parents passed away when we were in school. I will lose my parents eventually, this is obvious, but even now it is not something that penetrates my consciousness. My mother’s uterus fully contained that tumor that brought us to this point and now it is gone, with all the cancer it contained. I don’t know what fear looks like in this context. John Millington Synge wrote in The Aran Islands about fear: “The old man gave me his view of the use of fear. ‘A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned,’ he said, ‘for he will be going out on a day he shouldn’t. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.’”
9
MY MOTHER REMEMBERS MY grandmother storing fruits and vegetables in the basement fallout shelter, carefully wrapping each apple individually in tissue paper. In my childhood, my mother’s garden was blanched and frozen and canned. To my sisters and me, Harvest—the Proper Noun—meant going out to the garden after we had gathered the last of the squash and beating the stinking, rotting vegetables to pulp with sticks and then hurling them into the distance as far as we could. Even now, even in adulthood, we still refer to Harvest only when our parents are out of earshot. My father hunted not only for enjoyment but for meat to fill the freezer. This time of year, the pause between harvest and winter, is one of preparation. My childhood was shelf stable because it had to be, not because my people lacked culinary imagination. Chicken, baked with white rice, condensed cream of chicken soup, and Lipton onion soup mix—warm and comforting and delicious and something my mother could put in the oven before church on a Sunday morning, and I wish I appreciated the crunchy rice around the edges of the pan in the way that I now deliberately make stuck-pot rice with my cast-iron skillet.
My grandmother was a skilled utilitarian cook who seemed to have never lost her fear of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, the rations of World War II, as she made the most out of the cheapest cuts of meat, preserved garden produce for the long winter, preparing and dreaming and fearing. Even now, fresh produce is not consistently available in the North Country, and yet, predatory grocery stores know that by the time January Thaw rolls around, we will pay premium prices for strawberries that aren’t any good. On dark nights we made hotdishes with elbow macaroni, tomatoes we canned in August, and ground beef frozen when it was on sale. It would never have occurred to us to use fresh tomatoes to make a sauce for that hotdish, nor would it have occurred to make pasta from scratch. We would have considered it a waste of time and resources. As a culinary concept, we liked the idea of stability, of shelf-stable food. It suited our visions of ourselves as solid, grounded people who couldn’t be blown about in the wind.
10
THE GREEKS BELIEVED THAT a woman’s womb could spontaneously start wandering in her body, causing physical and mental problems. By the Renaissance, the wandering womb was considered the cause of more psychological illnesses than physical ones. One solution developed over time to keep the womb in place: a womb could not wander if the woman was pregnant. Some considered that the problem was that a woman’s energy should be focused on her womb and if she was not pregnant, that energy could escape to her brain. My mother no longer has a womb. My sister is pregnant. My youngest sister and I do not have children. My maternal grandmother bore one child; my paternal grandmother was mother to five. My great-aunt K. never had children of her own, but she wandered Central America with her own private pilot’s license, then cycled through Europe in 1950 with a friend. My father’s aunt Edna never had children. The family story is that her mother, Ida, had Edna sterilized in the 1920s under the guise of an appendectomy because she thought Edna too frail for children. I wonder if Edna ever knew the truth.
11
AGNES IS THE COLOR of risk, the risk of taking a chance on a thrift store skillet and entering a new world of wonder. I used to be afraid of cast iron, the idea that it is hard to use, hard to maintain, and What’s the point when Teflon exists? We grew up with aluminum and that’s what I knew: my grandmother’s WearEver became mine when she moved into assisted living and my mother’s Club is still in use after forty years. Cast iron—and Agnes—is nothing I know, but I find myself addicted. I think, If I can’t do it in the skillet, what’s the point? I learn how to bake cakes in the skillet, cobblers, pannekoeken, clafouti, eggs, hash, and the possibilities become delightfully endless. Building up the seasoning isn’t hard when it’s part of my routine: a wash, a dry, back on a warm burner to make sure the remaining water has evaporated, and then a thin swipe of oil. Agnes is now cured to the point of being indestructible and it’s good to remember that. Agnes is a delicious constant in a world where nothing makes sense anymore.
There’s a legacy to the cult of cast iron that I envy in these days of trying to understand cancer, a desire I have for specialized knowledge and not having to create a world from scratch, like someone has been down this road before, because the road less traveled is not always a path worth taking. I’m new to this cast iron world, my growing collection having come from thrift stores, colorful vintage Dutch ovens of varying colors and sizes, skillets like Agnes, but it is a world I want to understand, a community I want to be a part of. It’s the equivalent of being passed down a hundred-year-old pan with seasoning like silk, the kind of long knowledge that rings with the voice of a great-grandmother you never met, the flavor of old laughter and bright pride.
12
ANOTHER ORIGIN STORY: I’M standing in my friend A.’s bright kitchen in Ohio probably ten years ago now, a 1950s white rental kitchen full of Le Creuset color and a candy-pink KitchenAid mixer. I’m a little in awe, a little intimidated, because A. knows what she’s doing and I know only enough to be dangerous. We teach together, A., her husband, and I, and we live one street apart in this small town. She’s six inches shorter than I am, her husband six inches taller. We’re in our midtwenties with fairly fresh master’s degrees. A. is the friend who first brought me to the Toledo Farmers’ Market, the friend who once told me I should open a bakery called Cakes and Shit Like That. She’s the one who taught me that cooking could be fun, that it was not a betrayal of feminism, because who has time for that nonsense when you’re eating really good food?
A. is teaching me about cast iron and kale as we settle in for a girls’ night. Her cast-iron skillet heats on the stove, a pile of kale torn and piled on the counter next to it. Greens are not something I know, beyond the fragile leaf lettuce that my mother and grandmother would eat in a bowl with sugar and milk. A. pours olive oil into the skillet and adds a pat of butter. I will learn later that this lowers the smoke point of the oil, but at this moment, I don’t even know what a smoke point is. She piles the kale into the skillet, mounded beyond the sides of the pan, and starts to press it down with her tongs, then twists the seared greens. Press, twist, and toss, press, twist, and toss. When that entire mountain has wilted to a quarter of its size, she flicks salt and pepper into the pan, then finishes it with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice that sends up objection in steam. One more twist and she divides the pan between my plate and hers. We devour the kale in less time than it takes to prepare it. The butter and oil take down the bitterness, the bright of the lemon juice just enough to heighten the green flavor. It is this moment where I understand kale. Years later, I will swap kale for spinach in my favorite soups; I will add it to frittatas courtesy of Agnes as I teach my niece how to crack eggs. I will rarely have it fresh, but I always have a frozen bag or two waiting. I will sauté up fresh summer kale to eat with fried eggs, grateful that I don’t have to share, but still wishing I could just hop one street over to exclaim This is so good, you have to try this anyway.
13
AT HACKENMUELLER’S MEATS IN Robbinsdale, the smell of smoking meat seeps through the brick walls into the street. The door to the butcher shop is old wood, the kind that makes you believe in your bones that the small shop has been in business for more than a hundred years. There’s something here that rings of the 1960s, like the old
