I have been cooking since I was seven years old.
Not the way children cook, with the supervised measuring and the standing on a step stool to reach the counter and the specific narrowness of tasks assigned to small hands, cracking eggs, stirring batter, adding the pinch of salt at the exactly right moment.
I mean real cooking.
The kind that feeds people.
The kind that requires you to hold several things in your head at once, to know that the onions need another four minutes and the stock needs to reduce and the bread will be ready when it sounds hollow and the timing of all three needs to be managed simultaneously or the whole thing falls apart.
I learned this from my grandmother Rosa, who had been cooking for large groups since she was a girl in Portugal and who believed, with the specific conviction of someone who has fed people their whole life, that feeding people was one of the most important things a person could do.
She said: when you put food in front of someone, you are telling them they matter.
She said: the quality of the food is not the point.
She said: the point is the attention.
She said: the care.
She said: you can make something simple and have it be one of the most loving things you have ever done.
She said: or you can make something elaborate and have it mean nothing at all.
She said this many times over the years.
I understood it better as I got older.
I understood it best three weeks ago, at four in the morning, standing on one crutch in my kitchen with a broken leg, making appetizers and main dishes and desserts and cocktails for thirty guests at my husband’s fortieth birthday party while he was asleep upstairs.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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