All it took was everything
My favorite T. S. Eliot poem, “Four Quartets,” which had no small part in luring me to where I am today, states in the most beautiful of ways that the exploration which seems like the end is really the beginning, “costing not less than everything.”
Everything included quitting a job and leaving an industry I knew, getting a divorce, learning a new trade, buying a business (with very little resources), and finding a new home.
I can see now how my experiences have shaped who I am. I am an Alabama girl with a Greek heritage. I am a daughter. I was a wife, and I am a mother. I was an executive, and now I am a cheesemaker. I am a cook. And I am fortunate to call myself friend to many wonderful people who have guided me along the way.
All of these roles have been combined like one of my recipes to create me. Appreciable yet very ordinary. The “me” that is my experiences-to-date had a notion to write a cookbook to share what I love about my life as a cheesemaker, my recipes from my Alabama and Greek heritage, and my joy for playing in the kitchen.
It seems presumptuous of me to write a cookbook, which is really none other than a how-to book, especially since it comes from a woman who never really likes to measure anything. My hubris in trying to teach you how to do something that I most often make up as I go, or rather, as I am inspired, seems overreaching. I rarely ever follow a recipe; I find that my experiences often send me in slightly divergent directions from other cooking authors. Spontaneity and improvisation drive me in the kitchen— all with a nod to classic technique.
I am okay with this.
Not only am I okay with it, I heartily encourage it. My hope is that if I introduce you to a new recipe that I really have given you not one but ten new ideas on how to create a particular dish. Feel free to take any soup recipe you find here and substitute the vegetable for one you like better, or for something you just happen to have in the fridge. Take the technique of braising or the concept of frittatas and play with them. Create something that suits your own taste.
My son has a game he plays in the kitchen, something he has been doing for years, which is making a “potion.” I put an extra-large mixing bowl in the sink and, as he stands on his stool to hover over it, he is allowed to put anything into that big bowl that he can find in the kitchen. Well, almost anything— I won’t let him open a bottle of champagne! I normally end up acting the role of surgical assistant as he cries for soy sauce with his palm out waiting for it to be handed to him.
It isn’t my hope for him to be a cheesemaker or a cook. My hope for him is that he will be creative and daring in all that he does. That would also be my hope for you with this cookbook, with these recipes serving only as a guide.
I have a tradition at my table. It is my personal take on saying the blessing or raising one’s glass with a few words at the beginning of a meal. It is inclusive and communal, as everyone at the table or standing in wait for a buffet brunch is required to participate. It is also a sign of respect to the cook and to the abundance we are so very fortunate to have. At my house, around my table, we say “Three Things.” Before the first fork is raised, everyone, whether it is only my son and I or thirty guests, goes in turn to say the three things he or she is thankful for.
Ever since my son could speak he has said his three things before eating. And always, to this day, it has been the same three things— “I am thankful for you, me, and the beautiful day.”
I cannot recall the exact moment, but I believe the tradition of Three Things started at a time when I was reexamining my routine behaviors. I was a new mother of a young son and wanted to be very conscious of how he would grow up at the table— how the ceremonies of partaking of a meal could and would shape his life.
I had been particular, if not downright zealous, about food traditions for a long time before I became a mother, however. In fact, my thoughts and interests orbited around food well before I was self-aware enough to realize that it was my “passion.”
Passion-driven pursuit
Calling my interest in food, and its tradition and culture, a passion is, I think, an adequate description. If passion is “a strong or extravagant fondness or desire,” then that is my bent toward food. I learned early that food meant love. I learned this from my grandmother (as a lot of us do, no doubt). I dotted my early life’s landscape with food-centric thoughts: cooking for my boyfriends’ families— winning not just the boy’s heart but the entire clan’s— reading food-centric books, and following chefs and food writers in the same way that some teenagers follow rock stars. Yet I never thought about food as a career choice. I just didn’t think that my “interest” could be coined as anything like a passion or a calling.
Now I am at home, both literally and figuratively, with my pursuit of food, with how it shapes my life and the lives around me, with the friends I have made, and how I have settled into this interest, this self-proclaimed passion. Beyond being comfortable with it, I hold sacred the power of food; how we share it shapes our world in ineffable ways. Through my journey I have become not only a mother concerned with her child’s food traditions— like saying the Three Things— but a producer of a food item that is served at tables across the country. What a responsibility! What a beautiful responsibility.
When I first became a cheesemaker, I was asked what I ultimately wanted to achieve: what was my five-year plan, what was my goal? Those were great questions and ones that took a good deal of thought to answer, because I had to ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” I became a cheesemaker primarily because it is fun. I find immense joy in it because it feeds me— both literally and figuratively— and because I get to share that joy with so many people through the products I create. Those are the same reasons I cook and share food at my table. At the beginning of a meal or even before, as I start cooking, I think of that wonderful gift.
The why in cooking is the most important starting point in choosing what to cook. The reasons are plentiful if you think about it— to romance, to love, to celebrate, to honor, to sustain, to share ideas. And then I ask myself which foods and settings will help me to arrive at that destination. My feelings about cooking are perfectly described in the Story People artists’ collective “Real Reason” prints: “There are things you do because they feel right and they may make no sense and they may make no money and it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other and to eat each other’s cooking and say it was good.”
I start my days now in contemplation of foods and traditions that I— Southern first, American second, and somewhere in there Greek, too— enjoy. I also think about how you might start your day, what will happen around your table, and how I, the products I make and the recipes I share, get to participate in that. It is a magnificent thought that I may extend myself into your life and enjoyment of food just by crafting a product or sharing a recipe.
Before my tradition of Three Things, I still had a propensity for beginning a meal with some form of reverence. I would often read a poem at big, over-flowing meals at the lake, particularly “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo. Harjo depicts every great moment of our lives taking place over a table. She shows how a table can bring people together in joy and sadness and closes with my favorite line: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”
From the beginning of my day to the “last sweet bite,” I will share with you in this book more
