Food Memoirs
The following essay won the "Best Culinary Essay" Award from Saveur.
The essay, "Serious Food: In the Kitchen with Grandma," details the very emotional and nostalgic elements of cooking, while highlighting generational differences in really funny ways.
You'll have to go to actual blog post to read it, as the embedded photos are golden, but I'll give you a sneak peak:
When Mom and I arrive at Grandma’s the following afternoon, we find her in full lady-locks swing. We’ve brought her a couple of leftover slices of pizza from lunch, but she’s so busy that she takes a slice and just keeps going. (The detail that she places the box with the remaining slice atop the oversized pot of boiled cauliflower, which I now feel well acquainted with—after all, it’s right next to my friends, the plastic-wrapped black bananas—is not lost on me.) She takes a bite, scoots past the kitchen island, pulls open the refrigerator door with the non-pizza hand and announces that she has been adding Crisco to the lady-locks dough with regularity since 7 a.m. and that it now only needs one final dousing. She pulls out the chilled dough and hands it to me. It seems to have almost doubled in size.
“Wow, that’s a lot of Crisco!” I say...
...She takes another bite of her drooping pizza slice and with her free hand, begins shedding the dough of its plastic wrap. Because, Grandma, and here is where I’m suddenly struck with the real lesson in all of this: Grandma doesn’t think that Crisco is funny. Not only that, but you know what? Grandma doesn’t think that food in general is funny. Because historically, it hasn’t been.
The essay, "Serious Food: In the Kitchen with Grandma," details the very emotional and nostalgic elements of cooking, while highlighting generational differences in really funny ways.
You'll have to go to actual blog post to read it, as the embedded photos are golden, but I'll give you a sneak peak:
When Mom and I arrive at Grandma’s the following afternoon, we find her in full lady-locks swing. We’ve brought her a couple of leftover slices of pizza from lunch, but she’s so busy that she takes a slice and just keeps going. (The detail that she places the box with the remaining slice atop the oversized pot of boiled cauliflower, which I now feel well acquainted with—after all, it’s right next to my friends, the plastic-wrapped black bananas—is not lost on me.) She takes a bite, scoots past the kitchen island, pulls open the refrigerator door with the non-pizza hand and announces that she has been adding Crisco to the lady-locks dough with regularity since 7 a.m. and that it now only needs one final dousing. She pulls out the chilled dough and hands it to me. It seems to have almost doubled in size.
“Wow, that’s a lot of Crisco!” I say...
...She takes another bite of her drooping pizza slice and with her free hand, begins shedding the dough of its plastic wrap. Because, Grandma, and here is where I’m suddenly struck with the real lesson in all of this: Grandma doesn’t think that Crisco is funny. Not only that, but you know what? Grandma doesn’t think that food in general is funny. Because historically, it hasn’t been.
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