Remembering Recipes

How food and memories intermingle, and how sometimes things are lost

“I know that’s not daddy’s granola,” my aunt calls from the kitchen. She’s holding a tall glass jar, normally used to store pasta. Instead, it’s filled with nuts and oats and chia seeds.

Every week, my grandfather used to make himself a big batch of granola. He’d eat it with yogurt for breakfast every day. He’s been dead now for six years. I remember it had oats and almonds and raisins in it. I remember I didn’t like it very much.

In June of 2019, I stopped through to see my grandmother, Nina, on the way to an internship in Durham, North Carolina. I was missing my grandfather, I suppose, and remembered that granola. I asked her for the recipe, so she grabbed a blank postcard. It was purple, with irises along the border and some scrap of gospel at the center. In her looping cursive, she wrote on the blank backside and handed it to me before I got in the car.

I drove across the state with the postcard on my dashboard. When I arrived at the little white house with a fenced-in yard by the highway, I lugged in my bags, let loose my dog, and brought in the little written recipe.

It hung on my fridge all summer. I never actually made it. Maybe because I was lazy, perhaps because I simply couldn’t afford to buy bags of assorted nuts and seeds. When I moved out, I almost forgot that it was there—I didn’t pack it with any of the rest of the kitchen stuff.

In my last sweep of the house, collecting spare dog toys and toothpaste, I saw it hanging on the fridge. I stopped for a second, arms full of miscellany, and decided: No. It wasn’t worth it. I didn’t feel like stepping over to grab it. It could be a gift to the landlord. I’d just ask Nina for the recipe again, later.

On Monday, I saw the empty pasta container that used to be filled with granola. I decided to fill it. I asked Nina if she had the recipe.

After an hour of flipping through eight different photo albums filled with cut-out recipes, there was no sign of the granola. My grandmother sat at her kitchen table, pouting into the palm of her hand. “I’m so sorry to be a disappointment to you,” she moaned.

For all her life, this is a woman who got more hours out of her day than anyone else. Accomplishing everything she could at rapid speed, she’d take care of any and everything needed of her.

She’s 80 now. She can’t run around with a dozen bullet points on her task list. Instead, she’s limiting herself to one or two things to do a day. And she’s learning to be waited on. She has taken care of coughing children, bed sick husband, and dying friends with a tender sort of grit. It takes grit to love and help someone who is unwell.

She has always been the caretaker. But now she’s the one asking for help. Can I fill up the bird feeder for her? Could you switch over the laundry?

This woman may well have fed me 1/10th of my meals in this lifetime. She has cleaned more of my dishes than I want to count. When I was ill, there was no one who could look after me like she did. Of course, I can cook dinner and leaf blow the yard, pick up medications or give her a hand up the steps.

She is reaping the benefits of a life lived with love. Her family reaches out to her to help in whatever way we can. My uncle drops by a couple of times a day. His dog will leave his house and walk the whole neighborhood alone, just to come to lay down by my grandma. My aunt drives herself here every weekend to fix small computer bugs, cook her some supper, and just sit and visit. My cousin takes her arm as he walks beside her, stepping slowly and carefully as she moves her cane across a brick sidewalk.

She worries that she is a burden. I ask her, did you feel burdened when you were taking care of your mother, your sister, your husband, your friend?

“No,” she replies.

“No,” I repeat. “You loved them. You’d do anything for them. They were not burdens. You are not a burden.”

We didn’t find her late husband’s granola recipe. And she can’t recall it from memory, which she blames herself for. But we did pull out my mom’s cookbook, filled with index cards of handwritten recipes. Looking at one loose scrap of paper, it takes me a second to discern whether it’s my handwriting or hers. It’s beautiful to see handwriting as a generational progression.

My mom had a granola recipe, so I looked at it and tried it out. I was convinced it was my grandpa’s, though Nina and my aunt both disagree.

I relinquish that silly little recipe to the ether. It was a weekly tradition that died with its maker. And that’s okay. I had the record of it and consciously left it behind. And that’s okay. It hasn’t lasted in anyone’s memory. And that is okay.

Why cling to something that’s inevitably going to be forgotten?

I took the recipe jotted down in my mom’s collection and doctored it to make it my own. Added hemp seeds and extra maple syrup; threw in goji berries and more nuts and little nibs of cacao. I find it delicious. Way better than my grandpa’s, at least as far as I can remember.

Now there’s no recipe. I throw in what sounds good, toss it with maple syrup, and roast it in the oven. There’s no loss. No one is a burden or a disappointment. Only living people with steaming mouths and sweating hands as they eat their morning meal.

Because, really, it’s only breakfast.