The Recipe

The Recipe

That winter, I cooked a lot. I made soups, pates, ragouts. But, mainly, I baked pies. With chicken liver and eggs, with apples, and with cabbage.

Every time I cooked a meal I invited my sister over. That winter, we ate together often.

It was fun at first: as fun as a good bowl of lentil soup could be.

At some point, my sister asked:

“Are you going to slaughter me?”

“What? Why?”

“You keep feeding me. For two months, every second day. You should be more social," she said. "Maybe throw a pie party or something. Do you have other people, than me, to talk to?"

“Alright," I agreed. "I'll invite someone else over.”

She didn't offend me. But she didn't get my point.

“I am a young woman with a vibrant enough personal life. Even if I haven't met the right one yet, it doesn't mean I wish to spend all my evenings with you," my sister went on. "Any day, I could meet a nice and reasonable person, with whom we would carry on together. But look what I carry instead: fatty hips and flabby belly. All thanks to you!"

Bla-bla, and boo-boo, and so she went, like a mechanical doll. Even when my sister wanted to sound heartfelt, or alive, she ended up being blunt.

Once, many moons ago, I was crawling through my second divorce. She offered support. I try to believe that she meant well.

“Being single is no longer perceived as something pathetic. You are not a failure. Modern people are all about other people's feelings. So if you are worrying about being called an "old hag" (she showed air quotation marks), don't. No one will call you that," my sister said.

“We are milfs,” she continued.

“Who?”

“Look it up!"

"Okay."

"Aging is sexy now! Experience is sexy! You are in high demand, sister."

I don't know if she was born that way.

Once in a while, my sister would meet someone she thought was her significant other. Then it would inevitably fall apart. I fed her through love disappointments. I was building up the suspense,

getting to the Winter of the Cabbage Pie.

That winter, deciphering mom's pie recipe became an idée fixe. My sister was the only living person who could tell if I were on the right track with that. 'Never refuse a meal you've been offered.' So, my sister never said 'no' to my invites. During our dinners, we mimed more than we talked: considering my sister's verbal stiffness, miming was better. We sustained each other's memories. We dreamed of some warm place where we would spend our golden years.

I went from the variety of appetizers – pates, salads, sandwiches – to the main dish.

“Only a horrible person rejects a giving hand,” our mother said.

If someone visited our mom's place and didn't eat properly, she never invited this person again. She passed this principle – a gift or a curse – to us. When my sister and I grew up and moved out, our mom repeatedly tricked us into her apartment with a dinner invite. She wanted to see us, but instead of just saying so, she threw meals at us.

The time passed. Life turned its ugly side to us, and then pretended to be nice and glorious again. After the moments of joy, and a row of unfortunate events, and years of boredom, life pushed us together - a sexy old lady with an alienated kid, and her single sister with fluid sexuality and reproductive challenges. We were two of so many others.

Our mother was a fan of cabbage pie. She baked it for all major feasts. She started in the late evening, after work and after supper, after half an hour with the crossword, and after her tea with lemon. I went to bed, hearing the sound of the hand mixer and a whisk. When I woke up, the cabbage pie was sitting on the dining table, covered with the kitchen towel. The top window was open, pushing in the air from the street, but the kitchen still smelled of fried cabbage and eggs.

I didn't even realize if I enjoyed the taste and the structure of the pie itself, or it was the scene that I loved: the mother's apron hanging on the chair, empty tea cup and a slice of squeezed lemon, the Saturday morning, the flour crumbs on the floor like tiny gnome footprints. I usually stuffed myself with a few slices of the pie, and then I went back to bed. It was the day that justified all other, less-than-perfect and less-than-calm, days.

The past was coming at me in bits and flashes. Random phrases that stuck in the head. Newsstands with ugly key rings – my mother occasionally bought one of those for me. Candles in a cupboard. TV programs that we watched together. Routes I took every day. Packed buses and long winter nights nurtured my boredom and solitude.

When I was cooking, my visions were brighter. There was something meditative in it, either contained in repetitive hand movements, in measuring cups, or in a hyper-focus on chopping and stirring. Chopping and stirring were the only things that mattered.

“How's the soup?” I asked my sister. “How's the salad?”

She'd respond with “fine”.

“Does it taste like mom's?” I insisted.

Sister shrugged.

“Did you follow the recipe?” she asked.

“Well, I did. Sort of. I based on what I could get from her tiny notepad.”

“How come it's tiny? The woman spent life next to the cooker."

“Imagine that: she juggled with half a dozen of ingredients. There are also prices, scribbled next to the ingredients.”

