To Cook is to Know is to Love Her

When Dad calls me, he is still getting over a cold. His voice is congested; he sounds young and vulnerable. But I know Dad, and I imagine his large frame sitting at his desk in his office, Mom’s reading glasses sitting precariously on the tip of his nose. While typically one to command any room he walks into, right now he’s probably wearing gray sweatpants and a tattered cotton shirt.

He gets right to it: “So you want to talk about Nana?” 

“Is that okay?”

Nana passed away in 2015, along with the spring. She was in her eighties, suffering from a dementia we later discovered was most likely caused by a certain metal they once used for hip surgeries. Apparently, the metal would dissolve and break off into the body. We could have sued. We didn’t. 

Dad still can’t talk about her too much. Every holiday, he turns tense and rigid, his parents’ absence from his life a consistent and noticeable one. “Your father’s off,” Mom will say. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?” She’s not quick to sense his emotionally soft side; typically, everything he feels is felt hard and loud. This quiet suffering is always a shock.

“It’s another Christmas without her,” I’ll respond. 

Today, he’s calling to talk about Nana’s cooking. I want to write about it because I’m forbidden from having her recipes, because I love to cook, because I want to know her.

“Well, your Nana was an incredible Italian cook because her mother was. Your Nana’s side of the family was from Abruzzo, which is renowned for its chefs and cooks.”

Dad talks like he’s being interviewed, formal and rehearsed. He pronounces Abruzzo differently each time he mentions it. Years ago, when we had gone to Italy as a family, we stumbled out of torrential rain and into a restaurant built into the hills. There, in Artimino, Dad befriended the old chef as he does with everyone he meets. When the chef asked where Dad’s family was from, he answered with Calabria and Abruzzo. The old man simply sighed with a nod and slammed his fist on the table twice to signify the Calabrese stubbornness before warming his heart to the tune of Abruzzese.

“I vividly remember coming home from school to my grandmother and Nana in the kitchen, dozens of loaves of bread and cookies piled around them. You know, Nana would buy serious culinary and cookware pieces or have them handed down to her. Her mom gave her this massive wooden cutting board and rolling pin, and there would always be dough or cookies on it.”

He tells me the cutting board would be covered with six circles of flour and eggs at all times, a bar of Fleischman’s yeast nestled into their centers. While listening, I found it weird that Nana was making bread with eggs, but I didn’t say anything, assuming it must have been a brioche or some other enriched dough. I don’t want to stop Dad from talking, from giving me these moments. I’m keenly aware, right now, how lucky I am to hold them.

Tonight, I’m making dumplings. Handmade ones that I will painstakingly fill and fold. I take the premade wrappers out of the fridge to defrost. For the past few days, I have been saving recipe videos from Instagram, convincing myself this is something I can feasibly do. 

I cut the napa cabbage base and separated the leaves. Running them under cold water, I rub the pad of my thumb against any spots of dirt. The recipe tells me to blanch the cabbage, so as soon as the water begins to boil softly, I impatiently dunk the leaves in. I’m not sure how long one blanches for, so I just wait until the green spinach-like tendrils around the white core cook down a bit, then plunge them into an ice bath.

Fighting to wring all the water out, I press the leaves between two sheets of paper towels and roll that into a log, pushing my body weight against the countertop. I then toss shiitake mushrooms into the water and wait for the firm slices to soften under the heat. This will end up being a mistake—their porous bodies bloating from the water.

Whenever I cook, I think of Nana, especially if I am making something from scratch. Earlier, I tried to make dumpling wrappers by myself, combining all-purpose flour and boiling water in a metal bowl. The wrappers came out thick and chewy because I used an empty wine bottle as a rolling pin. I decided to nix them and instead ran to the store for these frozen, premade ones.

