by Amy Thielen
“Whoooo!” she called, cranking her rag hard to wring all moisture from it and slapping it over the faucet neck. “What do you think? I’m pretty sure we can make last call at the Rooster!”
The next thing we knew we were piling onto the wide bench seats of Izzy’s Buick and floating down the highway to Genola, one town over. Just as we liked the same music, we all liked a spacious Buick. We spilled out at the Red Rooster, where Aaron played his guitar and held the bar’s frontline captive—or they held him captive, depending on how you look at it. His stack of wooden chips (good for future drinks) piled up dangerously in front of him as the crowd begged him to play “Small Town Saturday Night” over and over again. When we got home, we handed over the chips to Addie, who officiously dumped them into a small urn full of drink chips sitting on her dresser.
At the end of the night, after she had finished sipping on her perpetual brandy Manhattan—a wise routine that involved watering down her drink in pace with the dwindling hour—she covered it tightly with a small square of plastic wrap, smoothed down the edges so tightly that a dime could bounce on its taut top, and put it in the refrigerator.
What strikes me as funny now about this habit was not the obvious Depression-era thrift but instead the hope it held for future good times. The assumption contained in the watered-down refrigerated elixir was that it would get consumed during some upcoming happy hour. Maybe tomorrow’s.
—
Like a pack of professional female cooks, the women in my family are tough on the ladies. They expect a lot of one another. Even though I was unshowered and unsteady, I plodded into a loose skirt, kneesocks, and a vintage button-up shirt and strode into the kitchen. I was hungover but ready.
The winter sunlight shot low through Addie’s kitchen and bounced off the shiny white Formica, calling the day to order. At the counter she was apronless. There were so few ingredients before her—just a sack of flour and a can of Crisco—and she moved so quickly that I feared the whole operation would be over before I could shake my eyes open. I knew she never measured anything, so I had to watch closely. I took out my notebook.
Still in my senior year of college, I was accustomed to taking detailed notes. “How many cups of water is that, Grandma?” I asked her as she poured cloudy liquid into the bowl.
“Stick your finger in this. As warm as a baby’s bath,” she said, and I stuck my finger into the water. “And it’s potato water,” she said, and then looked up. “Jesus Christ, put the pencil down and just pay attention.” She pawed out a lump of Crisco and threw it into the warm water. It started to melt into a reflective ivory pad on top of the water, as pretty as a cheap opal. “You don’t write out a recipe for bread.”
She crumbled a moist-looking plug of fleshy cake yeast into the water. Below the surface it dissolved quickly and smoothly. “I bought this cake yeast at the bakery in town. That dry yeast in the grocery store doesn’t always work. I buy it and bring it home and half the time it’s as dead as a fart.”
I made that mental note. Two rounded cupfuls of flour went into the bowl and she started stirring forcefully, whipping the batter until a shaggy lump rolled woozily in the middle and stretched out arms of dough that clung to the inside of the bowl as if holding on for dear life.
“You’ve got to beat it,” she said, exhaling, “until you see the gluten working.” Her arms were a blur. “You try it.”
I was surprised by the force required to stir from the bottom. My arms, not strong with experience, were feeble.
Addie baked by feel and eye rather than by formula. She added more flour, even more flour, and then suddenly came an amorphous flop. A puddle of dough was on the counter. She started kneading, yanking the outer edge and suturing it to the middle, sealing it with the force of her palms. It was like braiding, but from only one side. As she worked it, the dough started to perk up. I poked it and it felt alive, like it had muscle tone. Its surface was as smooth and cool as well-hydrated skin.
“You want to knead it until the gluten gets tight,” she said, leaning into the dough, “until—do you hear that? You have to knead it until it starts to squeak.” The middle of the dough emitted a high-pitched eek. Now I can recognize this sound as the reaction of two tense sheets of dough slapping together, like a valve squeezing out pent-up air, but back then it sounded like the lump was hiding a lost mouse that’d taken a fatally wrong turn.
As she flipped and pummeled the dough, I was well aware that this was the bread that so many immigrants had made from their bumper crops of wheat. Crusty brown on the outside, with a white interior sponge and tiny even pores, this white bread posed no chewing challenges to children or seniors; it was as easily digestible as their new American life, and its high, caramelized tops just as photogenic.
To my knowledge, few immigrants came bearing recipes for this lofty white bread in their trunks, and yet this was the one that so many Plains-state Americans, no matter where they came from, learned to make once they got here, from the flour that they grew and milled and the boiled potatoes that accompanied the noon roast. Unlike in the old country, Addie explained, in America they ate meat for lunch, usually with mashed potatoes, without exception. When the milky potato-cooking water was drained off, they saved it. What wasn’t added to the gravy was set aside at room temperature where, after being fed a little flour and left to sit, the potato-water slurry turned into sourdough starter. Any surplus potato water that remained after that, they fed to the pigs. Nothing was squandered. While hers wasn’t a yeasted starter, my grandma’s porridgy potato water contained an underground history, a pretty clear record of what it felt like to “make do” out on the prairie in Pierz Township. I had always thought the phrase meant you settled for what was subpar, as in making do with a hill of cornmeal and a chunk of salt pork, but I had never before considered the obvious: When you grew your own corn and cured your own side pork from your own barnyard hog, you didn’t settle for something dodgy on your table. Making do was more literal: It meant making and doing. Creating something uncommonly beautiful from the honest country materials you had on hand.
