When I think of my Grandma, the first memory that comes to mind isn’t a sight or sound or event, but the warm and welcoming scent of home-cooked meals. Hot bread. Sizzling bacon. Blackberry cobbler.
The kitchen was important to Grandma. It was the place where she put her heart. The product of her labors there were sustenance for the ones she loved. Like her, the meals she made were never ostentatious. They were practical, undecorated, unmolested by exotic spices. Ham with black-eyed peas, dinner rolls to sop up the pea juice, hominy, sweet Southern watermelon for dessert.
Grandma lived in a little three-room shack that was falling apart, tucked away in a corner of her sister’s property, which itself was tucked away in a corner of northern Louisiana. She rarely ventured out of that little house into the long, sweltering summers of the South, parasol in hand, preferring instead the comfort of her kitchen and her daytime soap operas. When special guests came, she would treat them with home-made tea cakes, an ancient recipe literally brought over by our forebears on the Mayflower, and bask in the glorious raves about how delicious they were. No one made tea cakes like Grandma.
She didn’t have a lot of cooking utensils or special equipment. There weren’t any sauté pans or food processors. Her spatulas and whisks probably dated back to the time when she raised my father. All of her pots were worn from long, expert use…