Nana and I used to cook together all the time. Each visit to Florida was punctuated by at least one morning spent in the kitchen glued to each other’s side, rolling store-bought pizza dough between our palms until they formed twists. Nana plopped each down into thick, boiling oil. She waited patiently until their pale colour turned a golden brown, then placed each onto paper towels to dry off before we dowsed them heavily in cinnamon and sugar.

But Nana is from a family where your recipes are passed down only to the eldest daughter. She was her family’s, my aunt my dad’s, and my cousin, mine. It’s a tradition I imagine was much less alienating when families lived in the same neighbourhood, if not the same house. When everyone gathered together on Sundays for dinner.

Now, however, we rarely see Dad’s side of the family beyond the occasional holiday, wedding, or funeral. I’ve tried asking for the recipes, thinking maybe our more progressive times would soften this tradition. I used to think my aunt would make an exception for me; I’ve stopped believing that.

I dunk the mushrooms in the same ice bath and get to squeezing everything I can out of them. Their bodies ooze through my fingers, still swollen with water. In the end, I acquiesce and just add less liquid to the overall mix.

The wrung mass is dropped onto my cutting board, where I chop them into small cubes along with the cabbage and watch them pile into a metal bowl nestled in the sink to save space. Ground pork goes in as well before I measure out the soy sauce, sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine, salt, and pepper. The recipe tells me to mix for six to eight minutes, which feels excessive, but I remember hearing in one of the many posts I saved that stirring clockwise for a long period of time is what gives dumplings their juicy bounce. I acquiesce to the arm workout.

～

“Your Nana was always reading a lot of cookbooks,” Dad says into the phone. “They’d clutter the house.”

A few weeks ago, I asked if Nana only cooked Italian food. Dad didn’t skip a beat: “No, she cooked everything. She cooked Chinese and Thai. One day, I walked into the kitchen, and there was this giant pan there. I asked her what it was. It was a wok. The first time I actually saw one.”

“How did Nana start cooking Asian food?” I asked.

“Well, we’d get Chinese or Thai food for dinner, and she’d want to learn how to make the dishes on her own. So she’d buy a new cookbook. She was making French food and typical American fare, too. Julia Child and Jacques Ponpon, they were really big at the time.”

I wonder if his memories of his childhood home being cluttered with cookbooks are the reason why, as a family, we’ve long searched for Italian ones. Even though Nana cooked by feeling; by that’s the right texture, by another pinch, by it should feel like sand. We still scour store shelves for recipes reminiscent of her own. Especially his favourite childhood cookies: half-moon pastries filled with smashed grapes, chopped walnuts, and dark chocolate.

My attention back on the phone, I ask: “What do you remember about the cookies?” 

“We would go to Naples or Canandaigua Lake to buy the grapes. We’d bring back bushels of them and sit around the table to peel the grape skins.”

I laugh at the idea of my father sitting patiently enough to prepare the fruit. I think of his thick and short fingers, and I wonder how he’d even manage to coax the thin skin off of each grape. He hears me laughing softly and asks why.

“I just can’t imagine you doing that.”

“Well, we all had to. It wasn’t just me.”

My dad, who threw Nana’s china set against the wall when he was a toddler, giggling at the sound of ceramic shattering; who stole golf carts and was escorted home by the police; who made Nana cry more than once. My dad: emotional, strong, impatient. How did she get him to do it?

～

As soon as six minutes pass, I stop mixing. My wrist is tired from the motion and I still need to actually fill and fold each dumpling. I cut the wrappers loose from their plastic prison and placed them on the bottom left corner of my cutting board.

Now that I’ve left the filling to settle, liquid from the mushrooms and pork escapes to the surface. I switch my spoon out for a fork, a possible challenge already clear in my mind.

The tower of wrappers is still frozen in the middle, so I gently coax each round off the other, careful not to split it anywhere. I try to place a healthy amount of filling into the center of my first dumpling, the small sheet cupped softly in my palm. I wet the edge, fold the wrapper in half, and tuck the filling inside. Still, it escapes through, and the dough is getting too wet to stick. I’m fumbling, trying to braid the two halves together, pushing hard into the dough to crease it. But everything is softening and falling apart at my timid touch. I let the mangled thing slip through my fingers, scoop the disaster up, and plop it into the garbage. 

