What I learned in Grandma's Kitchen

When we forgot how to cook, we lost more than a skill. We lost the language of food.

Of all our senses, the sense of smell seems to be the most visceral and the most connected to memory, able to transport us in a startling instant to a particular setting or moment. When we smell something that carries a significant emotional weight for us, whatever we've experienced in the intervening years seems to melt away and we are once again awash with the physical memory of what that scent signified to us: excitement, loss, hopefulness, contentment.

For me, there is a certain comingling of scents - food in the oven, a slight hint of mothballs, rose water, the way that a sunny room has a dry, warm smell to it - that when properly combined, instantly fills me with a feeling of wellness and comfort like nothing else. It smells like the apartment - specifically, the kitchen - my grandparents had when I was little. Of all the components that make up this particular blend, it is food and the smell of it cooking that is the most evocative. It's the hot oil, the cake batter, the intoxicating smell of bread baking, the gas of the oven...Everything.

Some of my favorite memories of childhood were sitting in Grandma Dora's yellow and blue kitchen, helping her grate potatoes for her latkes and folding raisins into the thick, crumbly mixture that would eventually become her indescribable strudel. Like many women of her generation, her meals were prepared simply and without much fuss. Grandma was the type of person who could make anything taste wonderful, even something as ordinary as toast. A good deal of the emotional significance of eating something my grandmother created was that in doing so I was also ingesting a bit of her spirit that I simply adored, the nurturance and abiding love she felt for those she fed.

The food she prepared was passed down among the women in her family from generation to generation, learned simply by observation and assistance in a mother or grandmother's kitchen; the few actual recipes she did have were written in old-fashioned cursive, speckled and stained with splattered food and fingerprints. The recipes are steeped in cultural and personal history, some following ancestral lines back to the ‘Old Country' and some tinged with Western assimilation; most use the hardy root vegetables and grains that could be grown in Eastern Europe, but some, like the one for Potato Chip Cookies, smack of 1950's Americana.

In looking over some of these old recipes, measuring cups and implements of this nature were never mentioned; instead, it was natural for cooks to rely on intuition and the senses. The instructions typical of my grandmother's heirloom recipes would seem downright evasive to today's by-the-book chef: toss in a half-handful of dried apricots; add enough flour so it's wet but not sticky; remove from the oven when the onions smell sweet and the carrots are softened some but still firm.

My grandmother had been instilled with a sense of utter naturalness in the kitchen; she had absolute confidence in her instincts and used a graceful economy of movement. More than anything, she derived genuine pleasure from cooking, from feeding herself and others. During my hours spent in my grandmother's kitchen, talking, listening, laughing and stirring while flour clouds puffed up around me, I too developed a love and appreciation of cooking that I'll carry with me for the rest of my life. Although I enjoy cooking, our contemporary society with its long work hours, crowded grocery stores and even more crowded streets has made it so that cooking a meal from scratch can seem unrealistic, if not downright indulgent.

Still, it's interesting and strange to me that my grandmother's love of cooking, which was so contagious to me, never caught on for her children. My aunt and mother look at cooking as a chore, a hassle one must endure in order to sustain oneself. Growing up, the kitchen at my home was a showcase for all the brands I'd never touch today: Kellogg, Kraft, Oscar Mayer, Hostess, Swanson. To my aunt and mother's generation of women, those who grew up comfortably in the 1950's, their mothers who spent hours in the kitchen baking bread and canning asparagus seemed hopelessly outdated. Grandma was an old-fashioned relic to be pitied; they were modern, educated, emancipated Americans. The tools of the revolution were canned vegetables, then frozen, and finally microwaves: Dinner for their families could be prepared in a fraction of the time Grandma would have spent in the kitchen. But, oh, sometimes they'd crave the plum kugel she used to bake. Well, there was always Sunday, the day Grandma's kitchen would fill once again with the intoxicating, comforting aromas of their youth.

We are losing the ability to feed ourselves, and instead allowing corporations fill us like empty consumer vessels with their product.

Today, our relationship to food is seriously threatened. Not only do many of us not know how to cook beyond the most rudimentary level - a fact that is almost a source of pride - but it seems as though the very physiology of our tastebuds has been altered by the unnatural, processed food it has grown to rely upon. The sweetness of an apple pales next to that of an apple pie, and the hassle of baking one's own apple pie isn't worth it when every convenience store brims with factory made pastries one can buy for a dollar or two. Now, certainly, as a vegan I've made clear choices in my life that preclude me from buying a convenience store pie to begin with, but that isn't the point. The point is that when we lose our ability to cook and appreciate something that's been made with our own hands, we're losing something fundamental and profound: cultural and personal histories, self-reliance, true nurturance. We are losing the ability to feed ourselves, and instead allowing corporations fill us like empty consumer vessels with their product.

In spite of all this, there is an undercurrent of dissatisfaction that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. A growing population of people are steadfastly rejecting the fast food, empty-calorie culture that has threatened to eclipse our deeper needs, our more difficult to satisfy hungers. To many, especially within the anti-multinational movement gathering steam in Europe, the Golden Arches of McDonald's represents something beyond its inherent cruelty, wastefulness and unhealthiness: McDonald's has become the very symbol of a pernicious homogenizing force that wants to plow over centuries of children cooking in the kitchen with their grandmothers, families eating together, talking, deepening relationships and connections. The ultimate battle we'll wage against the industries that try to make us dependent on shoddy, unnatural products - the fast food and biotech industries - will be, of all places, in our kitchens: When we sit around the table to eat organic, consciously prepared, healthy food, we are not eating the uniformly produced wretched product of factory farms. We are boldly rejecting their bid for global domination. We are reclaiming our ability to feed ourselves.

As I write this, my grandmother is 86-years-old, and, though she's still spirited and independent, she's no longer able to cook for herself or others. When I visit her, she often says, with a bittersweet air,

"Oh, Marla, do you remember how I used to love to cook?"

Of course I do, Grandma. That is your legacy to me and I will share it with all I can. And hopefully, one day my friends and family will think of me whenever they encounter delicious kitchen smells too.

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This page was launched August 30, 2000