Food for Thought

She feels sorry for people who cannot cook. Living without knowing that vinegar in the right proportions and under the right conditions can be made to taste like lemon custard for one of the artery-clogging, buttery confections she loves is unfathomable to her. Never experiencing firsthand the wizardry of leavening agents and the lightheartedness they bring when the delectables they encourage pair with warm cups of chicory coffee and vanilla bean cream saddens her and makes her wonder: What happened? Are these people destined to live without knowing the pleasure of making biscuits on granite-like countertops? Will they never have the satisfaction of gently pushing eggs from one side to the other in a hot skillet before folding those eggs over sauteed peppers and diced ham?

She cannot imagine it or refuses to.

Food is both confusing and clarifying to her. It is delivering homemade chocolate chip cookies in pink dollar-store tins to mark the birth of the first boy in her family in more than 60 years. It’s gumbo cooking contests and near fisticuffs about whether the glorified soup is Cajun or Creole. It is barbecue chicken grilled with a mixture of pecan, apple, and hickory wood by the deacons of her church on the day they buried her mama.

Food is communion to her and the excuse she uses to squeeze her hips between Sister Vi's and Mother Pearl's in the overcrowded fellowship hall at her church. On those days, the only thing juicier than the ribs on her plate is the gossip those two church matriarchs disguise as prayer requests. Their spattering of “my goodness,” “bless his heart,” and “Lord, help us” somehow makes the peach cobbler sweeter, thickens the syrup they call tea, and absolves them from the slander they peddle after benediction every first Sunday.

Is it really slander if it’s true?

She is a summa cum laude graduate of the harvest season. In spring, she hauls in strawberries and cabbage with a side of crawfish. By summer, tomatoes and a kaleidoscope of squash and melons fill her baskets. She dips heirloom mason jars in boiling water and cans the fruit of her labor for colder times and remembers. The days when she dropped her backpack on the front stoop of her grandmother’s house and ran to the kitchen to retrieve a baked sweet potato from the oven that fed 15 children and 88 grandchildren before a carelessly flung cigarette reduced the house on Park Street to ashy memories and oxymoronic labels like bittersweet are gone. Now, she must try to replicate the smell of fig preserves mixed with the trace scent of pecans weighing down her grandfather’s trees that stood behind the house that nicotine leveled.

Is it acceptable to prosecute family members for accidental arson?

She is stewed okra, homemade wine, and the willing victim of her mother’s predilections. She is smothered chicken over white rice when she’s feeling like her mama, but she is pupusas with a side of slaw when she’s feeling like one of the other people inside herself. She is her grandmother turning homegrown grapes into jam, and her great-grandmother turning other grapes into the wine she snuck into the nursing home around the corner when she visited the oldest woman in her family.

She is roasted pork stuffed with fresh garlic, served with mustard potato salad, dirty rice, green beans, and yeasty rolls. If only she could get the skin on her roasts to crisp as her mama’s did. She tries the vinegar trick, but it fails. Her uncle says she needs to apply salt after the vinegar, but she never saw the woman who taught her everything she knows about cooking do that. Besides, her uncle can’t be trusted. He basted his beloved sister’s roast once. That well-intentioned move destroyed the crisp on her mama’s Sunday entree and nearly destroyed her uncle’s relationship with his sister.

Mamas whose love language is cooking will raze just about anything that gets in the way of their self-expression.

Food is everything to her. It is life and death, joy and pain, and maybe it’s a way out. Maybe. To her, food is savory seafood mixed with fake cheese stuffed into pistolette dinner rolls, and it is the harsh realization that some bread and some people cannot be found when she leaves the place where she grew up.

It was Cousin Claude letting himself into her unlocked house and finding his dirty dishes in the sink when she got home from Wonder Mart. It is making 20 sweet potato pies for family gatherings like the one Claude’s family had when cancer killed him and wondering if her daddy would have lived longer if he and Claude had not worked in the same place that makes the black stuff that lasts forever even if the things we use the black stuff in don’t.

Who determines what becomes a delicacy, and does anything really last forever?

Food is nothing to her. It is a reminder of who she wanted to be, who she is, and the vacuum between the two. It is a soufflé that refuses to rise and salt in her sugar shaker. It’s a hankering for a grilled cheese sandwich only to discover end pieces of the loaf in the bread bin, and it's a gnat in the latte she learned to make at home to save money. It’s coming home from a hard day at work and reaching for the last slice of pizza that she hid the night before, only to hear telltale smacking coming from the next room. Food mocks her like a gash in the soles of her brand-new red bottom shoes and chides her like a vegan in a Brazilian steakhouse. Food is out of place in her life and irritating her like the thing tugging on her arm – a thing that cannot be ignored no matter how hard she tries.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” she screams at no one in particular.

“What do I want?” it echoes.

No one has a voice.

“Yes, what do you want?” she repeats.

“I want what I have been ordering for the last five minutes - a 10-piece nugget meal, with a cola, a fried apple pie, and hot mustard dipping sauce!”

As she drops a batch of cold fries into hot grease, she thinks about people who cannot cook and how lucky those people really are.