In Death Do We Cook

Growing up in my household, my Grandma was our unofficial designated chef. Most of her food I loved, some not so much.

I remember her looking on in disdain at anyone else’s cooking, proclaiming often loudly and in earshot of the cook, that she would have produced much better fare. Even the seemingly mundane act of slicing ginger, no one else could do it right. Through all the phases of my experimental cooking journey, I think my ice cream phase was my favorite. One summer I made ice cream after ice cream. My favorite inventive flavor being fresh ginger and cinnamon. I would often enlist the help of my mom to slice the fresh ginger to add to the cream. As we sliced, my grandma would sit and observe, interrupting every so often to announce that she could slice ginger better, thinner and faster.

She often bragged about how my father’s parents came to visit us from Florida, and that they had loved her cooking. If this was true or not, I cannot tell you. I was too young at the time to remember if my Mom Mom and Pop Pop had truly enjoyed her cooking or if she was just weaving another thread into her shroud of lore which surrounded her, leaving an unmistakable air of magic around her.

The dish she was so proud of that she had prepared for her daughter’s in-laws was potato and apple salad. I'm not sure if I have ever allowed this particular dish to pass my lips. Just hearing about slippery mayonnaise covered apple and potato slices is enough to make me gag. I can’t imagine anyone enjoying such a concoction. But, then again, that Pop Pop of mine was famous for eating some stomach churning combinations. Having enjoyed pig’s feet, raw onion, and Limburger cheese sandwiches, mayo apples was probably no sweat to him.

My Grandma always wore a fabric apron that she would also cover with a plastic apron. Under her double apron armor and armed with her razor sharp cleaver and very well used wooden cooking chopsticks, she prepared for battle in the kitchen. Chopping, slicing, frying, steaming. The aroma of sesame oil, soy sauce, scallions, and ginger wafting around her, making her presence known and felt. As a child, I often parked myself at the kitchen table to watch this daily spectacle of magic unfold before my eyes. Sometimes helping to roll dough for 蔥油餅 scallion pancakes, or as Grandma said “tsonyoubean”, or wrapping over ripened bananas in spring roll skins to be pan fried for dessert.

Her most famous dish however was her Chinese stuffing, lovingly made every year for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Sticky rice, with Chinese sausage, shrimp, chestnuts, and mushrooms was frantically gobbled by myself, my parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles twice a year. Our biannual ritual of consuming as much as possible, because after her two rice cooker pots were empty, that was it until the next holiday.

At Grandma’s funeral, my mom wrote and read a piece about how Chinese stuffing was not just food created to nourish the family, but a tool to bind generations of family life and culture. Comparing Grandma to the sticky rice of the stuffing which holds all of the ingredients together, Grandma, by way of food, also brought all of us together.

It has been three and half years since her death. Three generations of her progeny still gather twice yearly to eat what is now called Grandma’s stuffing, thinking with every bite that she made it better.