After this I felt like I had to ask about the origins of everything. “White flour then, Grandma?”
“Yes, of course white flour!” she said, as if whole wheat was not to be trusted.
But then she tipped her head. “Back on the farm in Buckman we used to get our white flour with the germ in it. Big twenty-five-pound sacks of it. It spoils in the summer, though. That’s why we switched. The bleached never spoils.”
“I bought some of that last week!” I bleated.
“Good! Yes, with the germ. The flavor’s better. You’ll see flecks in the bread. It’s the germ, not bugs in the flour.
“But most of the time,” Addie continued, rubbing the bowl with Crisco until it shined, “I don’t even do all this. I make my bread with Rhodes dough. And it has to be Rhodes! Not that other garbage brand they sell at Coborn’s that doesn’t rise.”
I had to admit, I felt a little bit cheated. I’d been led to believe that I was eating her famous blue-ribbon potato-water bread all along—when I was usually eating bread made from commercial frozen dough. Most of the magic must have been in the kneading and the rising, because even her Rhodes bread was memorable. I suddenly saw where my mom had picked up the habit of sometimes changing a quantity or two before passing on a prized recipe to a friend. She’d inherited the proprietary-recipe gene from Grandma. But Addie couldn’t do that to me now because I was forbidden from writing anything down. In my notebook, following “add the potato water” was a great blinking expanse of white paper.
When I eventually wanted to reproduce her homemade potato bread, quite a few years later, I was forced to call on my sense memories, which came dribbling back to me: the long, stretchy gluten arms, the tight squeaks emitted during kneading, the whoof of living, breathing air that escaped when Addie punched down the first rise, the way she coiled up the dough before tucking it snugly into its twin bed of a loaf pan. I call
ed up the taste of the nut-brown heel smeared with butter and its stubborn chew, my teeth on it like a growling puppy that wants to prolong the pleasure of someone tugging on her toy.
Along with the bread came other memories, older ones, of the leggy bird marionette that Grandma piloted into the kitchen to entertain us young kids, its big head drunkenly veering toward me, nodding enthusiastically. I remembered sitting on my mom’s lap, the edge of the kitchen table pressed deep into my belly. As the adult voices swirled in the atmosphere above me—my dad laughing deeply, my grandma coy, my mom smiling sideways—I felt invisible. I nibbled on a rectangle of poppy-seed coffee cake, giving its rubbly streusel top my full attention, and even though I felt as inconspicuous as a fairy, I could feel that my consumption of it gave my grandma great happiness. I was eating what she wanted me to eat. Being good.
I don’t remember ever seeing my mom eating the poppy-seed coffee cake. In fact, I think she had stopped eating it for a while—the same way that as a young adult I stopped eating my mother’s wonderful homemade caramels. It didn’t matter that they still tasted like buttery liquid happiness floating down the throat; they transported me on a direct flight back to my youth, from which I needed some distance. Maybe that’s why you have children after all, to provide new recruits who can be counted upon to take down the signature sweets. There comes a time when you need to bring in the fresh troops.
—
Years later, I went to see my grandma in the nursing home in Pierz. We were sitting in the hallway in chairs lined up against the railing for what she called “another one of these damned mock tornado drills.” To break the awkwardness of our hall exile I asked her, “How do you make a piecrust with leaf lard again?” It was a question to which I pretty much knew the answer, having made a couple according to her phoned-in instructions, but I wanted to hear her tell its story. She sat there a beat, then pursed her lips.
“You don’t know how to make a piecrust?” she hooted. “And you call yourself a cook?”
I was somewhat prepared for this. In her old age, her comic bossiness had settled into a more cantankerous groove. At “the home” no one wanted to sit with her at mealtimes because she complained so much about the food. She hardly ate, and on the days that one of my cousins could take her out to Patrick’s Bar, she ordered just a single egg roll—“fried very crisp!”—washed down with two White Russians. Some days, she didn’t even bother changing out of her housedress.
She had probable cause to jab me. After she moved out of her house, my visits became, regrettably, less frequent. I cursed my inattention, but it just wasn’t the same without her kitchen, and we both knew it. There were no basement runs to send me on, no jars of pickles or bags of frozen sugar cookies to retrieve. When Addie left her house, she lost her household machine and, with it, a lot of her spirit. I was in mourning for that.
She wasn’t done with me. “I don’t know why I spent all that time cooking. Acch…” Her disapproval ratcheted up in her throat. “I wish I had spent more time talking to people and not so much time feeding them.” She had concluded what she wanted to say and looked down the tunnel of the hall.
My obsession with cooking, my passion for digging into the historical topsoil of every recipe I loved, many of them taught to me by the woman now sitting before me…what she was saying made no sense. Except maybe as a provocation.
