It must be a spring afternoon. And I must be about six or seven as my grandmother watches me, as she often does while my parents are at work. I’m accustomed to staying alone, I adore playing in my own world, building worlds in my mind, and an empty house is a thrilling, wondrous playground for fantasies and adventure and I can easily amuse myself for hours, for days, without anything but my imagination, but this is one of those afternoons when my grandmother comes over to babysit. Yet that feels like the wrong description, as it feels more like we’re playing together, or that we’re friends, creating games in the living room on a warm day, rather than time that she’s on guard duty. Although I’m certain that there are demands that I dislike, for unwanted naps, for unwanted meals, for unwanted quiet, these afternoons still feel like playtime with a friend, a friend who I already almost match in height, a friend who tolerates endless card games, a friend who lets me watch gameshows, a friend who somehow comprehends the mysterious secrets of the kitchen.
And I do consider the kitchen a startling, peculiar room in our home, a room filled with puzzles—where plates inexplicably appear with sandwiches or chicken or eggs, where there are elaborate, hurried procedures to chop and burn and steam, where the entire room, from the cold fridge to the hot oven, seems incomprehensible. In the kitchen there are strange tools, pots, and jars, there’s a row of high cabinets that I can’t even reach, though neither can my grandmother. At least she comprehends the rows of little colored jars, all those bizarre, even troubling, spices and seasonings.
Whenever I stretch my neck and try to observe a meal’s preparation, straining to look over the counter, the pile of ingredients on the wood board that my parents splash into a boiling pot—onions, peppers, carrots, slices of greens—resemble, to my eye, a witch’s brew. I watch my mother stir a pot with a wooden spoon, the steam rising toward the low ceiling, misting the walls of our tiny kitchen. Or I watch her drop vegetables into a sizzling pan, telling me to open the door to silence the screaming smoke alarm. Maybe it’s soup, or a thick red sauce, or even something sweet, but I’m always befuddled by how the transformation occurs. What’s on my plate doesn’t match what we buy in the grocery store and I can’t figure out the process. Food feels enigmatic, unknowable, although I’m aware that my grandmother understands. I do know what I want—pasta, pizza, cake—but I can’t imagine, I can’t even fathom, how those meals, a thick sauce, a warm pizza, a chocolate cake, are created.
Nor can I imagine anything but our small kitchen, as I am too young to wonder about a different house, or a different city, to picture a different way of living in the world. The round table where I sit to eat eggs or oatmeal in the morning and where we bunch together to eat fresh corn or chicken in the evening is my only context for a meal—at my age everything in the kitchen is both mysterious and completely natural.
The most prominent sight is the mint-colored fridge, with its bowed, rounded front, and its large silver handle, which requires a jerk backward to open, almost like a hatch on a submarine. The wood cupboards smack closed with a thud if you aren’t careful, and, to my eye today, this kitchen appears dated, it’s a polarized snapshot of twentieth-century America, but it’s probably, to my grandmother’s eye, crammed with the latest technologies: there’s a microwave that she’s reluctant to use, and shelves that contain mixers, peelers, an endless array of little tools that I recognize but don’t understand. And all of it is tinted with a late afternoon light, a light that descends minute-by-minute while we’re in the kitchen, pulling long shadows across the slippery floor. The setting sun pierces through the blinds when I return from school and ignites that fridge and the cabinets and our faces with its glow.
Because my grandmother watches me at my parents’ house, she doesn’t possess the ease with which my mother and father move around the kitchen, so preparing a meal with her involves opening and closing a series of drawers, shuffling back and forth, checking twice for the right ingredients. Look over there for a little fork, she says, and I believe, in some ways, that we’re working together as explorers. I want to help and she’s perfectly willing to indulge my eagerness. I’m not supposed to grab knives or touch the knobs on the stove—although I have the sensation that if my parents opened the door, she, too, would be in trouble from the adult world, that her reluctance to use the microwave, her uncertainty about the kitchen, makes us equal.
In front of the stove there’s just enough room to squeeze one tiny grandmother and one growing grandson. I grip the oven handle, curious, eager, staring upward, as she twists the knob and the burner clicks, the flame jumping with a whoosh. She fills a steel pot and plops it down, scraping the stovetop grate. The flame climbs the side of the pot but she quickly turns the fire lower—it’s just the tiniest speck as she jiggles the pot, adjusting it, fiddling with the handle until she’s satisfied that it’s centered. From below, looking through her arms, there’s a precision to these movements. A correct way of filling the pot and holding it over the stove. It’s a process that seems reflexive, orderly, and I know that she’s doing something that she’s done countless times, but it still feels like we’re doing it together, that we’re both figuring it out.
Much like how I take the house for granted, the golden glow in the kitchen, as the only possible way of living in the world, I assume that this meal comes from her mind—I can’t imagine, I won’t even consider, the notion that it is a traditional meal, that it has been passed down, that the precision of her hands and her need for the correct ingredients and a precise sequence actually reveal a reliable, traditional recipe. In my mind, my grandmother, my mother, they don’t exactly know how to cook, because what I see, instead, from my perspective—close to the floor, still unable to see the counter—is that they have discovered cooking.
Look over there for a little fork, she tells me. I jiggle the drawer, yank it open, then hurry back. Should we add an egg? She holds a bowl steady, her eyes betraying a slight tension, as I tap the egg on the edge. Then I watch as she uses the fork to whisk it in a swishy, slushy beat. There’s pepper and salt and perhaps something more—as I think, writing now, that it must be thicker and contain, infuriatingly, ingredients that I can’t recall. She puts it out for me, pushes my chair too close to the table, and tells me to eat around the fence, which is her particular way of saying the edge, as this soup is best served hot.
It’s a simple and, I’ll admit, plain dish, one that I assumed she found ideal to get past that most perilous wilderness with a small child—when it’s too late for lunch but too early for dinner. I was probably around eleven the last time I ate what’s simply a runny egg in a tiny bit of water, though I eventually learned that Stracciatella is the Italian name for this soup, and that it usually comes with spinach—incidentally, my theory for why my grandmother’s version skipped this step is that you don’t typically feed a finicky child spinach for an afternoon snack if you want to remain friends.
When she prepares this meal for me the first time, I can’t see over the counter as the egg is dropped into the boiling water; but I do see over her shoulder, watching from behind and looking downward, when she prepares this meal for me the last time. Seeing as there are only two ingredients—in the version prepared for a fussy child—it isn’t quite a compliment to my culinary abilities that I understand the process as a child, though it feels profound and adult in the moment. And I still have the feeling that this, in some ways, is the first meal that I ever cooked.
My girlfriend and I often visited my Irish grandmother, whose cozy apartment was in town. My grandmother would bake fresh soda bread or cornbread from scratch. Ah, the wonderful aromas from her oven. And we’d sit, all three of us, around her table and delight in the food and banter. Many years later grandmother died, in her late nineties, with me and my parents beside her bed, holding her hand. Whenever I pick up the scent of bread or baked goods in the oven, it’s like her spirit pays me a loving visit. Your delightful post called up all these memories.
Beautiful. The Boy and the Egg.