Rosie's Kitchen

I learned to cook by growing up in my grandmother’s kitchen. She was the most amazing cook. She could eat something once and knew how to cook it for life. She was the oldest child among many, born in poverty and came of age in the great depression. As such, she felt that restaurants were a decadent extravagance, verging on mortal sin. "Why waste your money eating in a restaurant when I can make it right here?" she’d say. It didn’t matter what you wanted; Chinese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Greek, French, she made it all. The only problem was she cooked like she was cooking for a mess hall feeding a full battalion rather than just my grandfather and myself. By the time she passed away, the house held 3 full sized freezers and four fridges. She liked going to visit my uncle in North Carolina. He had four children and a wife. She would visit twice a year and leave enough food behind in the freezer to keep them going for six months at a time.

Going to eat at a restaurant was a very perilous thing to do in my Grandmother’s house. It wasn’t until I moved out of my grandmother’s home that I felt that I could eat in a restaurant in relative peace. I never told her if I were going to eat in a restaurant with friends but she always knew the minute I walked through the door. Then the interrogation would begin, and let me tell you, the CIA had nothing on her. She not only knew I had eaten in someone else’s kitchen but she could sniff out what I had eaten. She sang as she cooked and she had a lovely alto. In another life she might have sung professionally in one of the opera’s she so adored. To this day when I hear certain arias, I have a desire to eat.

She never followed a recipe in her life. Her friends and daughters-in-laws often use to ask her how to cook certain dishes and she would duly write it down but there always seemed to be something missing for it never turned out like hers. My mother and my aunts thought it was a vanity of hers not ever giving out the recipe exactly but I now know it for something else. If you wanted to know how to cook the things she made; there was only one way. You needed to apprentice in her kitchen. You needed to learn how to compensate for the size of things, when to add more, when to add less, how to substitute this, for that.

Overall I have not done badly by learning to cook this way. Once a year I give a big sit-down dinner for friends based on my grandmother’s favourite comfort foods and they never refuse what is offered. At nine, my oldest son, came home from a play date at a friend’s house and asked me if I knew that you could buy soup in a can? I pretended to be shocked though I was smugly pleased when he announced that he didn’t like it. For him, Rosie lives on in food.

The problem with serving my apprenticeship in my grandmother’s kitchen is that I cannot follow a recipe as written. I always find myself thinking it needs this or that. So it never turns out quite like it is suppose too. Sometimes better and often not. Subsequently, I own very few cookbooks; mostly they have been gifts and gather dust on the bookshelf. I admire people who can write out a recipe exactly, and for others who persevere by sticking to the recipe as written. I lack my grandmother’s empathy for food and cannot cook anything I tasted just once. I can only cook what I learned in her kitchen. I think of it as a kind of dyslexia and resigned myself to only cooking what I learned 40 odd years ago. But lately I find myself restless and discontent for cooking what I know. For months now, I have been receiving notices about the Carnival of Recipes and I have duly followed the link and read through the recipes offered. I have often been tempted to try, but I chicken out in the end, though I like to think that my capacity for learning has not been stalled with my entrance into middle-age so I am taking the plunge and trying a few dishes that have been posted at the Carnival of Recipes. Caltechgirlsworld is hosting the latest Carnival, and this time; I am going to see if an old dog can learn a new trick.