The Hub, The Heart, the Hearth
My story of kitchens, my story of love, my story of family.
There’s a pot on almost every burner, steam rising to the vent hood. My 15-year-old son, all gangly angles and long hair, stands holding our cast iron skillet at an angle, basting the large London broil with a mix of melted butter, olive oil, garlic, and rosemary using a spoon.
I finish peeling potatoes, give them a rinse, and then drop them in bubbling salty water. John slides the pan with the steak into the preheated oven and we start working on the fresh green beans (sauteed in olive oil, butter, garlic, and an entire thinly sliced white onion).
My son doesn’t talk a lot normally, but in the kitchen, when we don’t have to make eye contact and our hands are busy, I learn about his life.
In the warmth of our kitchen, words just flow.
It was always the kitchen…
After I was adopted, I looked forward to trips to my new grandparents’ house with quivering excitement. They had a large farmhouse, on an actual farm, in rural South Carolina. Unlike farms in the Midwest, there were no wide open plains. The fields and grounds of the farm were tucked in, surrounded by sweeping magnolias, towering oaks, and spindly pines.
Along the edges of the yard, clusters of gardenia, azalea, and boxwood bushes broke up the landscape. There was no lack of shade on hot summer days; lounging on the soft grass underneath the trees reading an Archie comic, eating boiled peanuts, and sipping a cold Cheerwine was a favorite pastime when I visited.
But my favorite spot, hands down? My grandmama’s kitchen.
I remember it yellow. I could be wrong. I remember a soft yellow and worn linoleum. Absolutely nothing was “high end” or decorator quality, at all. A line of sensible cabinets, a standard oven, standard sink, standard fridge, and a round table with four chairs. Coffee pot always going. Line of windows along the wall to watch the fields. Utilitarian, always squeaky clean and smelling ever so slightly of brown-bottle Lysol, coffee, and bacon.
When you came in from the back porch, which was enclosed and served as Grandmama’s greenhouse, always full of plants, you passed a mud sink before entering the kitchen. Sometimes you’d look down and there’d be fish swimming in it. Granddaddy would go fishing in the pond and drop his fish off there, where Grandmama would wait until just before dinner to kill, clean, and cook the fish. Dinner would’ve been alive less than an hour before we ate it, but it was hard to feel bad about it when that salty, buttery cornbread crust crumbled off delicate, flaking fish onto your tongue.
She made everything that came through her kitchen taste good, and she made it look easy.
I learned a lot about cooking from her. I learned, first of all, to love the origins of the food. My grandmama had a massive vegetable garden. She was, I realize now, a gardener like me (or I am like her). That is, messy. She didn’t have super organized and super neat rows, but rather let the basil run wild and the cucumber vines go basically where they wanted.
She’d head out into the garden in the late afternoon, the sun casting a golden hue on everything, and she’d pick tomatoes, cucumber, squash, onion, and head back into that cozy kitchen and make supper.
Lunch was lunch. Dinner was “supper.”
Lunch was white bread sandwiches: Duke’s mayo and a fresh tomato, sliced. Or Duke’s and banana slices. One of her favorites, and now one of mine.
Supper was heaven. Fried fish, or chicken, sauteed onions and squash, sliced tomatoes. Cornbread. Drop biscuits. Ham, sometimes, salty and sliced thick. Vegetables fresh from the garden. Sometimes a surprise dessert: peach cobbler, or a Cheerwine float with vanilla ice cream from the Piggly Wiggly.
Supper was the end of a hard-working day, a long day of helping out around the farm, or merely running wild and free among the three pastures with the flock of sheep, or running through the orchard grabbing crab apples. Nosing through one of the many barns, sheds, and outbuildings, relishing deeply the smell of old wood, hay, animals, and earth.
Supper was earned.
Supper was food for the body and the soul.
The stark difference and how I reclaimed it…
Supper at home was dinner. Dinner fit neatly into a Weight Watcher’s plan and had easily countable points. Dinner was a broiled white protein, usually unseasoned (think bare chicken breast), a proper serving size of rice, and a green vegetable — usually canned green beans.
Dinner was healthy and proper and portion controlled.
Dessert was for holidays, birthdays, and special occasions. Or a Little Debbie cake from our personal snack ration box.
Dinner was a tense, quiet event, forced nightly. My brother and I set the table, we sat and ate our rationed Weight Watcher portion with minimal small talk, we cleared the table swiftly, one of us washed dishes while the other sprayed the table and wiped it clean, replaced the formal placemats and decorative items, and then we retired to our rooms for the evening.
If my grandmama’s kitchen I remember yellow, I remember my home kitchen in greys. Dull. Lifeless. Cold and sterile and clean and barely used.
As soon as I got my own apartment, I bought a crock pot.
I only had a twin mattress on the floor by way of furniture, but I bought a crock pot. And pots and pans. And the set of plastic cooking utensils for $5 at WalMart, a little set of spices, a few plates and used silverware from a thrift store. I began to learn to cook in earnest.
