In Nana's Kitchen

Tales from the table

An old box sits in the back corner of my closet. It’s been there for some time. Over the years it has been moved from house to house, waiting for the perfect shelf to display its contents.

When my grandmother Emily died in the early nineties I was given a box of old kitchen wares. Tin cake and bread molds. An old toaster with the black fabric electric cord that threatens to burn the house down with just the thought of plugging it in. A variety of old kitchen utensils and wooden spoons. These items where not fancy or modern back in their days of use, but they where working tools that helped with the job of feeding people. One wooden spoon is so worn down that it is barely recognizable as an actual spoon. When I was very young, in kindergarten or first grade I believe, my mother went on a retreat for the winter. A seminary where she explored the wave of eastern religion and meditation that was sweeping the country in the early seventies. In the winter of 1979 my brother and I lived with my grandmother, Emily, or Nana as we called her, in the small town of Keene Valley in upstate New York. Most of my memories from that winter revolved around sitting at, or on, a little table in Nana’s kitchen. It was cozy and warm.

Smells of something always baking perfumed the air as steam rose off the stove top from various pots and pans. This was long before the days of celebrity chefs and the food network. I don’t think there was a TV in the house, at least not that I remember. We spent our time out doors. Ice skating at the little rink that was set up next to the school or cross country skiing into the woods, spigots shoved into our pockets, searching for maple trees that we could tap as the weather began to warm. As the sap began to flow we would collect the buckets, dumping them into the giant pot on the stove. Nana would cook it down for days until we had a beautifully amber colored maple syrup to douse our pan fried corn cakes with. Nana could seemingly whip up a fresh batch of muffins, bread or a hearty soup in no time. She was a busy woman. Having gone to law school in her mid fifties, she spent her time representing an underserved population who would have otherwise been eaten up by a system that didn’t favor those without much money.

Cooking was just something she did because that’s what she had to do and had always done. Having raised five kids already at that point, making sure my brother and I where fed was a small part of her day. She was clean and efficient in the kitchen and never seemed to consider prepackaged food an option.

At such a young age I hadn’t considered, nor do I remember, thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up. At one point in high school I wanted to go too collage for environmental studies. Maybe I’d end up studying ecosystems or oceanography but that didn’t pan out. In my early twenties I still had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’d been working in restaurants since my teenage years because it was an easy job to get. I had never really thought of it as a career. Early on, one of my managers at a spot called “Round the Corner” had taught me how to relax into the pace of the kitchen. My first time running the grill was overwhelming and stressful. I stood there staring at the printer, spatula in hand, as it spit out one ticket after another, completely frozen. My manager watched as I began to panic. Just before I was about to go under he stepped in and calmly took the reins. Watch, he said. He methodically read off all the tickets and began to rearrange everything on the grill. He made it look so easy. Over time, with a lot of practice, I was able to achieve that state of flow, calmly executing whatever the printer could spit at me. By my early twenties I was the fastest guy in the kitchen. I could step in and dig the kitchen out of the weeds no matter how bad things had gotten. One day I was asked to step out of my line cook box and make a soup. Everything changed, seemingly overnight. I made a tomato-bread soup. I’m not sure where I got the idea. It may have been a cook book or a magazine. The internet was not really a thing yet. I may have used a recipe or just done what felt right. I remember my kitchen manager telling me that parsley was my friend. The soup came out pretty good but I knew right away that I had used too much dried herbs. From that day on I began to play with my food. Within a year I knew, without a doubt, that cooking was going to be my career. After five years in a kitchen I finally realized that I was good at this. I had made the leap from being a line cook that assembled things that other people cooked, to the actual cook. I began reading cook books and asking a lot of questions. I still ask a lot of questions 35 years later. Every day in the kitchen still feels like a new adventure, like I’m cooking for the first time.

I often wonder how I got to this place. Did the smells and tastes of Nana’s kitchen guide me to where I am today? Perhaps they did. I do know that the comfort and love that I felt in her kitchen made me feel safe and secure. The passion I have for food was certainly influenced by what my grandmother and mother did in the kitchen, the care they put into each meal. I can still tap into that childlike wonder when tasting something for the first time. These days I am clean and efficient as I prepare a meal for my teenagers. I do believe that Nana’s spirit guides me in the kitchen and hope it brings my boys the same type of comfort and security I felt as a kid. It may be time to dust off the old box in the back corner of my closet and build the shelf.