Why We Write (About Food)

Joe Forte's artwork just about sums me up.

A FEW DAYS BACK, my (internet/have never met her in person, yet feel like she’s a part of my dysfunctional family) friend, lovely Marilyn of Simmer Till Done, asked me to chime in with a guest post on her blog. The assignment was simple: food & memory. I pinged her back (this whole convo, of course, was over Twitter) and said I’d LOVE to be a part of her blog (it rocks) but that my initial, stream-of-consciousness response to the assignment was pretty dark. “I’m cool with dark,” was her reply (or something like that) and so I was off to the memory races.

I wrote about my nearly first food memory, which is vivid, and somewhat shocking, and yet, not entirely negative. (My very first food memories involve Slim Jims, and that seemed a little lowbrow for Miss Simmer.) I worried about what my mother would think: this story, after all, is hers more than mine, and she has always been sensitive about revealing her health history to others.

On the other hand, no one has been more encouraging to me in my embrace of a writing life than my mother, and so surely, she must realize that the peril of encouraging family members to put fingers to keyboard is that their stories will become yours, will be filtered through your lens (tough) and shared willy-nilly with a world of strangers, and perhaps worse, non-strangers (tougher).

When I wrote about the great pie fight, my mother told me a few days later (after the crust had cooled, so to speak) that she liked what I had written: It was both funny and accurate. In truth, I think that what I wrote helped patch up our rift.

This was a relief, but there was still a large (crusty?) elephant in the room: When I wrote that post for Marilyn, I “neglected” to send the link to my mom, or even mention it.

I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about my telling this particular story, and yet: I didn’t want to not share it, so I took the approach I think of as the 4-Year-Old Child/Small Animal strategy: If I don’t see you/tell you, you don’t see me/know what I’m up to. (At 43, I should no doubt have moved past such behavior. What can I say? Recognizing the problem is the first step to recovery, no?)

This morning, while I was (what else?) making breakfast and packing camp lunches for my kids, my mother came down to the kitchen. “Simmer ’til done,” she said, looking right at me. (Have I mentioned that she almost never ventures into the kitchen during the early morning chaos?)

“Excuse me?”

“The blog. Simmer Till Done. You wrote a post?”

“Oh. You saw it. I was afraid to tell you about it.” I’m pretty sure I trailed off, but she didn’t look away.

“It wasn’t chicken curry; it was lamb. And the worst thing? I never made it again after that.”

While my mother’s assertion that the worst consequence of a major stroke at age 34 was failure to ever again cook lamb curry seems disingenuous at worst and incredibly optimistic at best, her willingness to talk about this period amazed me. We are pretty close, she and I, though we drive each other nuts: I am much too impatient with her, and she still likes to tell me what to do (correction: she makes a lot of suggestions.)

But close or no, if I’d never put those words down, I might never have known it was lamb, not chicken, that fateful night. I would certainly not have learned that she started experimenting with Indian-influenced meals in the early 1950’s because of a family friend whose adventurous cooking encouraged my mother to branch out herself. And we wouldn’t have concocted a plan to begin searching through her collection of bound volumes of Gourmet magazine, dating back to the late 1940’s, searching for that long-lost lamb curry recipe. (She’s pretty sure it’s pre-1955.) We may just make it again, and if we do, you can be sure I will write about it.
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The art up top says it (almost) all about me…and was made by the husband of a dear sister-friend.

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