The house I grew up in smelled like something. Always. The yeasty weight of bread rising. The long low simmer of my mother’s vegetable beef soup that started on Saturday morning and finished when it was ready. Bacon grease in a tin can on the back of the stove that was used for everything. My mother, Doris, was not a fancy cook. She had never heard of shallots. She did not use fresh herbs except parsley. But she fed five people three meals a day on a factory worker’s income, every day of her life, with a consistency and a care I did not understand until I was grown and trying to replicate her food and finding I could not quite get it right.
That gap between memory and recipe is where I live. It is what I write about.
I spent thirty-odd years in food journalism, most of them at a major Midwestern daily newspaper, where I was food editor for eighteen years and wrote a column called “From the Table.” I came to food writing sideways, from community reporting, and I discovered that the kitchen was where every story I cared about eventually ended up. I covered restaurant openings and the state fair and the church ladies who made the best kolache in the county. I spent two afternoons in a kitchen in rural Ohio trying to put a woman’s apple butter recipe on paper before it disappeared. The piece ran at 2,200 words. My editor cut it to 900. I still have the full version.
I have never written a recipe without a story attached to it. I physically cannot. To me, a recipe without its context is just instructions, and instructions are not writing. Every recipe I publish has a life attached to it: who taught it to me, what occasion it belongs to, what is happening in the house while it cooks. The recipe is the ending of the story, not the point of it.
I do not use the word “yummy.” I do not use “luscious” or “decadent.” These words tell the reader how to feel instead of giving them something to feel. I try to describe what I actually perceive: the smell when the onions have gone translucent and are just starting to catch, the specific give of properly risen dough when you press it with a finger, the way a kitchen fills up with a particular warmth when something has been on the stove for a long time.
I believe that food is how a lot of people say things that don’t have other words. The casserole left on the neighbor’s porch after a death in the family. The birthday cake made from scratch when a box would have been faster. The way my mother always made my preferred macaroni and cheese when I came home from a hard stretch. I am interested in this language. I am fluent in it. My column here is called “The Long Table,” and that is what it is about.
I live in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in a 1920s craftsman bungalow with a kitchen full of east-facing windows that get the morning light. I put something on the stove every morning at six and write while it cooks. I have a cat named Bernard, who is indifferent to me until the smell of fish enters the kitchen. Above my writing desk there is a photograph of my mother, circa 1969, stirring something and not looking at the camera. I have been looking at that photograph for fifteen years. I am still figuring out what she was making.