I was standing at the kitchen sink today, washing and rinsing
out my blue Le Crueset pot when my mind wandered back to my nana’s kitchen, around 1975. She was making my favorite
dinner-which was some kind of baked chicken that no one else knew how to make. It sounds so simple, baked chicken, but she
did something secretive that made it really stand out. My mom had a few theories about what it might
be. She claimed it was the generous
amounts of butter my nana used. That
explanation held little weight, however, when my mom tried to recreate it
herself on Monday nights many years later.
I would complain that it just never tasted the same. On those evenings, she blamed the chicken
itself. She pointed out that chickens
had changed through the years and no longer were they the free roaming ones of
the 70’s when the taste matched their liberty.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t try to get to the bottom of things
myself. In fact, on my nana’s deathbed,
I pressed the issue. A few minutes
before she took her last breath, I took the plunge and just asked her straight
out about her secret. Of course, I felt very awkward asking at that moment,
wrestling with the decision a little too long.
When I finally got up the nerve to ask, she was already drifting off,
and only just sighed when I at last blurted out the words-- as if I should have
known better. I still hold a fair amount
of guilt that I didn’t say something more meaningful in those last
moments. But I was still on the youngish
side and I had heard that common phrase
“she took the recipe to her grave” so often that I was just trying to
prevent more lost information. My nana
never wasted anything, she was too practical for that. I still remember
the rinsed out plastic bags hanging by the sink. Why should this have been any different?
When it was time to clean out her house my mom was
responsible for making sure everyone had something to keep. I was still in college but my mom would
relay her weekly progress to me. One
cousin got the silver, another the dining room rug. The rocking chair struggled to find a home.
Eventually, most of the odds and ends of a long-lived life found their way into
other people’s lives. On one particular
day, my mom called to let me know she was saving me the chicken pot. I sensed some earnestness in her voice that
conveyed to me the significance of this.
I later determined it was, in fact, her ultimate theory as to why my
nana succeeded where others had failed.
It turns out that a simple pot holds quite a bit of potential. It is a link to childhood; to relationships, to time and place of being. The blue pot I washed today, for instance, is the host to many savored meals--among them turnip soup and sourdough bread. This pot will be responsible for the vivid memories of warmth, taste and love. I will wash it well.
