Cooking in Your Kitchen

It was a lovely day—warm with a spring breeze—and both Tony and Ron were out. I was alone in your kitchen, foraging for ingredients to make something for dessert later. To take our minds off of things. It was a Sunday and the conditioned impulse to have something extra for Sunday dinner was taking over. Though, I’ve never been religious. Scanning the cupboards and fridge, there wasn’t much to work with, certainly no fresh fruit (or frozen, for that matter), and at the time I didn’t know about the small trove of apricots and pears canned in sweet syrup in the basement (oh, had I known!). Fruit you had canned—with care or worry, painstakingly, or perhaps absent-mindedly, letting hands take over a task they had performed how-many-dozens of times. I’d never know.

My preliminary survey yielded the necessary ingredients for a batch of mildly-flavored biscotti (anise and almond, no oranges to provide their brightening zest) and a simple chocolate chip coffee cake. The biscotti came together well enough, but upon tasting after the initial bake, I found something to be...off. What was it? My palate was certainly missing the roundness that citrus would have afforded, and maybe I could have amped up the almond extract, but something tasted unfamiliar and artificial. Replacing various ingredients on their shelves and pondering the possible sources of my disappointment in what is usually my favorite kind of cookie, I saw it—imitation vanilla, and a very old bottle by the looks of it.

I reopened the small plastic bottle and tentatively inhaled. A scent that was most definitely charading as vanilla pervaded my olfactory receptors. It was pseudo-sweet smelling, yet flat, and conjured laboratory scenes to mind. I replaced the bottle skeptically on the tightly ordered shelf of fading spices and thought well, what’s done is done. Just like the imitation extract was a failed approximation at the idea of vanilla, I would at least enjoy the idea of Italian cookies with my coffee the next morning.

On to the coffee cake. I mised out the dry ingredients, portioned butter to cream with the sugar, cracked the eggs and then began measuring out the sour cream. I had excavated the latter from the back of the fridge, and, noting the month-old use-by date, I scanned the tub’s contents and figured it would probably still be fine. There wasn’t any visible mold, and the texture looked intact. How much more sour could it get? The remnants of the container proved a little short, so I compensated with some blessedly full-fat vanilla Greek yogurt (deciding that the vanilla flavor in the yogurt seemed more unadulterated than the imitation extract, I nixed the vanilla called for by the recipe).

Ready to cream, I pulled the beaters for a hand-held mixer out of a catch-all utensils drawer. I have a Kitchenaid stand mixer at home and hadn’t used a hand-held since the days of baking as a kid with my mother. Remembering scenes of the chocolate apocalypse that always descended after making THE chocolate cake—the only time my mother’s kitchen wasn’t spotless—I began questing for the mixer body.

Pawing through the lower cabinets—bins of extra flour, coffee, and an approximate lifetime’s worth of croutons—I tried to imagine where you would have kept it. It was strange to think that, in the three times that I’d met you, I’d never known you here, in your kitchen. I knew you had baked often, though undoubtedly less so in your last two years, cancer having robbed you of the ability to eat solid foods. Tony had told me that, despite being on a solely liquid diet, just three months prior you had made him and Ron a full Christmas spread, including dessert. So, you likely used the mixer at Christmas. Think, I ordered myself. It had to be close at hand.

Every home cook worth her salt maintains some personal system of organization, and although the large kitchen table was a cluttered heap of papers, books, newspapers and magazines, files, and extra dishes, not two feet away were your spices standing in tidy rank upon shelves, as orderly as an army brigade. Several glass jars were labeled with your own script, the unhurried, tempered cursive of a seasoned teacher. Searching high and low in every cramped and overstuffed cabinet, shelf or drawer in sight (which was a considerable amount), I was just about defeated when Tony and Ron walked into the kitchen.

Relieved, I recruited them to aid in my search. Ron expanded the perimeter, checking the basement, his vocal expressions of doubt that the mixer would turn up drifting up the stairs. Tony rechecked the crowded shelves overhead and cabinets on the far side of the kitchen. No luck. When Ron came back upstairs, I could tell my project was starting to cause more stress than it was worth. “I know it’s here,” he said, sighing, as he slumped into a chair, his face stricken, eyes lost. “I should have paid more attention. She was always the one in the kitchen…” Hearing him trail off into despair, I put on my best reassuring voice and said not to worry about it, I could make the cake by hand.

Inwardly, of course, I was crestfallen. The butter and sugar will never get enough loft from hand mixing, I thought. Still, I whisked and whisked. Luckily, after all the time I’d spent searching, the butter was plenty soft. While the lactic acid mounted in my forearms from my fiendish whisking, Tony kept poking around the shelves. And then, all of a sudden from behind a gaggle of dust-covered coffee mugs, inches from where I’d been standing, he unearthed the mixer! I’d already started adding the eggs and sour cream so I had my doubts about the effectiveness the mixer would provide at this point. Still, I dutifully loaded the beaters and mixed in the remaining wet ingredients and then the dry. After spreading half the batter in the pan, adding a cinnamon-sugar layer (admittedly, a startling amount) then dolloping out the remaining batter, I slid the cake—with a silent prayer—into the oven to bake.

