Dear reader,
If I could give you one piece of cooking advice for the rest of your life, it would be to gather all your favorite recipes from your grandmother and mother. I live with this thought every single day, mostly because I don’t have any of my grandmother’s recipes. She never wrote them down, so when she passed away, she took them all with her. If you look in her kitchen, there’s no cookbook.
She had told me she only started cooking when she got married and had kids. She learned entirely on her own, cooking alongside her neighbors and perfecting her dishes over time.
The day before she passed, she had made a casserole of beef stew. After her funeral, the whole family went back to her house, and we all shared the last meal she could give us.
Having grown up eating her dishes daily, we only realized how doomed we were as a family the day after she passed. We were so used to her food just being there that we took it for granted. My mother is still trying to perfect her dishes to this day, three years later.
I was incredibly attached to my grandmother and her food. I ate at her house every day. Even if we couldn't eat together, she would prepare the food anyway and tell us to come pick it up. That was her love language.
My love language back to her was getting her burgers from time to time, just to give her a break from cooking. I learned my lesson with Italian food, though. Whenever I took her to an Italian restaurant, she would just look at the plate and say she could cook better than that.
I just spent three days alone in her house. Being there, surrounded by her stove, casseroles, and not being able to cook a single thing in her kitchen. It felt too empty to turn on the stove without her standing there.
So please, do yourself a favor. Go talk to your mothers and grandmothers. Stand with them in the kitchen, watch how they measure ingredients with their eyes, and write down the recipes if they aren’t written down.
In light of recipes that are written down, and that you should definitely save for your own collection, here are a few to try this week: Chef Chantal Tabet's fresh sea bream sashimi, Caline Chaoul’s comforting banana cake, and Anissa Helou's classic orange blossom jam (mrabba al-zahr).
Melissa Manouchakian
Distribution editor
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