They made it look so easy in the video, I think.

The next time I looked up, two hours had passed. Before me, an army of dumplings marched out in relatively straight lines. I take the Dutch oven from the cabinet, originally white but now speckled and stained, and place its heavy body on the stovetop. I fill it with water and leave it to boil. In just a few minutes, a gentle gurgle comes over the air. Using a slotted spoon, I lower each bundle of sustenance into the water. When they float to the surface, I add one cup of cold water, wait for them to drop with the temperature, and bring it back to a boil. I keep doing this until the pork is cooked through.

In these moments, when I spend endless hours after work in the kitchen, I feel closest to her. When Nana died, I was seventeen. Pretty quickly in my life, she stopped being able to cook and instead came over to our house for the holidays in woollen sweaters. Her face softened from years of motherhood; her cheeks sagged beneath her chin, so she always wore a sort of frown. The last time I remember her being with us for Christmas, Mom and I found Nana hovering by the kitchen island, quietly folding napkins. She wasn’t really there anymore and hadn’t been for a long time. We approached her gently, Mom wrapping Nana’s body into her own.

 At the funeral, I listened to my aunts and cousins tell stories about cooking with Nana, about all the years they shared with her. I had so few, and the ones I did have felt measly in comparison. There was so little to hold onto. 

～

When I have kids of my own, what will I be able to tell them? When they want to hear about our family—our past—is fried dough all I will have to show for it?

If I can’t know her now, if I only get part of the whole, especially when it is still so hard for anyone to talk about her, then I need to build my own traditions off of hers. I will welcome my current and future family with bread and cookies inspired by those my father grew up on.

For my twenty-first birthday two years ago, I asked my eldest cousin, Anna, to come to my parents’ house and cook with me.

“I know you can’t give me the recipes, but I was wondering if we could make them together.”

“Sounds good. I can come over on Saturday.”

When she arrived, Anna’s arms were heavy with cornmeal and baking powder, vegetable oil and eggs.

“You know we have like half this stuff?”

“I just wasn’t sure. Best to be careful. We’re making polenta donuts. You ready?”

She took out our biggest mixing bowl and poured the cornmeal in, followed by water and eggs and sugar. 

“This is where it gets tricky. Nana would go by feel, so the measurements aren’t exact.”

We talked about food and Nana and loss the entire time. I listened to Anna’s mornings and afternoons in Nana’s kitchen making fresh pasta, rapt with jealousy. 

“Whenever Mom and Dad had to go somewhere, Nana would watch us, and we’d cook together.”

That’s how she knew what consistency the polenta dough should be. And when we put the bowl in the refrigerator for at least forty-five minutes to firm up, Anna could tell they were ready by a glance.

  “There were recipes Nina’s grandmother wrote down, but one dish could be made a million different ways,” Dad had once said. 

We pulled the mixture out of the fridge. Together, hands dusted with flour, we rolled about half a cup worth of the dough between our palms, forming balls. The vegetable oil was simmering the whole time, popping and rolling behind us. Each donut took its turn in the bath.

I was brought back to Nana’s kitchen in Florida—how I had to look up at her from below the countertop. She tested the oil’s heat against her skin, fingers hovering over the hot pan. Instead of watching her drop each twisted log of dough into the oil, I get to do it this time. Anna stood behind me, calling out when the donuts were ready to be turned. When they became golden brown and cooked through, each round was set to dry on paper towels. We doused them, like Nana and I used to, in sugar and cinnamon. We created a pile of donuts on the plate, lopsided and tall.

