The Sister Project is starting to write down its rules for sisterhood. Mine follow; Marion and Anastasia have some, too. We hope you’ll add to the list.
LET’S FACE IT–cooking is more fun when it’s done with a partner. I don’t mean a husband or a boyfriend, I mean a sister, one who likes the same flavors you do, is happy to skate back and forth between top chef and sous chef, one who will chop onions for you or remember to take out the roast while you run off for a bath or a quick battle with a family member.
These days, I don’t get to cook in tandem like this very often. When I first moved to Los Angeles, my then-roommates and I cooked together–a lot. Driven by grad-student poverty and a shared love of entertaining, with different specialties and wildly different heritages represented, we were able to feed everything from vegetarian chili to sweet potato pie to Japanese curry to crowds of friends.
After our happy household broke up, my cooking life dwindled, and certainly my ability to cook alongside a sister-friend disappeared, at least for a time. Then, without really thinking about it, my friend Chris and I began to cook together. I’m not even sure how our culinary partnership started (though I suspect it began in earnest when she moved into The New House With the Beautiful, Big Kitchen.) This was after marriage, and at the beginning of motherhood, and cooking together brought yet another dimension to an already-deep friendship.
Chris is the one who taught me about brisket, who endured my experiments in Passover baking, who would always tell me the truth about flavorless stock or gummy risotto. But mostly, we kept ourselves comforted and sane while we nursed babies, weathered professional tsunamis, rolled our eyes at spousal insensitivity and, whenever we could, laughed at everything, funny, or not.
And so, for Chris’s birthday, I decided a few years ago to put together a cooking class with a few of her dearest nearly-sisters. Four of us gathered at the home of adorable wunder-chef Tim, and under his tutelage we made divine cocktail-party food and drank champagne. One of the guests, Stacey, had been fighting breast cancer for almost six years. She wasn’t feeling great, but she managed to rally for her sister-friend, and she chortled and bitched and reveled with the rest of us.
As it turned out, that night was one of the last times Chris and Stacey really went out, one of the last times she was feeling well enough to just enjoy herself, before enduring months of a bitter, painful end. Chris was with her every single step of the way through her disease, and I like to think that the memory of that evening, spent stuffing endive leaves and drinking champagne, laughing together, stirring and sautéing in a sweet stranger’s apartment kitchen in L.A., is one of the good ones from that dark time.
For me, the memory of that evening, and all the other uncountable evenings Chris and I spent in her kitchen or mine, make clear the first rule of the Cooking Sisterhood: Laughter is not optional when cooking with your sister. You can cry while you’re laughing-that’s OK–but when you’re chopping, peeling, or beating, nothing is so sacred that it cannot be mined for humor, no matter how perverse, bleak or even tearful the laughs might be.
What are your rules for cooking with your sisters? Must there be wine, but no whine? Does anyone get to lick the bowl? Are there any recipe secrets between sisters? Chime in.
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Making food with someone else is very intimate. Two summers ago, I decided to have big cocktail party for all the people I had met in my first two years living in a small town. My city friend Lygeia, who is like a sister, offered to help with the food. We were making lots of simple canapes–tenderloin of beef on baguette rounds with horseradish butter and smoked salmon on black bread with herb butter. We had to decide if you cut the ends off the black bread before or after you cover with butter and salmon. And then what do you do with the salmon scraps? And then my real sister showed up and the three of us would debate how to arrange the canapes on different trays. How should we arrange the crudites? And then we had to join forces on the peaches wrapped in prosciutto that my friend Jennifer said were the hit of her cocktail party earilier in the summer; we had to decide how big the peaches should be and if there should be toothpicks. This was the best part of the party which was a huge success. And that my real sister and my sister friend were acting like sisters (even though they’d only met twice before) was so gratifying and a bonding experience for us all
Dan–what a great story. I can see the three of you–even though I don’t know either of your “sisters.” Now–can you give us one of the recipes? And how did those peaches turn out? They sound delish.
Paige,
The peaches were divine—all the more delicious in light of my unfounded objections that they would turn brown before they were eaten up (they didn’t). Dan’s account of that wonderful afternoon is accurate and a lovely reminder that though it sometimes seems that we’re (I’m) toiling alone in obscurity for much of our days, there are the bright spots that make it all worthwhile. I loved your post, too. It makes me wish I could cook more often with all of my favorite people. Lygeia
It was August 2, and I got some great Hudson Valley peaches (i confess the prosciutto was from Costco but this was a party for more than 100) and we cut the small peaches in quarters and the larger ones in eighths and squireted some lemon juice on them before wrapping in the prosciutto. For the tenderloin (marinated according a Gourmet recipe with lots of black peppercorns) we mixed one of those heavenly French butters with prepared horseradish, but it was Lygiea who insisted that we decorate all 300 rounds with minced chives. She’s a bit of perfectionist with food which is one of the reasons I adore her.
What a beautiful story, Paige – and so true. Laughter in the kitchen is never optional.
Thanks, Marilyn. Your kitchen exploits certainly keep us all laughing (and thinking, and baking, and….)