Sometimes and Other Times

CHRONICLE: MID-FEBRUARY 2024

Today’s post is wholly inspired by Crystal Wilkinson’s new memoir and cookbook, “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts”. Thanks for reading Lonely Kitchen Chronicles. It’s a treat to have you here!

Often, I cook because I’m hungry.

Other times, I cook to belong.

Cooking is a language I learned early. I learned it at the elbow of my mother, skilled in the verse and meter of the kitchen.

Sometimes, I cook compelled by longing.

Four days before my mother died in 1987, I turned twenty-eight. My mother would have turned eighty-nine this past Ground Hog’s Day. 

For me, February is a month-long nostalgia fest. Yes, Valentine’s Day plus a few birthdays provides a bit of distraction. But I can’t help focusing inwards. Memories of my mother firmly occupy the space between my heart and head. There, they are banked steep like wind driven snow. This memory snowbank is not stacked in neat chronological layers. Rather, they are stockpiled, accessible always, when my inner strength wanes or when I hear one of Mom’s favorite songs like Neil Sedaka’s Laughter in the Rain, anything by the Mamas and Papas, or Henry Mancini.

I’ve just begun reading Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson. It’s part memoir, part ode to her Black Appalachian roots, part cookbook. Wilkinson is making my mouth water for the food her family cooks in the place she evokes. But when Wilkinson introduces us to her grandmother Christine, the woman who raised her, I am transported:

“…I still conjure her wielding a stirring spoon and butcher knife, not just simply providing sustenance but something more. In the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen, spirits shimmered near the bucket of well water, hovered over the olive refrigerator, floated above the flour sifter, and glided around the coal-burning stove. The dead danced, both protecting and cajoling. My grandmother told me of the haints she’d seen and the ones she remembered. She told these stories at suppertime while we were cooking.”

I do not have the same strong connection to place like Wilkinson does. Her family has lived and worked and died in Indian Creek, Kentucky since 1795.

My family is one of immigrants from Russia and Lithuania and Poland. They came to this country centuries after Wilkinson’s family were long established in their Appalachian valley.

My family came from places where I can’t speak the language, where the alphabet is unrecognizable, whose streets and architecture are unfamiliar to me. Stories of these distant great-grandparents and great aunts and uncles were thin and watery, the details that would have thickened the family stew long forgotten. Photographs essentially non-existent.

Yet even though I never heard the voices of these far-flung kinfolk or knew the contours of their faces, their presence swirled in the steam that rose from the pot of Matzoh ball soup, the cadence of onions and carrots being chopped for the pot roast, the triangles of pastry spread with apricot jam that were rolled into rugelach.

But Mom and I spoke easy and free in the kitchen. Sometimes our kitchen talk was about the cookies we were baking or the salmon cakes we were frying for dinner. Sometimes we talked about who’s recipe we were using knowing that making their dish was tantamount to having them in our kitchen with us. Sometimes we talked about difficult things, like a bad grade at school or why I’d been mean to my younger brother, (again) or that if I wanted to keep my hair long, I had to take better care of it. “If you can’t keep the tangles out of your hair, I’m going to cut if off”, always enough of a threat for me to methodically comb my hair. At least until the next time the threat surfaced. These conversations, some no more than snippets, were easier done in the kitchen, their tenor different than the difficult conversations held at the dining room table. My mother’s ever-present cup of coffee, the half-filled Pyrex percolator coffee pot on the stovetop waiting to be re-heated for her next cup, was always re-assuring no matter what was said.

Sometimes, music from either the hi-fi, or most likely the transistor radio that sat on the countertop near the beige wall phone dominated. We sang together, Mom and I, or she crooned along with Frank Sinatra, her teenage heartthrob.

Sometimes, when I’m missing my mother, like I am during these February days, I make myself a cup of coffee, (drip or espresso) put on some music, pull out a recipe or thumb through a cookbook until I find a recipe that matches my mood…or involves most of the ingredients I have at hand. It doesn’t matter what I make. Honestly. Sometimes, I’m not even hungry for something to eat. It only matters that I’m in my kitchen, wearing my apron, sipping coffee, singing along, hoping, waiting for the words to fill me up.

Here's a playlist of some of Mom’s favorites tunes:

Neil Sadaka                 “Laughter in the Rain”

Mamas & Papas          “California Dreamin’”

                                    “Monday Monday”

Cass Elliott                   “Baby I’m Yours”

Frank Sinatra               “The Way You Look Tonight”

                                    “One for My Baby”

Nat King Cole              “Send for Me”

Ella Fitzgerald &

Louis Armstrong          “Dream a Little Dream of Me”

Louis Armstrong          “I’ve got the World on a String”

Oscar Peterson Trio     “Night Train”

Henry Mancini            “Moon River”

                                    “Charade”

As for me? Here’s my playlist...it’s hard to pick just a dozen songs, but these are some all-time favorites:

Rachael & Vilray          “Do Friends Fall in Love?”

Claude Debussy          “Suite Bergamasque”

Brooks & Dunn            “My Maria”

Glen Campbell            “Sing”

Bonnie Raitt                “Nick of Time”

Tedeschi Trucks Band  “Midnight in Harlem”

River Whyless             “Falling Son”

Slowdive                     “Kisses”

Tony Bennett &

Lady Gaga                   “Cheek to Cheek”

Tom Petty                    “I Won’t Back Down”

Patsy Cline                   “Walkin’ After Midnight”  

Supertramp                 “Take the Long Way Home”

I’m with Wilkinson. Kitchen ghosts are always nearby. When I listen, and I’m almost always listening, I can hear their refrain in the music of cooking.