At this point in the trip, I’d gotten to know the quirks of the old gas oven; it took forever to preheat and cooked at a glacial pace, so I tacked on five minutes to the timer, one of the little wind-up clock-face types (but knowing the cake would almost certainly need more). When I commented on the sluggish oven, Tony consented, “Yeah, mom used to complain about that, too.” At these words, I finally acknowledged the presence of all those strange feelings that had been quietly hovering just below my consciousness throughout the morning. That feeling of wearing someone else’s clothes, of driving a borrowed car. Of inhabiting, ever so temporarily, the essence of another’s life. What precious, or trivial, insights was I being granted by simply going through the motions of your days?

Later that evening while making dinner, we decided that it was past time to use the cabbage that was perfuming the fridge. To Tony and Ron, the question of “what to do with the cabbage?” seemed simple: Cabbage and Ramen Salad. When met with my blank look, Tony explained that you used to make this all the time and he seemed to especially associate the dish with summer picnics in the nearby state park. “Do you know the recipe?” I asked. “I’m sure mom has it here,” Tony said, pulling a small dark green metal recipe box from a nearby shelf. Leafing through the index cards, Tony’s movements slowed, taking in the title of each recipe he passed. At “Poppyseed Cake” he stopped. “You’ve gotta learn to make this,” he sighed. “Mom used to make it for everyone’s birthday, but really she got it from Dad’s mom.” A few cards later, he paused again, “This shit is sad.” Pressing my cheek into his shoulder and rubbing his back, I steered him on to the cabbage salad.

We’d brought along a few of our own provisions, so while I handled cooking soba noodles and sauteeing some mushrooms, I suggested Tony take a stab at making the Cabbage and Ramen Salad recipe:

Cabbage Salad w/ Ramen Noodles

¼-½ head cabbage 1 TBL sugar

½ c. sunflower seeds a few flakes of black pepper

1 pkg. Ramen noodles seasoning pkt from noodles

½ c. oil 2 TBL soy sauce

1/3c. vinegar

Shred cabbage and add sunflower seeds. Mix together oil, vinegar, sugar, pepper, seasoning, and soy sauce. Pour over cabbage and stir together. Crush noodles and mix into cabbage just before serving.

As we assembled the ingredients, I stifled the urge to see if there was any sesame oil in the house to toss in, or rice vinegar since the type of vinegar was unspecified, or substitute red pepper flakes for black. I also thought that sunflower seeds, over say peanuts, was an interesting choice, but again deferred to the recipe. Even if my desire to tweak had won out, there weren’t peanuts anyway.

As I started chopping mushrooms, I heard muted sawing from across the kitchen as Tony started in on the cabbage with the box-grater. Abruptly, the sawing stopped. “The cabbage is way too fine like this, I think she must have chopped it.” As the uncontested cook in our house, I, reflexively, called back, “The recipe says to shred the cabbage.”

“Nope, the pieces are definitely too small with the grater, I’m going to chop it fine.” And with that, I realized that in this case, my opinion was no match for the edifying power of memory. Of course I had no concept for what the cabbage should be like. I’d never seen or tasted the salad. My sense memories did not include the experience of eating crisp, cool cabbage outside at the state park on the waning end of a hot summer’s day; I had no associations with how the vinegary tang and subtle sweetness mixed with the fragrance of dusk, a breeze lilting up from the languid Missouri River that frames the park to the north. At a certain point, the culmination of flavors and memories outweighs the sum of ingredients listed on a page, and the enjoyment of a dish, no matter how far into the future, forever rests on the accumulated experiences of having enjoyed it before.

. . .

Even though you were the oldest of 12 siblings, there were only ten of us at the funeral—COVID-mandated gathering-size restrictions in the bizarre reality of March 2020. The weather felt fittingly solemn, muted and gray, as our small group gathered in the cemetery. In addition to feeling the sadness of the day, I was also nervous: you had written part of the eulogy, Ron the other, as a dialogue to be read aloud, the perspectives of a wife and husband, mother and father. Two voices from the same life. Tony would be reading Ron, his father’s portion and I would be reading yours.

The eulogy was long—11 pages!—and, for most of it, the focus required to deliver your words clearly took all of my attention, such that their meaning passed over me. But by the end, after I’d found my rhythm, the gravity of the task started to seep in. The weight of being your voice raised the hair on my arms and my voice faltered as I spoke the last words you wanted to share, expressing how you’d felt after learning that your cancer had become untreatable:

“The news overwhelmed me with a great sense of relief and sense of peace. I was suddenly prepared to focus only on myself and take care of me. I had been taking care of others all my life and was tired.

Now I could ‘be’ and nothing more. I strived all my life to grow and reach the moment of release with a sense of dignity. I hope that is what has happened. I do not regret the path I followed—it was the one offered to me, and I think I followed it as best I could.”

. . .

When the cake was done, I took it out of the oven and set it on the stovetop to cool while Tony, Ron and I ate dinner. The residual heat from the oven and buttery aroma quickly filled the small space. We might have talked about the news, the pandemic’s uncertainty was never far from the headlines, but probably we didn’t say much. After clearing the dinner dishes, we cut slices of the cake onto fresh plates. I was glad that it wasn’t too dry and had, in the end, turned out pretty well—the chocolate lending its deep richness to the soft, mild crumb. In the face of grief, a cake on Sunday isn’t very much at all. But for a few moments, we shared something sweet and warm, after an evening of cooking in a kitchen where you would always live.

In memory of Elizabeth Krupicka (5/23/1948 - 2/20/2020)