My Love Affair with Food

Thought this wasn’t a recipe blog? Well, I mean… it’s not. Buuuuut if this blog is supposed to be about whatever is in my head, then It has to have a food section. I love food. Love to eat it, make it, learn about it.

However, I figured before I started launching into recipes, histories, or tips and tricks, I thought I might explain about why I felt the need for a foodie section here.

I’ve always liked food (c’mon, who doesn’t) and I’ve always found other cultures and history fascinating. I found out quickly that if you want to learn about a people or location, food is a window into culture. Is the food spicy to induce sweating? It’s probably from a warm area like India, Africa, or equatorial South America. Is the meat brine preserved or salt preserved? Maybe a wet or dry climate, respectively. Do they elevate technique like the French or ingredients like the Italians? is it about small presentations and balance like the Japanese or is it about one pan dishes to feed the village communally like Haiti? It’s fascinating. Food is tradition you can taste.

I would read about food history and collect cookbooks, from classics like Julia Childe’s Mastering the Art of French cooking and Edna Lewis’ Taste of Country Cooking to off-beat ones like Tieghan Gerard’s Half-Baked Harvest and Thug Kitchen’s Eat Like You Give a F*ck. I’d watch documentaries like Cooked or travel shows about food in different areas like Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown or Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods. From straight up instructional Food Network to reality TV, I devoured (Ha!) it all and did my best to follow along.

But like any skill, my cooking truly developed when necessity weighed in more heavily than desire. We were living in Corpus Christi, TX, putting my husband through school. My ability to work took a down-turn due to my health and we were poor. Like at-risk-of-losing-the-crappy-apartment poor. I had a $20 a week grocery budget and 4 mouths to feed. While I had always had an appreciation for different foods and ways of doing things, I had always cooked for the family the way I grew up with: big meats, 2 sides, boxed convenience. Now, however, I had to COOK.

Everything was from scratch. I pulled on the recipes I had always bought and began to make the pieces and parts. No more store bought pasta, we figured out how to do that by hand. Biscuits were cut in a big bowl like my granny instead of a popable package. I came to terms with that America was the only country in the world where 12 oz of meat was ONE person’s serving and set out to change that with filler foods that were cheaper and more filling. And we made it deliciously.

As much as this success story and how I really got good at cooking is fun, and at least inspiring to me, it’s not when my true love affair with food began. It started before then with Thanksgiving of 2015.

I was facing the prospect of cooking my first Thanksgiving meal by myself. I had always been around some branch of the family or the other, all chipping in and trading recipes, and I was daunted by the task before me. I know that I was only cooking for my little family and some friends, all of whom had eaten my food before, but still I was overwhelmed. 

And lonely.

You see, Thanksgiving for me had always been synonymous with family. Lots and lots of family. Our celebrations started early, ran late, and easily hosted a rotating flow of upwards of 30 or so people. It was loud and crazy and filled with so much love that you could feel it in every breath you took. I wanted that feeling and my family that had been left behind on the east coast.

So, I did what every girl does when overwhelmed and needing comfort- I called my mother. I cried about being alone. She cried about me not being there. I panicked. She comforted. You know how it goes. 

But then, she pulled out "The Box". The same one pictured in the icon for this post. My great-grandmother's recipe box. Stock full of family recipes, her own and her mother's and grandmother's, all carefully scrawled on various index cards and papers and tucked away with love. This box carries generations of cooking knowledge. It has been passed down and shared throughout the family for far longer than I have been alive and it will continue to be after I am gone.

With painstaking care, Mom read Granny's spidery handwriting and gave me her recipe for her cornbread dressing. We cried again as we reminisced over the hours-long games of canasta that we would play at her little wooden table while we waited for food to cook. We laughed over the fact that her pepper was measured in packets (like she used to get at her local Hardees and hoard like a squirrel thanks to growing up in the Depression). We laughed harder as we tried to figure out how much a "ladle of broth" actually was. I mean, who has the same ladle?!

Over the course of the next days, Mom helped me gather recipes from all branches and figure out what could be made ahead so I could push out a grand meal from my pill-box of an apartment kitchen. With much experimentation and no small amount of calls for clarification, I managed to pull off a pretty good version of Granny's cornbread dressing. And when I set that dish down, I realized that I brought so much more than food to the table. 

There she was. Oversized robe and curlers, sparkling eyes giving me a wink for a job well done... The memory was so real, I would swear I could have reached out and touched her. 

My little family sat down to eat Thanksgiving dinner, complete with her cornbread dressing, Mema's giblet gravy, Uncle Bobby's sweet potato soufflé, and my Momma's strawberry candy for dessert. So many dishes with so many people and so many memories. Suddenly, my kitchen table didn't feel big enough to seat all the people I had brought to it. It wasn't large enough to hold the love that was so thick in the air that you could breathe it.

And I wasn't lonely anymore.

I think that this was truly the moment that I fell in love with food and cooking. I said it before, and I'll say it again, food is tradition you can taste. At that moment, right then, I realized that it wasn't just what went in the belly that was important, it was what went into what goes in the belly. It's the pound cake that no one can ever make as good as Granny, even with her recipe. But when you smell it cooking, you can picture those green cabinets and yellowed tile and you know it's a special occasion. It's seeing Grandma smile at you from over her shoulder while you cook down  the fatback for her red rice and realizing she made it originally for the same reason you fell back on it in hard times- what other meal can feed 16 people for $5?

Food brings us together and stimulates memory in a way nothing else really can. It lets us appreciate everything from the nuances of a culture to simply the love that was poured into every bite. Especially when you can recreate something that was once made for you and that you can now pass on.

So there will be helpful hints on here, and recipes for things you may love, or hate, or never have even thought of. There’ll be random history. But ultimately this section, for all my sarcasm and shenanigans, is how I spread love.

So eat up and enjoy.