I have been reading Marcus Samulesson's book, Yes, Chef and in the first chapter or three he discusses Berber the spice and how it is the spice he connects with his blood heritage. I love the imagery he uses as he describes and uses it to transition into the story of his birth, loss, and adoption. It got me thinking about my own cooking and my own culinary story and how to tell it to my children.
If I started with a spice, they know it is Swamp Fire a Cajun seasoned salt that I spent a few years perfecting. We use it often lot on a lot of things. Butter and swamp fire in a well seasoned cast iron skillet with a wooden spoon. This is my heritage. I was not taught to cook on a grandmother's apron or at the side of a parent or aunt or even by a friend. I was taught to cook by fire and poisoning.
Unfortunately, I'm not kidding.
For a wedding gift, a neighbour gave me a cook book, a bottle of wine, and a fire extinguisher. I used them all up before our one year anniversary.
In the first few months of our marriage, Chad ended up in the emergency room with food poisoning, throwing up blood and severely dehydrated. So much that the iv backflowed his blood. I sobbed, guilt ridden, calling his parents at 3 am to come to the hospital.
Then I set the kitchen on fire. Twice. Well, twice that required the fire extinguisher and a couple other times that I could handle by shutting off the stove and closing the oven door waiting for it to just burn off.
My pet parrot imitated the smoke alarm whenever she heard me in the kitchen and sometimes the firetruck siren too.
My dishes at the neighbourhood potlucks would go untouched unless I left them in the grocery store wrapper with label still sealed. Even then, folks proceeded with caution.
I thought all food had to be microwaved before serving to make it safe to eat. I worked at a fast food place as a teen and that was protocol with all the burgers. I washed all the garden produce Chad insisted on with dish soap and was still afraid to eat it.
I could be brought to vomiting just thinking about lard, let alone touching it or having it in my kitchen.
I could actually burn water. I ruined more pots than I care to admit forgetting about tea water.
I never gave up though. I kept trying. I read, I tried, I cooked, I burned, I learned. I asked people to cook in front of me and I studied. I picked up on little tricks of the trade. I stopped using elaborate recipes and opted for the 3-4 ingredient ones. Simple is better. I still failed. I still fail. All the time I make mistakes in the kitchen and I ruin dinner.
I still try, seek out more experience and more things to try. I know three things that I use as my rules:
1) use the best ingredients you can, fresh, well sourced quality ingredients. It is more expensive to throw something of low quality out because it is yucky and have to order pizza than it is to go for quality and just eat a little bit less of it and the fewer ingredients the better. Meat is the easiest to follow this rule. Heat, fat, seasoning- add meat. Veggies too: heat, fat, seasoning. Broiler is usually my favourite for both.
2) Use the right pan or pot for the job.
3) Go slow. Pay attention. Measure. Wait. Experience it. Go slow. Even if you only have 10 minutes to cook, be there in those 10 minutes.
Adding children to the mix complicates things for sure, the 2 hours I had to carefully follow America's Test Kitchen recipes bit by bit is now 10-20 minutes with Netflix blasting Phineas and Ferb or Peep's Big Big World. I make due. I make it work.
We still eat take out of frozen pizza more often than I'd like or fried eggs if there is not time. Still, it is less than we used to and no one has been hospitalised in years from my cooking. Ha!
Anything that is worth doing takes time, not everyone is gifted with the magical spoon and pot. I am logging my hours in and I will not let my children out into the world with only the skills to feed themselves of making instant noodles in the coffee pot and making jiffy mix muffins. They cook along side me.
I do have a few random memories of cooking with my grandmother Mel, a very stern woman who delighted in making us snicker doodle cookies. She would chop potatoes into long sticks before boiling for mashed potatoes and allow us to steal them and snack on the raw potatoes. She called us potato gremlins and would set cookies and carrots along the counter edge to ward off the gremlins. She was a fantastic cook and had a very functional and beautiful kitchen, always clean. She favoured real butter on toast and orange juice with pulp. She didn't care for me much as I grew up though, my purple hair and my own opinions were enough to drive her into a rage. That makes me sad, even now.
As I share more of my kitchen memories, hopefully with recipes, I hope to understand and create my own record of culinary heritage. I am writing, not just for me, but for my children to know me and our collective stories better. A unique familial folklore, if you please.