“You don’t mean that, Grandma,” I said. I thought of her tiny kitchen table encircled by well-fed revelers clinging to her freewheeling hospitality like so many rescued souls around a life raft. “You love feeding people.”
“At one time,” she said, closing the book on the subject.
No, I thought. Sitting around an overflowing table with too many people in a too-tight nook had been her life. I’d been raised to see that as living.
I knew one thing, that she was like me, or I was like her. Our automation was everything. Her cooking hands, my mom’s, and mine all functioned as the turning motors for our minds. The legacy she passed on to both of us, the compulsion to make wonderful food no matter how much extra work it required, was as heavy as a professional responsibility. Once she broke her flow and started sitting all day without a purpose, she lost her taste for the work, food, life, everything.
I kissed her on her white floury cheek, soft and deflated, and she smiled up at me, grabbing my small warm hands in her cold rock-jointed ones, and we said good-bye. For years before she died it felt as if I was always saying good-bye for the last time, again and again.
The conversation we had that day followed me around for a long time, like a challenge. She had obviously been trying to remind me to focus on the people I was feeding instead of the food; she knew the domineering nature of her own cooking complex well enough to try to save me from the same fate.
But one day something else frizzled into the light: What about the recipes? Her holy box of recipes, many of them hand-lettered in her bloomy cursive and imprinted with a scrawled “very good” in the corner…How could she say they didn’t matter to her?
Her recipes—which old early American cookbooks sagely refer to as receipts—patiently stacked in long-forgotten metal recipe boxes, remained the only hard paper evidence of the dinners she made for us and the memories we shared around her table. As I shuffled through them, I saw that her gift, as a frugal, widowed mother of three, had been to cook as if there was no end in sight to the food. As if it were bottomless. That kind of irrepressible generosity couldn’t be stoppered; it was still flowing like a slow leak through my mom and me.
Despite what Addie said about cooking being a waste of time, she slipped it to me that she believed the reverse to be true. Her surliness was the key: If something deep down inside her hadn’t known that all her cooking had been worth it, she wouldn’t have brought it up.
12
THE OLD TIME OF MY YOUTH
That summer, I packed up my life in Minneapolis and moved with Aaron up to Two Inlets for the gardening season.
We took Highway 10 north, chasing and racing trains the whole way. Driving the 1973 Buick Centurion, we were soap sliding in a bathtub and felt like we owned the road—two clichés that rightly describe how those old boats make you feel. Both wide and long, the Centurion had aerodynamics designed for road tripping in the pre-air-conditioned era. Even with all the windows down, the wind just gently sniffed at the very ends of my hair but otherwise left me alone. In a car like that, dignity rides on the open air. We could smell the muggy musk of the corn in the fields the whole way up.
By the time we arrived at the little house out in the forest, the sun had just sunk, taking with it all possible light. Without any electricity, the night sky covered us like a heavy black quilt, and wouldn’t pull back its cover until dawn.
Twenty-five minutes from Park Rapids, our hometown, the place was, as they said locally, “out there.” The bark of the nearest neighbor’s dog was just a muffled bok in the dark; the moans of the wolves sounded closer. The clucking of the wood frogs out working on the creek, a concertina of mallets knocking on hollow logs, was deafening.
Parking in front of the house and leaving the car lights on so that we could see, Aaron and I made our way down the hill to check on the small fenced-in garden that we’d planted over a weekend a couple of months back. Maybe it was beginner’s luck, or the pent-up minerals in the freshly turned dirt, or a gracious pattern of summer storms and heat, but the plants towered over the fence. The tomatoes were unrecognizable from the baby starts we’d planted. Aaron lit a kerosene lantern and leaned it into the mass of vegetation. The tomato foliage had grown into itself, working its limbs into knots. It smelled like a pungent mix of green grass clippings and wet locker-room floor, like nothing I’d ever encountered before. Miraculously, shiny green tomatoes hung heavy on the vines. The cucumber plants had fuzzy, pointed leaves, skinny limbs with prickly caterpillarlike fuzz on them, and, cooler yet, fully grown cucumbers. Pickle-size. I reached for one, surprised by the sharpness of the short quills cov
ering the fruit. The pepper plants hung with pepper lanterns. The beets sported crowns of greens. The peas had pods on them. And on and on.
At a time when everyone wonders what a young college graduate will make of her life, I moved to the woods without any amenities. This was not the bucolic woods of the East Coast corridor, managed for generations and planted with cows, but the ten-acres-and-a-trailer backwoods that surrounds my gritty northern hometown…This was like hitting a big fat pause button. There was to be no big-city career in my near future, no immediate upwardly social movement.
My mom and most of my friends considered my move to the woods to be a phase, as they’d never known me to willingly take a walk on any kind of dirt path, beaten or not. It was pretty much the most unexpected move I could make—and I knew it. That was the part that thrilled me. Walking to the outhouse under the cover of a night sky so tarry that the white roll of toilet paper actually glowed only heightened the audacity of it. I felt as if I’d just made a tremendously exciting wrong turn, onto a tiny road, in the pitch-black dark.