Family Recipes
Alyssa D. Ross Waiting for the Yeast to Rise Summer called for baked bread and preserves. Berries everywhere, engorged on the vine, the sun feeding them full and sweet. I’m in the backyard picking muscadines and blackberries, prickling off the dissolving fence. My grandmother, kneading dough, calls me into the floral kitchen to smell steam rising off the vats of fruit. She sets a bowl with a floured mound in the center. We knead together until we each have a glossy, yellow ball. “Reshape it into a loaf, a bit rectangular, like this,” she says, patting her hands back and forth. I copy her, then we wait. Grandmother’s Cheese Wafers It’s a rainy December and I can’t bring myself to look in the mirror or write anything meaningful, so I cook instead. The only words I commit to verse are my family recipes, etched across the pulpy pages of a handmade pink-and-gold notebook, falling apart, given to me by the pink-and-gold hands of my oldest friend. 2 room-temp butter sticks 2 cups puffed rice 8oz shredded cheddar Salt to taste Paprika for color I find it soothing to make the rudimentary foods that I remember touching, squeezing as a child – the sticky butter-cheese and porous rice clinging to my skin, crushed hard between my clean fingers. Cooking, it was important, forcing me into the immediate moment when the crisps turn from faint yellow to golden brown. Snow Cream Made by Mother in Winter The entire family is trapped, but not stationary, in a thick Virginia blizzard. School is cancelled for who knows how long, so my mother decides to teach my sister and me the valuable art of mixing a quick snow cream. This recipe is about timing, the right season – the coldest moment must arise with frozen precipitation imminent. 5 cups of freshly fallen snow (avoid yellow) Scraped guts of one vanilla bean 1 spilling-over tablespoon vanilla extract Forth a cup of cream Sugar to taste She let “us girls” swirl the concoction together with a wooden spoon. As we stir, the snow condenses and the bowl is no longer overfull. The pile of snow slims just below the rim of a massive glass Pyrex dish that my mother also uses for mashed potatoes, which she purees by hand. We watch the news each night, each morning and hope to make snow cream again. Stepfather’s Soupe Du Jour When mom went away for work there was only one meal to look forward to: my stepfather’s special soup. Even though it was a basic bag, just some 30 cent chicken ramen from the poorly-lit 7-11 on the corner, he passed it off as important with a little pepper and we believed him and slurped our noodles, licked our bowls and thanked our stars for a pink room with separate beds and a bay window where we watched our neighbors play kickball, which was more than our own father had ever offered. Our trust was rewarded with X-Files, followed by the ever-impressive Cookie Cake, which was really a roll of basic cookie dough spread across a small, circular cake pan. His little tricks to look accomplished in the culinary arts had us convinced that he was a keeper. Courting with Curry Dry fried spice starts it out, then stock and milk trickled in, with cut vegetables set to simmer. Layered cooking first occurred to me when I made Vietnamese sweet potato curry that was based on a dish I’d once eaten with a half-Korean guy named John in Richmond at a restaurant with a symbol for a name that I could not understand. We drank sweet rice wine and he never poked fun at the way I used chopsticks. Back then, a failed attempt at parmesan chicken was still enough to get me by on the dating scene. But this time I was trying to impress a new man in our new house with something exotic. The unfamiliar smell of turmeric and coconut thickened the kitchen as sticky as the jungle air. As I poured such a stew over rinsed, steamed rice, I felt proud at the process of feeding foreign matter to a trusting new mouth. |
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About the Author: Alyssa D. Ross was born in Guntersville, Alabama, but spent over a decade in Metropolitan Virginia. After abandoning art school in Richmond, she went on to pursue writing. She now holds an MFA from George Mason University and a PhD. from Auburn University where she teaches World Literature. Select readings are available here.