I was very, very bad at it. Once I placed whole tomatoes in the crock pot on low, covered them with water sprinkled with garlic powder and Italian seasonings, and skipped out the door confident I’d have spaghetti sauce when I got home.
Of course, I had a crock pot of boiled tomatoes in Italian-flavored water when I got home. And a roommate who laughed and laughed and ragged me about that for years.
I learned, though. I learned through trial and error, I learned through years of allowing myself to make mistakes, burn food, ruin food (and yet be so poor I had eat the ruined food), and I learned first what not to do.
Once I had gotten down basically everything not to do in a kitchen, I really started learning what to do.
I started to truly love the process of cooking.
June Cleaver I was not, but I could cook.
By the time I entered my first (very young) marriage, I had a decent host of meals under my belt. I could cook Southern food, and I could cook some basic American Italian dishes. I was independent, working (active duty military, at that), so I was not some meek domestic, but I definitely prided myself on being able to throw down a bit in the kitchen.
Our first apartment was like something out of a Tim Burton movie. It was impossibly tiny: one bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living area, all in 455 square feet. The kitchen was so tiny, but adorable. From the hallway, you faced a window. On the right, a small gas stove/oven and sink, on the left, one cabinet square of counter space and a small fridge.
If you opened the oven door, it almost touched the cabinet doors on the other side. Same with the fridge. Definitely only space for one cook.
Dishes were a nightmare; nevertheless, I loved cooking for us.
As soon as I got pregnant, I knew that family dinner was going to be a ‘thing’ for me. I set my mind to it then, that our family would sit down to dinner every night to talk, laugh, and eat.
That was eighteen long/short years ago, and for eighteen years, I’ve sat down to dinner with my family almost every single night.
That means roughly five thousand hours of face-to-face conversations with my kids. Even through divorce, even through tough times, even when their plates had beans, rice, and vegetables and I didn’t have a plate because I “wasn’t hungry,” we sat down together, ate, and talked.
“How was your day?”
My kids say it jokingly now. Someone always ends up asking it almost every night because when they were in elementary and middle school and sometimes getting them to talk would be like pulling teeth, I’d often use funny voices or gestures when I asked the same question… “How was your day?”… to get them to loosen up and communicate.
Now it’s part of our family fabric.
I’m immensely proud of that. Because it makes them kind people. It makes them empathetic. It gives a simple vehicle to opening the door to some real serious shit, to real conversations, to airing out grudges and hurt feelings, and to celebrate good news and happy days. If someone doesn’t want to brag, they wait until the question gets asked and they can humbly say, “Well, I mean, I got the highest score in my class on my English paper,” and we can celebrate them! Or they can wait for the question and say, “I had a shit day. I’m so sick of school because….” and we can talk about it, they can vent, and we can support them.
All over dinner. All over food.
Food is the glue that holds families together in day-to-day drudgery.
My kids wait through the hot summer months until the first fall day comes along that’s cool enough for them to find a pot of their beloved potato soup waiting on the dinner table.
They anticipate salmon stew and tiny pickles on Christmas Eve for weeks. They come straight to the kitchen if they smell the fragrance of baking when they walk through the front door, bending awkwardly to crack the oven and peek at what’s inside while still wearing their big backpack from school.
My kids love my food like they love me; earnestly and fervently and with abandon.
I hope when they remember my kitchen, they remember it in yellow and golden hues of warmth and happiness.
I hope they sit down to dinner with their families.
I hope they ask, “How was your day?”
Cholesterol and caffeine, don’t tell me they’re unhealthy.
My grandmama’s kitchen smelled of coffee and bacon because every morning she had one egg, a slice of bacon, and a cup of black coffee.
Now we know that bacon gives you high cholesterol and caffeine should be taken in moderation. But my grandmama’s body kept going ten years after her mind did. Tell me she wasn’t healthy.
Still, I practice moderation. OK, with bacon anyway. But on those mornings when I cook bacon while the coffee brews, I am transported back, through time and space, through layers and layers of love with a woman I cherished deeply, into that warm yellow farmhouse kitchen with worn linoleum. Where food was prepared with love and care and just enough butter and bacon to soften little gaunt ankles and elbows and send traumatized children off to sleep in blissful peace.
I’m on to you, Grandmama.
My grandmama wasn’t an overly emotive woman. She showed love like I do, with food. If I cook for you, I love you.
Food is love and love is food and cooking has been my lifelong love letter to my family. I cannot ever express the insanely overwhelming love I have for each of them through words, written or spoken, but I can pour it into homemade birthday cakes and casseroles and soups and pasta and bread.
Standing in my warm yellow kitchen, with one kid sitting at the table chattering about their friends and another beside me at the stove, tilting the cast iron skillet as he bastes London broil, I am as close to heaven as I’m ever going to get, the closest to seeing my grandmama’s face, the closest to tasting the purest love.
I am home.
My name is Melissa Corrigan, and I’m a freelance writer/thought sharer/philosopher in coastal Virginia. I am a mom, a wife, a veteran, and so much more. I deeply enjoy sharing my thoughts and receiving feedback that sparks genuine, respectful conversation.
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