Making Memories

Connecting to the past and creating in the present.

I made biscuits and gravy this morning. I felt a sense of mastery I hadn’t felt before. I wondered if I was channeling Betti, my step-mom who has been dead for 35 years. As I stood at the stove stirring the gravy, I was transported to a kitchen in the early 1980s where she was standing in front of the stove stirring some southern-style gravy.

I wonder if this is supposed to be about mothers or cooking or something else. I’m a mother now… something I never really expected to be. I’m a great cook. I often attribute that to Betti, even though she’s been gone since 1987. I was only 15 when she died.

So many of my memories of her are wrapped up in food. An orphan's thanksgiving in the Philippines with big pots of bouillabaisse. Biscuits and gravy in our decidedly 1970s kitchen. Making homemade tortillas at the dining room table at our house in Okinawa. She loved to cook and she loved to try things. There’s this tomato cottage cheese dill bread that she made that I will never forget and have never found again.

I have always found comfort in food. Just now, the idea that maybe I’ve used it as a connection to Betti came to me for the first time. I love to cook… to try recipes. I’m confident in the kitchen, I think because she was. Nothing seems off-limits. I can imagine flavors and tweak things to make them my own.

This morning I made biscuits and gravy to celebrate my husband’s birthday. I chopped a stack of bacon into 1/4” strips and let it render slowly in the pan. Once it was nice and brown and there was lots of fat, I threw in the flour - making a roux - and then tossed in some more because the roux looked too thin. Next came the milk, stirring gently, working out the lumps, and then more milk. The gravy was bubbling and thick. Next came tasting… adding salt and pepper, lots of pepper because my husband loves it. The gravy came out silky and tasty and satisfying.

As my husband fixed his plate, two biscuits smothered with bacon gravy, I fried a couple of over-easy eggs and plopped them on his plate. He declared his birthday breakfast as delicious as any restaurant meal; maybe even better because I made it with love.

I have transported to that kitchen 40 years ago with a table and bench seats in the corner. We had our own restaurant booth at home. And I remember eating biscuits and gravy for the first time after watching my mom make it and I feel her love.

The pandemic robbed me of finding joy in cooking, of feeling anything besides stress at the thought of making yet one more meal. This morning though, I felt reconnected… as though I was finding a part of myself again that had been missing.