. Measuring cups and tablespoons gave me an understanding of proportion. Lists taught me what spices went with what ingredients. Steps gave me an idea of the most mysterious part of cooking: the wait and the when. Recipes looked to me like patterns and patterns were enough.
Cooking became my therapy. Chop the onions, lengthwise and crosswise, weigh the decisions I’d made at work. Skillet on the burner, a tablespoon of olive oil, toss in the onions, ask myself if I’m happy. Salt the onions, turn my attention to the next ingredient, am I really where I ought to be? Peel garlic, slice the cloves, mix the slivers into the sauté once the onions are transparent, face the need to change my life completely. Isn’t there more to being an adult than surrounding myself with trappings, than forcing myself into a preconceived notion?
After nine years, my kitchen therapy led to actual therapy. Convinced it wasn’t a sin to be selfish for my own happiness, I left what I call now my “past life” behind, taking with me what I could fit into my Sentra and a borrowed pickup truck. I moved into a two-bedroom condo a couple miles north of my first Atlanta apartment. Back on my own after almost a decade, I cooked for myself. There were no frozen dinners this time. I made simple dishes with vegetables and rice. I threw together soups that could stretch for days at a time. I still wasn’t using my Mom’s recipes, but I was taking care of myself enough to heal.
The next time I packed up to move, I put everything into a U-Haul and drove north to New York.
Last November, Helena and I hosted Thanksgiving. The November prior, we’d pitched in to help her parents with Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, but this time, we were going to do it all in our own apartment.
The menu was ambitious. We planned on tackling it together, taking turns in the kitchen. Our kitchen is small, only offering room for one cook at a time. We put together a spreadsheet listing which of the eleven dishes could be prepped first, which could be done simultaneously, which required time in the oven or on the stove. There would be no turkey, but there would be chicken with forty cloves of garlic. Also scheduled to appear were roasted green beans, three-cheese macaroni, cornbread dressing with sausage, garlic mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole and six more dishes including two desserts. All of this had to be ready to serve by 4:30pm.
This is the part of the story where I should tell tales of pratfalls, of spilled desserts and ovens on fire, of underdone food and having to order emergency take-out. This is the part of the story where everything falls apart in movies. But it didn’t.
It felt like making a perfect mixtape. Recipes like songs, ingredients like hooks, I could see where one dish overlapped with another, crossfaded where component pieces matched. If I have butter for one dish, I can melt more for another. If I have these two things on the stovetop, the oven can accommodate two dishes at the same temperature. I never stopped moving, leaving the kitchen only for a run to Zabar’s to buy two more serving dishes. That Thanksgiving morning, I was just cooking. The kitchen wasn’t a place to consider my options, to let my mind wander. Instead, I was expressing myself through what I was doing. I was present.
I faltered only once. There was a moment near the end of the cooking when I stopped and stood in the kitchen, staring into the middle distance. I could hear Helena in the living room, playing hostess with her parents while simultaneously cutting cheddar and gruyere into tiny cubes on our coffee table. I just couldn’t remember what to do next. Helena asked how I was from the other room, checking on me. I blinked, then thought of the people I loved in the next room. I glanced at the recipe at hand and I saw a path, a next step. I answered her with an honest “Okay.” I was really okay. We finished with ten minutes to spare.
Thanksgiving wouldn’t have worked without my mother’s recipes. Her cornbread informed the dressing, which was also her recipe. Her recipe led me through the sweet potato casserole. The pecan pie was hers as well. In addition to my mother’s, I used recipes from Ina Garten (the three-cheese macaroni) and Alton Brown (the garlic mashed potatoes). If I hadn’t stuck to the recipes, kept to the scripts they provided, Thanksgiving would’ve never happened.
I didn’t cook much Southern food when I lived in the South. I was surrounded by it, I’d grown so accustomed to it the novelty had worn clean away. But since moving to New York, I find the most joy in making dishes that are unmistakably Southern. In our Upper West Side apartment, I’ve boiled peanut oil atop an electric range to deep fry chicken, the batter so rich with buttermilk and cayenne that the smoke hurt my eyes to turn the pieces. I’ve made biscuits or cornbread or peanut butter cookies just because I had the ingredients and thought they’d be nice to have, something my grandmother, my Mom’s mom, would do on the spur of the moment when I was a child. I will complain to anyone who might listen about the scarcity of White Lily flour on the shelves at Fairway on Broadway. Through food, I’ve become more Southern than ever I was in Atlanta. The philosophy my Mom learned from my Grandmother lives on in the very Southern way I cook now. For Helena, for family, for our friends, my best cooking is done as an expression of care. That is what brings me the most joy.
We were back home in North Georgia recently. I get to the South a little more often these days. We planned to take my Mom & Dad out to dinner the night we arrived, but they insisted we come over instead. “Since we already have a roast thawed to cook for supper, let’s have supper here and then go to breakfast at Cracker Barrel,” texted my Mom. I’ll never turn down an opportunity to eat supper at home.
Before we left, Helena asked my Mom if she could have her recipe for carrot cake, one of my favorite desserts. My Mom smiled and nodded in a particularly way she does, said “Yes, yes” as she moved to the drawer. There’s a pride in the way she does this. A slowness that is deliberate, like she’s taking stock of the knowledge she’s acquired. From a stack thick enough hold in both hands, she plucked a photocopy from the center of the pile. We took photographs with our phones.
A recipe is a list of ingredients and instructions to put them together. Someone else made a number of mistakes until they figured out what worked, then they wrote it down. A recipe is a map out of the woods. A recipe is tested and tried advice. And like any good advice, you have to allow yourself to accept it. You give yourself permission. You humble yourself to gathered wisdom while acknowledging you are capable of accomplishing its aims. That humility doesn’t come easy for me, but the recipe offers a way toward it.
When you meet another person, someone who has figured out what worked for them, who knows where they stumbled and fell, it is imperative to listen and to learn. They’re full of recipes, they offer a survival kit. All of their mistakes and their triumphs become stories heavy with meaning and experience. They make you stronger, the sum of not just your own parts, but the chapters and verses of a whole other rich volume.
And so, I give myself permission. Here is a box of recipes. Here are these good ingredients and steps to follow. Stop starving alone.
Make soup. Make dinner. Make a feast.
