Stories Have Roots
The most wonderful thing
about reading my grandmother’s cookbook is discovering snippets of stories that
include my dad/great-uncles/grandfather, some of whom I knew only a short time,
others not at all. A tale about my great Uncle Jack-o and his brothers being
outfitted in sailor suits for a proper photograph; references to a ‘prep-school
type’ who lives with her - my fifteen-year-old dad; a Nova Scotia family recipe
adopted – then refined - by her mother in Ottawa. Little glimpses into her personal
life which I treasure like artifacts dug from the past, help me come to know a
woman by whom I am not only intrigued but with whom I am coming to identify,
even to love.
When she alludes to one
of my father’s favorite childhood poems, A.A. Milne’s The King’s Breakfast, and
the fact that his majesty did like a little bit of butter for his
bread, well…I am swept back in time, listening to that formerly little boy,
now a parent, reading bedtime poems to me, then remembering reading
those poems to my own children, sharing with them something from my childhood,
something from my dad’s. Maybe something from my grandmother’s, too. My
grandmother’s reflections remind me of time’s ephemeral yet eternal nature, of
how generations of families can be grounded in stories that hang somehow
suspended in time.
When those stories are in
some way connected to the cottage where she and my dad and I and my kids each
summered every year as children, I greedily eat them up, poring over and over
her references to people and places I know so well: neighbors Bessie and Julia
Burwash, who shared their secret recipe for lemon syrup with favorites like the
Armstrongs; Wagonblast’s butcher shop in Arnprior where the Sunday roast could
be purchased; the little Marshall’s Bay train station, where cottagers arrived each
weekend for happy times playing clock golf on the lawn, reading on the hill and
picnicking at the beach. I also discover a woman previously unknown to me except
as some sort of mythical being, a sad-eyed woman in still photos, smiling
enigmatically out at the world, a smile which prompted the naming of their
sailboat, the Smiling Jane. A new figure in my life, suddenly very real, who is
exuberantly alive, generous, funny, and beautiful, complicated, loving, and
smart.
One of the stories my
grandmother tells with fond amusement has to do with my great-grandmother Emily
and an old butternut tree that once stood at the edge of the property; the
story has become a bit of family lore, one my mother loved to relate, the
details of which I am astonished to learn are mostly accurate. The grand old
tree central to the tale has since been lost to disease, but in its heyday
produced oodles of fruit which, one especially productive summer, Emily instructed
her children to gather, picking up as many baskets of the sticky, green,
lemon-shaped nuts as they could. These, she was determined to pickle. Just the
way one would a walnut, of course, instructions the author rather wryly quotes
her mother’s as giving, hinting archly at a somewhat less than successful
outcome.
The tale is too long to
relate in its entirety here – turn to p.102 in Cooking With a Grain of Salt for
the complete version - but here’s how she opens the anecdote: A tendency to
experiment with food can apparently be inherited, like buck teeth or dementia
praecox. I often think of Mother as I quietly put the result of one of my more
imaginative efforts in the step-on-it tin below the sink. Mother was a terrible
cook but her spirited interest in the creation of food never forsook her. While
I seem to have dodged both an overbite and a schizophrenic personality, the
same cannot be said of a tendency toward editorializing, as you may have observed.
And although it's not every reader’s cup of tea, I am more than delighted each
time I recognize my own writerly impulses in my grandmother’s work,
particularly when I am writing to amuse or instruct, the art of which she was a
master. Then there’s my love speaking directly to you, dear reader when telling
stories. And finally, there’s the fact that while the first matriarch was reported
to be a terrible cook, the rest of us are pretty good ones.
Five generations of women
have fed their families and produced pickles every summer in the same
unremarkable, often unworkable kitchen for more than a century. Talk about loving
to cook, successfully or otherwise! My
grandmother continues the story of that summer by explaining:
We didn’t get off to the
cottage till very late that summer, but by the first of August Mother had us
all collecting butternuts. They were large and hard and sticky and we collected
a great many, being paid by the quart. Then mother got to work and the cottage
reeked of vinegar for many days….it was discovered that in spite of the care
spent to them no human tooth could make any impression on them, were
invulnerable to anything but the blow of a hammer. Mother by this time had lost
the recipe, and most of her interest in them, but felt sure it had said
something about letting them stand of the winter, to mellow. So when we closed
the cottage we left them mellowing.
Apparently, filling the cottage
kitchen with the acrid scent of burnt sugar, then filling mason jars with
pounds of preserved peaches each summer is simply part of a long-standing
tradition in my family, albeit one that many friends wonder at my determination
to continue, especially during the dog days of summer. Despite the hindrances
of cooking in that place and at that time, I honestly look forward to repeating
the process, year after year. The neighbors gush over the gifts, and, of
course, I love telling the stories, as you may remember.
The best part of the tale
comes at the end: The following summer, hard as ever, we buried them quietly
in the woods. Mother was far from downcast. I still admire a memorandum written
in her own distinguished hand with a pencil the pine sheeted kitchen wall.
“Pick butternuts before July 15th for sure”, it reads. Finally,
I understand my mother’s determined search for butternut saplings in the forest.
Now, I long to discover on which wall my great-grandmother wrote that advisory.
My daughter suggested we, too, add notes of instruction for family recipes on
the kitchen walls: choose a cool day for marmalade; *NB no one likes creamed
corn; keep nuts in sealed jars! Words to remember. Words that make
connections and tell stories.
Sarah Prospero
Sarah
Christie Prospero lives and writes in Almonte, mostly memoir, and is happy
to be realizing at last a long-held dream to be doing exactly as she pleases -
most of the time, that is. Sarah’s work has previously been published in the
Globe and Mail’s First Person, in Canadian Stories,
on CBC’s Sunday Edition, in the on-line magazine Story
Quilt, as well as in Ariel Chart.