Heirloom

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.