Médea's Recipes for Life

The book was waiting where I left it when I came home from the funeral: on my kitchen table, wrapped in brown paper and tied with a red velvet ribbon. My grandmother never wrapped gifts like that. She preferred wax paper and flax string, that could be repurposed later like leftover stew.

The lawyer handed me this book after my grandmother died. He said she wanted me to have it. Her recipe book.

When I untied the ribbon, I found a fat book under the packaging with cracked spine, stuffed with so many pages it barely closed. It still smelled faintly of her house — laundry soap, toasting paprika, and the faint trace of smoke.

The pages were thin as onionskin and yellow like sun dried apricots, their edges smudged with grease. She pinned postcards inside and taped pressed flowers over old photographs — some with faces scratched out; and left almost unreadable instructions on the margins like "Don't salt the soup if you seasoned it with your tears."

I found the recipe of her plum dumplings folded inside a funeral card. Some pages hid half a century-old breadcrumbs, fingerprints preserved in cinnamon powder. Others were stuck together by mysterious stains - perhaps, my grandfather's home made wine.

It wasn't a recipe book, precisely. This was an atlas for her life.

There were entries from different decades, though the pages were rarely numbered or dated, but each moment clearly held significance to my grandmother. And to every entry, she paired a recipe. Some were her own inventions, others were traditional family recipes with her own additions.

Before I even read the first page, I knew this book was going to take me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. But I hadn't cooked in months. Not since I left my husband. Every dish I made reminded me of him. Every flavor triggered a memory I rather forgot. Ordering in was more easy.

Life tasted dull when I wasn't having a panic attack. I moved through my days like those half-erased people on my grandmother's photographs — present, yet unrecognizable.

I wasn't myself anymore, but I could learn who she had been, this woman we never quite knew. She had always been some kind of enigma for us, grandchildren. We didn't know much about her or her life when she wasn't our grandmother.

Her funeral was the first time I'd left my apartment in weeks. But this book promised to take me somewhere far, without having to leave my bed.

I wasn’t ready to admit it then, but I really needed to get directions in my life. My grandmother must have known this long before I did. The first entry I read the next morning felt like sign. It was about her first heartbreak, clipped to her plum jam oatmeal recipe.

Her ornate handwriting went across the margin. "Something to make when you can't bare to cook", it read.

My grandmother never mentioned her first love by name, but her pain echoed through every line, stuck like burned sugar at the bottom of a pot. When her suitor choose to marry the neighbor girl, she got herself through with this recipe, so why couldn't I? This one can't be hard to prepare.

Before my brain could even register, I was out of bed, pulling a small pan from the drawer. My hands automatically reached for the ingredients, and performed the movements from muscle memory. Within a few minutes, I was sitting on my couch, crossed-legged with my grandmothers dairy on my lap and a steaming bowl of oatmeal in my hands.

I even had one last jar of her plum jam — sweet and tart, just like my grandma.

The oatmeal warmed me from inside out as I read. Each page unfolded a secret part of my grandmothers life, a fragment of her personality I had no idea of.

I didn't know she owned a pair of red T-strap shoes like Dorothy, except they didn't sparkle. In my memory, she always wore simple, practical clothing in 'old colors' like black, grey and brown.

I thought she never left the village, yet her was the evidence that she traveled to Transylvania several times, and they went to Vienna for their honeymoon with my grandfather.

I promised myself I’d read one entry a day, though I certainly didn’t intend to cook the recipes. While for me food is simply food—pleasure, hard work or at times comfort. For my grandmother it was something else. She took cooking to the level of art. It was her magic.

The next morning I woke to the sound of rain slicking the windows. I've slept badly —again— but maybe not as badly as usual. My eyes drifted to the heavy diary. I reached for it and started to read. And just like the day before, as if she knew exactly what I needed , the next recipe read: 'Storm soup'.

The ingredients list was unfinished, the instructions written with crossed-out phrases like she was inventing it on the spot. I knew this soup well, but had never made it myself. It fit perfectly the roaring weather. Once again, I had everything required.

The recipe was clear enough, but her note was somewhat cryptic. With tiny letters scrawled with red ink something that seemed to be: "The storm twisted many trees out, the river flooded the entire street."

But there had never been a river in our village.

Yet, a photo was clipped to the page, facing towards the paper so first I couldn't see it. When I turned it over, I recognized my grandmother — young, with her hair pinned up messily, her trousers rolled to her knees — standing in her flooded kitchen, smiling as though chaos was just another ingredient to spice up life. A note below read: "When it rains, it pours sour cherry liqueur."

My chest tightened. I remembered my own storm, but I wasn't smiling through it. My relationship that was meant to be loving and caring slowly turned to emotional erosion. My husband made me feel small, and insignificant, by the end I questioned my own mind and memory. And yes, during that time I reached for my grandmother's sour cherry liqueur more often than I should have.

Later I decided against myself, and made the soup.

The steam fogged the windows, until I completely forgot about the pouring rain and the wind ripping the trees canopy on the other side of them. I cried while chopping the onions, and it felt like the first honest cry in many moons.

