My grandmother’s recipes: of food and family

By Holly Wren Spaulding
Sun contributor
I look around the long table. Our mothers — the three sisters — are presiding over numerous pots and pans, the many dishes required to feed our coterie. They sit down to eat, then just as soon as something runs out, get up to fetch things from the kitchen or pass serving bowls around the table. Of course, in our own homes we are perfectly capable of looking after ourselves, but here we are “the kids,” and it is reassuring to be provided for in this way.
Photo by Ryan Romeike

I’ve been noticing how we assume the roles prescribed by birth order and long practiced habit; we are daughters and sons, sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers. On this rare Saturday, the great matriarch of our clan, our 88-year-old grandmother, has come north for the weekend. Although I grew up with photographs and stories of her visits to Afghanistan and China and the Outer Hebrides, she doesn’t travel quite so much anymore. This is an occasion to celebrate.
Although, like most families, we are a noisy lot, the tone of our interactions with “Nonny,” as I’ve always called our grandmother, acquires a different attentiveness in this context; it’s as if in the presence of our ancestor we recognize the truly awesome fact that without her, we wouldn’t even be here. That is, we try to behave ourselves.
I grapple with this, of course. As the eldest grandchild, I’ve always had a sense of filial reverence and duty. It seems an exceptionally generous and profound act to have children and to foster a family that over years and decades continues to cooperate, grow and gather despite our different dispositions and lifestyles.
How do I acknowledge my sense of this fact? How do I share my own life with my grandmother, who comes from a different time and whose generation had very different challenges and sensibilities? I want her to know me and I also don’t want her to worry. I want her to be proud, and perhaps most of all, I want her to be confident that we are each trying to carry on some aspect of the lineage to which we belong.
I think my brother Peter feels something along these same lines. He tells Nonny that he’d really like to have her recipe for Jalapeno Potato Soup — the one she would always have on the stove waiting for us when we’d go to her house for holidays. She’s in a much smaller place now, and I know she misses those days of decorating the house and playing host to all of us. The art and rugs and china that furnished those days has since found its way into the homes of her offspring and on this night, as she looks around the room, serves as a reminder of another time, now passed. She is visibly in awe of how much a life can change over time. I ask her if seeing the antique fog light in the entryway to my aunt and uncle’s new home gives her a sense of familiarity and she says, no, it’s confusing. That used to be in the living room of her lake house and now she is living in senior housing and doesn’t have space for so many of her memories, the special objects she collected over a lifetime.
Back when her appetite was better, and my granddaddy was still alive, Nonny would cook wonderful and elaborate meals, often with the imprint of her southern upbringing. Her famous soup bears the mark of her years in Texas whereas I wonder if the fruit trifle she used to make recalls her girlhood in Georgia. I tell her I want the chilled Zucchini Soup she used to make for excursions on the pontoon boat and the Concord Grape Pie that appeared at Thanksgiving. If we can all learn to make these things, her presence will be felt in the routines of our daily lives.
We carry on, eating with gusto. Conversation shifts toward the usual banter about politics, and embellished anecdotes from our daily lives. The clatter of our voices is ever amplified by wine and good food.
Nonny rises without notice and walks over to the upright piano. I don’t think I’ve heard it played in years but it gets a regular tuning. She’s a skilled pianist who plays primarily by ear and the image of her at the keys is one that recalls for me a childhood of music and sing-alongs in the company of my relatives. Nonny is working up a spirited version of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which she’s played more than once at recent funerals of friends. This is followed by other familiar songs, by request: “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean,” “Amazing Grace,” and “Down By The Riverside.” All of us would have had music lessons of one sort or another during our youth; several among our group are avid musicians, and yet it has been a long time since the whole family was belting out tunes with such verve. I look around me to take it all in: everyone is smiling and happy and there is a common hum, a beautiful tone lacing through all of it.
Nonny is positively regal at the piano, working the pedals and playing along with both hands at the rate of our improvised singing (it turns out we don’t know most of the words). This used to be one of the things she most enjoyed doing and there was always sheet music out on her grand piano at the house on Low Road. In the intervening years, arthritis attacked her hands and it has become painful to play with the physicality and frequency of prior years.
I haven’t said enough about how important food is to the kind of family we are. We don’t watch sports together or have a hunting camp but we come together in this ritual, one we enact without an afterthought most of the time. Our meal of grilled chicken and garden vegetables is drawing to an end. The cobbler has disappeared and with it the vanilla ice cream. The wine bottles are empty. We shift back in our chairs, sated, lacking nothing.