“I feel empathy for her,” my sister pronounced indifferently. “How could she not end the way she did?”

I switched to discussing plates and spices. Thinking of “could not" hurt. My sister was there with Mom in the end, and she told me more than once, that it was not her choice to witness what she had to witness.

“There were some moments...” she would say.

I didn't want to know. I didn't want her truth as mine was in the recipe notepad. This was real her – in her doodles, scribbles, and notes that were even harder to reconstruct than the taste of the cabbage pie.

“How's the pie?” I kept asking my sister.

She would eat my pie, just like she did when a young girl with a mom's pie – eating up only the centerpiece and the filling, leaving the crust on the plate.

She was regularly callous about my pie.

“Dry.”

“Half-baked.”

“You ruined the cabbage again.”

“It's okay but the smell is not.”

Tied with unbreakable family obligations, and nothing else, my sister kept eating my cabbage pie. Once or twice she brought other people – I didn't catch their names – but they were polite and, therefore, useless.

“You know what I figured out? Our mom was not a fan of cabbage,” I said to the sister, and to the accidental witnesses. “It's just that cabbage was the cheapest pie filling, and there has never been a shortage of it. I compared the numbers in her notepad.”

“What a discovery to make!” my sister noted.

“Indeed,” I said.

The winter passed by, and I had no regrets about missing it. I talked to my son a few times during that period, and I praised myself for not waiting for his calls anymore. I told him about my cooking routine. I said: "I cooked all of your grandma's special recipes. Remember what a chef she was?" The son replied that he didn't remember her cooking at all. He said grandma peeled bananas and unwrapped chocolate bars for him. "Right," I said, "It was a different time for her then."

My son said that as soon as he finds time to visit, he will demand three home meals a day, and I won't be able to get rid of him.

I always made a good impression on my son. I was not the best parent – I divorced his father, after all – but I was polite, relatively distant and never asked for anything extra. Not once did I beg him to come and visit. I never shamed him with the dinner offer. This all kept my son friendly.

After our talks, my phone was covered with flour or vegetable peels. I never stopped cooking.

Closer to the spring, I gave the pie a final effort. It was disappointing again. Even I knew it sucked. The cabbage tasted bitter, the crust was burnt, and the dough never raised. I shed a few tears.

My sister was right next to me for that. She tried to be empathetic.

“Why are you so obsessed with this pie?”

I, sort of, leaned toward her and rested my head on her skinny shoulder.

“Mom's pie was the best pie I ever ate,” I said.

“Do you follow the recipe?”

“Of course I do!” I splashed my hands.

“Show it to me.”

My sister had never asked to see the notepad before.

I handed it to her: a faded green twenty-page notepad crumpled at the edges.

She looked through it, showing no emotional response.

“Did you put salt in it? Yeast? Eggs?”

“I did.”

“Wait, what is this footnote? What does it say? God.. Is it an address? ”

“I think she accidentally scribbled someone's address and just never cut it out. She was very social.”

“Well...”

“Until she stopped being so, I know,” I interrupted.

“Do you think we should check it out?” she suggested.

Three tram stops, and we were almost there. We passed by the little park, hearing the birds chirping and people shouting at each other. Spring was definitely on its way.

The address belonged to an old bistro that had gone through a total re-branding. They kept some old elements and decorated around them. I used to dine in such places in the city when I was still going on dates.

“Can I help you?” the barista asked.

My sister took the lead.

“Do you know what was here before this?”

“Oh, you mean – if it was always a café here?" the barista responded after a pause.

We nodded.

“I believe so. I grew up in the neighborhood. I remember it being a takeaway when I was a kid.”

He was middle-aged. That made me say:

“When you were a kid, we were kids. What did they cook?”

“Well, everything... Beef rolls, rice, pies.”

“Cabbage pies?” my sister asked.

The barista looked at us with a hint of sadness.

“Sure,” he said after the pause. “Cabbage pies, too. And other pies.”

We asked for two cappuccinos to go.

“You do realize what it means, right?” my sister asked on the street.

I shook my head.

“The famous cabbage pie came from here,” she smiled.

“No.”

“Come on. That's a very mom thing to do.”

“No, No! She spent nights baking it. As if I don't remember!”

“She probably pretended to. Maybe this is when her sickness burst out.”

“Stop it!”

“OK,” my sister patted my shoulder. “Maybe she was just being practical.”

“Practical? What's practical in that? I loved her pies!”

My sister sipped her cappuccino.

Then she said:

"With all the other stuff that was going on in the house... Maybe she wanted us to think good of her."

As we passed the park, the streetlights turned on.