family relationships Archives - Page 2 of 2

Image courtesy of Josua De on Unsplash.

At every breakfast I had as a child in Koprivshtitsa, my grandparents insisted that I had my cup full of milk. The milk came directly from the barn of one of my grandmother’s close acquaintances. It was unpasteurized and non-homogenized, and my grandparents boiled it twice to minimize the risk of getting sick. No communist factory had messed this milk up. It had not been watered down or processed to kill contamination. Neither had it been forced through tubes, poured into dull-looking plastic packaging and sealed shut, so that a grumpy seller could slam down this product of the communist economy in front of a customer, addressing him or her as “comrade.” A comrade who might as well have been number 57 in line. Five more customers served and the rest of the comrades waiting would be turned away to head home empty-handed.

Image courtesy of Lobosstudio Hamburg on Unsplash

My grandmother used garlic in the same way other cooks use salt in their cooking. I never had the honor of cooking with her. However, she is the person whom I have spent years observing in the kitchen. I was captivated by the swift and rhythmic movements of her hands while she was chopping, crushing, tearing, mixing, folding in, pouring, kneading and rolling out. As a child, I found the unwavering certainty of her gestures reassuring. She didn’t use recipes but followed an innate sense of which one and how much of an ingredient she should use in a certain dish. Now I am humbled by the reliability of her memory, which held an impressive repertoire of dishes, along with the ingredients and exact sequence of steps necessary to prepare them. I cook a lot and often discover that if I don’t pencil down in my cookbooks the changes I have made to a recipe, the next time I want to make it, I oftentimes pause in uncertainty trying to recall what worked so well the time before.

Food with a Slice of History

Tag: family relationships

Milk

On watching my grandmother cook and liking her stories but not her food