Food=Love
The always excellent and erudite Mr. Henry wrote a post last week regarding food and grandmothers. Specifically, the food our grandmothers made that reminds us of growing up. It is amazing how the food of our childhood can bring back such strong memories.
I was lucky enough to have two grandmothers who were fabulous cooks. One was German, the other Italian, neither of them much far removed from their homelands. So I took for granted all the wondrous, made-from-scratch food they made for us.
We are lucky enough to still have one grandmother with us, a great-grandmother to the Munchkin. But her days of being able to stand at the counter and cook polenta from scratch are sadly behind her.
The other grandmother, the German frau who passed away many years ago, would have recognized in the Munchkin her culinary soulmate. Butter? Why not just put it on with a spatula! Something doughy? Oh my, yes! Apple strudel and puffy German pancakes? Pass the plate please! And for her, making food and nourishing her family was her expression of love. Because bless her heart, she was a stoic woman who was not often outwardly affectionate. But one taste of that strudel, at once chewy and flaky and perfectly sweet but not-too-sweet, and you knew there was nothing but love and care in the making.
As the Munchkin gets older, I find myself wanting to connect him with his ancestral roots, and thus I have attempted to make some recipes from both grandmothers. Before he was born, I wistfully thought of the dishes that I looked forward to eating as a child, but didn’t do much in the way of actually making them. Now, I try much harder to recreate the food I equated with love and happiness, hoping to have some of that rub off on him as well.
And as for my own mother, someone who didn’t enjoy cooking in the same way her mother did, it seems that the Munchkin will always equate her with chocolate chip pancakes.
She could defintely do worse.
Food=love even for people who are terrible cooks, like both of my grandmothers. One of them would get you the salisbury steak tv dinner for special occasions (we got Swanson’s turkey pot pie at Christmas and Thanksgiving, of course) and the other just put everything into the pressure cooker until it was all the same colour, whereupon she served it up. But we always knew they loved us anyway. And we loved them anyway.
Actually, I still love tv dinners and Swanson’s pot pies, come to that.
HELLO…sponsors, are you listening???
I also had a wonderful German oma. When we went to her house after school, there was always some yummy treat. The standard snack was a piece of bread lathered not only with butter, but about an inch of cream cheese, too. And unlike home, you always got dessert, even if you surrepititiouly fed the liver dumplings to the dog.
My daughter equates my Grandma’s house with peanut butter and honey sandwiches. = love.