They were probably the first great chefs de cuisine in that land, and galling though the fact may be to those Frenchman…they were Italians, every one.
-M.F.K. Fisher, Serve it Forth
People come to me for all things food. Information on it, tips and suggestions, or just ideas of what to cook. Before I made food my career however, I always obsessed over it. I was ever curious, standing behind my mother and grandmother as they threw mysterious items into the pot. I wanted to know what was for dinner on my way to grade school, so I had something to look forward to. In the reverse, if I knew something was being made that I didn’t love, which trust me there wasn’t much in that category, it was enough to ruin my day.
Core memories and even not so important memories are mostly food related for me. I remember being in FIRST GRADE and watching the snow come down from the big bay windows that overlooked the small valley I grew up in. The dusting of snow that so softly covered everything reminded me of the very special cinnamon crumb cake (topped with confectioners sugar) I had packed in my lunch box. My mouth watered and I wondered how much longer I had to wait before I could eat it. With my brain so strained for retention space as it is, why is this a memory it has deemed necessary and important?
All of the children’s books I obsessed over were food related. The cookie in “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” looked so good. I have been searching for the delicious eclair in “Two Bad Babies” since I was about four (that book isn’t even about food). And “A Chocolate Moose for Dinner”, don’t even get me started on that one. An illustrated book of puns had one page that included a deliciously dripping chocolate moose, and I made my mother read it over and over again. As a high-schooler I remember keeping it on my bookshelf in my room even though the other children’s books were moved downstairs as I aged. It had a place in my young adult library right beside the Harry Potter series.
Chocolate Mousse is now one of my specialties.
As a kid, I would love watching cooking shows. It was an obsession that started back when my grandmother used to play “Two Fat Ladies”, a BBC cooking show that aired from 1996-1999. I was at most ten while watching. Yet I remember loving how silly they were together, and large, and the fact that they rode around on a motorcycle with a sidecar attached as they traveled the English countryside in search of meals to prepare. The most interesting Superhero’s doing the Lord’s work, if you ask me.
I love to say that I am inspired to cook by my family, and I am. It is hard to find a “bad” cook in our midst, and no matter whose house you are at, the table is laden with homemade food that took hours to prepare and a person standing behind it saying “It was nothing, it was simple!”.
But I was also born with an interest. A desire to know food. I was aware that food was something that our family surrounded ourselves with, be it a funeral or a birthday. It was comfort. A craft, that if practiced, meant more than just a full stomach. It could mean a warmer heart. Home on a spoon.
So despite “food” being my career, it also means the same thing to me as it does to most other people. A way to remember. A way to remind myself of who I am, and where I come from. Cooking will always be a method I use to ground myself when things seem strange or uncertain, and I’m grasping at my roots to reassure my soul I’m still me, and I still remember how.
I hate to admit this, but people who know me well will not be surprised. Moving away from home was not an easy adjustment for me. Even now that I have been gone for 12-ish years, and have gotten married, and had two kids, and spent a decade doing the work of making Pennsylvania home, there are times where I am so lost. We are talking a difference of 6 hours from where I grew up, tops. And sometimes I feel like I moved to another country. I would have made a terrible immigrant.
I don’t know why my tie to home is so strong. I look at some more transient friends and co-workers of mine, that are always in a very different spot every 6 months. And happy. And enjoying. And life seems to be such an adventure. And i feel a bit embarrassed. Like I said, were talking ONE STATE AWAY.
Yet there are times when my heart aches for upstate New York. Not for any one person, or thing, or experience necessarily.
But for the way the air hangs heavy with the smell of apples in the fall.
And how dark and fertile the dirt is and how it felt to dig my hands in it.
And how quickly you can feel the change of seasons in the air, specifically between autumn and winter.
There are so many sensory ties I have to that place.
And while I have found a way to surround myself now in Pennsylvania with a creek a stones throw from my house and a garden that I am constantly hovering over. And the first trees I planted on our new property were two small Apple trees, I still wonder…
When will I wake up and feel it? Feel as if this is home? I’m checking all of the boxes in a tireless quest.
And as a book has the tendancy to do, when I found myself pondering that exact thought, a passage spoke to me.
I was reading “Serve it Forth” by M.F.K. FIsher, and in one of the chapters she brushed upon how an arranged marriage between Catherine de Medici (an Italian) to King Henry II brought the art of cuisine to France for the first time. Catherine was so upset to leave her homeland that she insisted on bringing all of her cooks with her. And she had her cooks teach the recipes and methods that reminded her of home to all of her staff, and she unintentionally created a gastronomic revolution that we all still get to take advantage of today.
A woman pulled from her roots. Who recognized it needed to be done, but insisted on having a say in it all.
There is power and strength in remembering where you came from. Its necessary for growth.
