“But more than anything, over all these years, you've written about food. Why?”
“Who? What? Where? When? How? Valid questions, but I learned as a cub stringer, never, under any circumstance, if it is remotely within your power to resist the impulse, never ask a man why. It - it tightens a fellow up.”
“I apologize, but I'm going to hold you to it...”
“Torture.”
“...if you'll agree.”
“Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private or not at all.”
-The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson)
Normally, when people ask how or why it was I got into the restaurant industry, I begin by talking about making dinner for my family. This is true, in many respects. Growing up, both of my parents worked, and our dinners fell into the kind of commonplace routine comfortable for people with large time commitments. There is nothing particularly wrong about this, and I have many fond memories of dinners with my family before I wound up taking the helm of the kitchen—me with the constraints only of homework and of being an older sibling. In cooking, I found first a refuge in creativity and one of new and, if I desired, limitless potential.
I also found joy in service. There was, is, something unique about the way food connects us, and how we as people can come together over meals, or drinks. I did not know at the time that this would be the first step to the course of what is currently the rest of my life, but I did know I had found something I deeply appreciated. Not only was cooking a useful skill, and having lived on my own in the interim I am forever grateful it was something I was both allowed and allowed myself to study and grow through, but it is a way to offer connection, joy, and service to others forever.
I thought about this a lot while preparing for my mother’s birthday last week. My mother’s birthday remains an interesting time in all our lives’, the only one of our immediate family’s which does not fall in August or September, one which unfortunately falls closely to Mother’s Day, and one which is as of only a couple years ago the anniversary of her brother’s death. I feel it remains incumbent on all of us to help others celebrate milestones and mark remembrances, and food is one of those things which delivers on all fronts.
There is great joy in cooking elaborate meals for people, be they guests or members of our family. My annual assignment of thanksgiving dinner is one of my favorites. It’s as much a show as it is food, and a chance to test oneself and push new limits while delivering reliable classics.
But there is something to be said about the comfortable, familiar, and beautifully simple. I think, as I continue my grand mellowing (you all should have known me in high school), that there is a great amount of beauty to be found in the simple. This is especially true of old recipes, and our memories of them. It speaks a lot to the power of food as well—the way certain tastes or smells are able to transport us back to specific moments of time in ways we did not think possible.
My grandmother’s mind has been going for many years now. This creates the kind of divided legacy of the woman we remember and the woman she is now. Oma, we go by the German names for our grandparents (another holdover of my now deceased uncle), is a giant in the life of the houses Corriss and Robinson. Some of our fondest memories of her are culinary, sugar cookies to casseroles to these things called Polar Bears.
They’re like glazed peppermint brownies. Ridiculously fudgy, richly sweet, and one of those things you can eat until you’re sick and want to keep eating. When I last visited my grandparents on my own, Oma was well enough and able to remember to show me the few boxes of recipe cards she has kept. I remember clearly one of the recent times I grew, unjustly, angry was upon hearing that many, many more had been thrown out. But here were some, nestled in a box, written in a hand that may itself no longer exist. Not one to miss an opportunity like this, I am a history major after all, I spent some time recording them. Among them was the recipe for polar bears, which went into a file on my computer with the rest.
The recipe called for oleo, and had all the quirks of a handwritten recipe recalled instead of formulated in terms of measurements, cooking times, temperature, and assumed knowledge. It was not exceedingly difficult, but it was its own unique challenge, and hiding a pan of peppermint scented glazed peppermint brownies was also a fun, new challenge.
But then the light, the memory, and the comfort and joy of knowing this piece of the past is not yet dead. To hear my mother speak of sitting on the back steps of her childhood home and eating these things I had recreated with her sister, also dead, as though it were not the past, but the present. It was the present, the culmination of our pasts taking us to a moment where we can look back, remember, and sit with our progress and our loved ones. This for food, for service, for memory, and for joy.
“The crickets are… are chirping, and the lake is still, and the night is full of stars.”
“I can see it. It’s so clear. What are we doing here, BoJack?”
“We’re sitting on the back porch, and we’re listening to your brother play the piano, and we’re eating ice cream. Vanilla ice cream.”
“Yes. That’s right. Oh, it’s all so marvelous.”
“Can you taste the ice cream, Mom?”
“Oh, BoJack. It’s so… delicious.”
-Bojack Horseman S4E11, “Time’s Arrow”