Anna has a few recipes but a lot still live with my aunt. Anna’s a mom now herself, and I can only imagine what her home will smell like, how she will bake the same dishes for her son that Nana once made for her. He will come to know our family’s flavours and histories in a way I may never. Especially now that we see each other less and less as family dynamics shift and there aren’t grandparents to hold us accountable. The next time my family will be able to taste Nana’s half-moon cookies is becoming less clear.

At the end of Anna’s visit, the donuts were growing soft already (they must be eaten as soon as they’re fried). She handed me two index cards.

“They’re not her half-moon cookies, but I thought you might like the donut recipe and one of my favourite zucchini dishes of hers. They’re just starting points, though. So make them your own.”

I took the cards from her and let them sit in my hands. I had hoped this would happen. The cards were messy with Nana’s script. It felt like an acceptance, like I’d earned a piece of my family’s history. It would be easier to hold anger toward Anna, to call her selfish or stubborn, but that’s not fair. 

Anna knew Nana longer than me, which means everything to grief. These recipes—they’re as much a tether for her as they are for me. Tradition connects us to our lineage. By keeping Nana’s wish, her mother’s wish, her mother’s mother’s wish, Anna is woven into the familial rug. Let her be.

Because even with a recipe, Nana’s dishes are and were made differently each time depending on whose hands touched the pastry and whether they thought the mixture was dry or not. Meaning that even with her recipes, I might never taste her food as she made it. I can try; I can continue to feed my dad, but because I never got to taste her version, I might always be recipe-testing.

And it turns out that no one knows where Nana’s sauce recipe is. Most likely, the index card is oil-stained and torn in my aunt’s basement, having slipped out of one box or another. Not on purpose, but simply the collateral damage of life.

I mourn this loss, as does my dad. But he will tell me time and again how her sauce wasn’t too sweet like jarred marinara is these days. That feels like an opening. A break in the line of inheritance, a missing link for me to reach into and hold.

～

Once the dumplings float to the surface, all silk-like and bulbous, I drop them into a new soup. Rich chicken stock that has been simmering away beside me, filling the small kitchen with an earthy tenderness. I don’t know if Nana ever made dumplings when she cooked Chinese food. Most likely, these are a new tradition I’m forming under our name. But she did spend hours in front of a stove, she did chop and bake and serve. She did nourish people.

The dumplings are imperfect. Some break in the drop, the soft roundness of their backs splitting under the weight of boiled pork and all the juices inside. Some are stodgy, thick at the seam. But when laddled up to my mouth, when fed to my roommate as we rehash the day, each will be delicious.

I spend a lot of time these days cooking for him, wanting to hear how she did things differently, excavating what he remembers through what he tastes. 

Every Easter, I make Ricotta Pie because Nana did. I know mine tastes different because he tells me so, but each time, I try to make the adjustments he suggests. 

I want to know if hers was more cinnamon-forward or if mine’s missing an earthiness that fresh nutmeg could bring. I want to know whether she used two eggs or three. If the crust is thinner than she would have liked. Was her zest of choice orange or lemon? Is the custard lacking? Did she use fresh vanilla pods instead of extract?

Mom never understands how he can gratefully devour the pie and, instead of lauding my efforts, instruct me on what could have been better. She comes to my defence at every critique Dad gives.

“You should be so grateful your daughter is cooking for you,” she’ll say. “Don’t tell her what’s wrong.”

But we speak a language where stories are told through taste. Where memories are associative and nebulous, folded into fragile peaks.

Maybe one day I will perfect this pie. Maybe I will even find a recipe for those grape and chocolate and walnut cookies. Maybe that’s no longer the goal. What I do know is this: if Nana were here today, she would have seen me, tasted my food, and given them all to me. 

What recipes of mine will become embedded in this familial text? I’m my family’s oldest daughter, and by talking to Dad about Nana, about his childhood, I am not only building up my image of her but of him as well. He’s become inextricable to my understanding of who Nana was.

And traditions die hard with me and my father.