One Million Times

I watched my grandmother cook a million times.

She’d bake bread when she could have bought it. It’s what she’d always done. And weren’t we happier for it? I always marveled at how she could knead the dough with her frail arms. I tried, many times, and each time my arms gave out before the gluten could bond. She made wheat bread, rye bread, refrigerator rolls, potato loaf, and focaccia and sourdough and pumpernickel. Richness of the dark grains, light break of the crust, the structure so dense it seemed to defy logic that butter melted so well into its grained web. These bread recipes were all captured in a little black notebook.

There were other dishes in her little black book. Dust bowl recipes (bean soup and onion sandwiches), low-country recipes (watermelon and krullers), mid-century recipes (frosty lime Jello salad with pineapple, cucumber and heavy cream). When other grandmothers were keeping their treasured concoctions in their heads and giving wistful instructions like add a little of this and bake, without saying how long or at what temperature, or entrusting their recipes in stout wooden boxes on 3x5 cards with shaky handwriting, my grandmother kept her kitchen spells in a book. All her recipes, all her mother’s recipes, all the recipes from the ancient tribe of our family's women were in that black book. I was sure of it. Closed up, held tight with a band that secured its pages and their secrets. Off limits to all.

Corners crusted with flour and lard, pages spotted with splashes of chicken stock, the binding smelled like Sunday supper. She wouldn’t let anyone look at it. We weren’t even allowed to touch it. It sat on a shelf, next to a tin canister of flour. She never opened it. She knew every recipe by heart. I watched her, one million times, put a teaspoon of soda, a squeeze of a large lemon, a cup of breadcrumbs into a bowl, the same amounts in the same order, like she was reading down a list of instructions.

I asked her once why she never checked the recipe, why she never had to look in that little black book. She said, once you’ve mastered a dish, you didn’t need a recipe. You know by smell when its ready to come out of the oven; you can see with your eyes when you’ve fried to a perfect brown; your fingers will feel the right tension in the dough; your ears will hear the perfect heat of the sugar. The food becomes part of you and more than words on a page.

I helped her cook one million times. Together we created heaping dishes, meals wrapped in history, sweets dipped in honey, tables full of food for family, friends and others. Year-upon-year we cooked side-by-side, steam and knowledge, spices and the order of things, seeping in like yeast in warm milk.

It led me to become a chef, self-taught, but a chef, nonetheless. Cooking with her, chopping and stirring and frying and baking had also inspired a dream to open my own restaurant. I wanted to cook her food, our family’s food, and share it others to give them a sense of home and warmth and a meal that put both together on a plate. I didn’t have the money to open my own kitchen, but I didn’t think that was most important. If only I could get her recipes, everything else would fall in place. For the one millionth time I wished for that book.

Illness swept through the house this summer. It knocked our numbers down, didn’t touch others, and took one away. Grandmother was gone. We were struck, of course, but her lose was made harder by losing our sense of taste and smell. We worried we might never get it back. We thought maybe it was a curse, one of those German-grandmother, laying-on-her-death-bed, not-able-to-speak-her-last-words curses placed on us for eating fast food, and skipping Sunday meals, and buying bread in long plastic bags.

What if we didn’t get the taste back? What if we couldn’t smell bread baking again. What if fairy pie and molasses cookies never made sense like they did after those large family suppers we had on one million Sundays?

We did, of course, get back our senses. She wouldn’t have loved us so little that the curse would last forever.

The illness took grandmother; I took the little black book. Others wanted it, but I said I’d earned it. One million moments cooking at her side; taking in her gospel lessons as I snapped green beans and slivered almonds; fingers learning the best way to skin persimmons and pit apricots; smelling when banana loaf when was crisp around the edges and ready.

I didn’t open the book until I was alone. I stood by the stove, peeled off the elastic band and opened it to the first page. It was blank. Page after page, blank. I was confused. Did I grab the wrong book? No, I could tell by the pebbled black cover permeated with olive oil and salt. I knew it was her book.

Then I saw a rounded corner, just slightly curled. I turned to a middle page. A check for $20,000, made out to me from my grandmother’s estate, slipped out and landed on the counter. I looked at it a long time before I looked again at the page. Written in her clear hand: You don’t need recipes. Cook from your heart one million times.