The soup didn't taste how I remembered it. Something was missing. Maybe the bay leaf? It was listed, but never mentioned again. So was the wine. Suddenly, I knew what else was missing: sour cream.

In my grandmother's house, every paprika based soup softened with sour cream. I wanted to correct the recipe, but I didn't dare to write in her book. I looked at the photo of my beautiful, young grandmother and tears flooded my eyes again.

That day I couldn't stop crying. I woke crying the next morning as well. Until I opened the journal again and the entry hit me like a slap.

My grandmother wrote about the year she left my grandfather for three months, carrying one child on her hip and another in her belly. Something no one in the family ever mentioned.

She describes a fight started by her sister-in-law, who I always knew as someone who loved to instigate a good quarrel. She spread a rumor in the family, saying that my uncle wasn’t my grandfather’s son; therefore, neither was my father, the baby on the way. Since half the family lived in the same street, gossip traveled fast.

My grandpa sought reassurance, so he questioned my grandma about it, who took this as a sign of mistrust and left. She detailed her long walk to the bus station, pregnant, carrying her bags and my uncle on her arm. She wrote about her inner battle of making a decision no one understood.

Between the pages she folded a recipe about a cake she didn't even name. She only labelled it with a side note on the margin again, "for when you must go". And below another one: "Leaving sometimes is braver than staying."

It’s a simple loaf cake with citrus zest and two surprising ingredients: Lady Grey tea and a small pour of brandy. "Just enough to remind you you’re alive", she added.

I imagined her baking it for herself for the road, I knew immediately that wasn't it. She baked it for my grandfather and left it on the table before she walked away.

Entry after entry revealed those months of her life. My grandmother struggled a lot, but still decided to leave and didn't return for three months. She had to listen to her intuition to survive. My grandpa was clumsy, and easily manipulated and couldn't stand up for her against his mother and sister. Bless his heart, he was such a good person, but not one of strong will, we both agreed in that. My grandma only returned when he pulled himself together and went to get her, and promised to stand up for her and their children.

Her story made me realize that leaving my husband when he hit me was not cowardice, as he claimed, but courage and very much needed for my survival. Staying would have hollowed me out completely. Maybe even killed me.

My grandmother always told me to keep Lady Grey tea at home. "You never know when you’ll need it", she’d say. I used to assume she meant unexpected guests. But now I understood. You never know when you need to go — and bake yourself a departure cake.

After that, I didn’t read for days. I needed time to let everything settle — like broth thickening when the stove is off.

I wished the only inheritance was the pair of golden pearl ear-clips my grandmother gave me not long before her death. When I opened this book, it started something within me.

I haven't felt like myself in a long time, but these recipes brought some fragments of me back— not entirely, just enough to start to remember. And I felt less alone now. Reading my grandmothers stories made me feel like we were walking down a similar path, and we shared our struggle.

When I finally returned to the journal, I reached a page entirely filled with pressed poppies, thin and fragile as rice paper. Beneath them, a short paragraph: “The heart is a kitchen. It burns, it transforms, it feeds, it creates. Be patient and always add the secret ingredient. Cook with love.”

The recipe was so small, it almost looked like an afterthought: "poppy seed tea for luck, love and safety".

I remembered this one, too. She used to brew it for me on sleepless nights or when winter crept too close. She warmed up some milk on her old wood-burner stove, stirred in two heaped tablespoons of ground poppy seed, crashed two pods of cardamom in it and sweetened it with honey from the forest.

As I sipped myself to sleep, I could feel her arms around me, snuggling me tights as she used to when I was a child. I never felt more safe then in her arms but in that moment, I felt it again. Safe to trust myself and life, and safe to finally get out of my cocoon and dip my toes in the ocean of life again.

By the time I reached to the end of her diary, I've cooked myself through almost every recipe, and begun to taste my way back to myself. I was afraid to turn the last page, because it would mean the end of it.

But not this time. The last page was left empty, with only a single line written on the top of it:

"Bake your own bread."

Was this a note to herself? Or to me? I never baked bread in my life. But this empty space felt like the last connection to my grandmother; like an invitation to pick up where she left off and start a new tradition by continuing her work.

I went to the supermarket and bought some flour and yeast. I had no idea what I was doing, except that traditional bread required only four ingredients. I cleaned my kitchen table off, rolled my sleeves up and started to mix and knead.

The room warmed as the oven heated, my t-shirt dampened with sweat, and my cheeks rosy. I barely left the house in months, I even ordered my groceries to my door. I hadn’t exercised in months, the simple moves of kneading the dough felt like a gym workout.

But I was enjoying it. For the first time in a while, I caught myself in the mirror with a smile on my face, my heart pounding in my chest.

When the bread finally came out of the oven, I tore a piece off and ate it right away. It was steaming hot, and slightly burned my fingers and my tongue, but I couldn't wait. It wasn't a pretty bread, nor a particularly delicious one, but it was my bread and it made me feel alive again.