There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of cheesecake recipes on cooking websites, Instagram profiles, and YouTube channels. I have at least two cheesecake recipes in cookbooks here at home. But every so often, B and I reach out to her mom to ask her to walk us through her cheesecake recipe - not because we don’t trust the recipes we can find online or in books. We hop on the phone and ask her to walk us through the same recipe she has sent a dozen times. Why? Maybe as a way of coming home, even when we are, in fact, thousands of miles away.
When I was living a much different chapter of my life, every once in a while, I’d call my mom, from whom I was often estranged, to ask for her chicken casserole recipe. Oh, I could make it in my sleep with one whisk tied behind my back, but I would call a few times a year to ask her to walk me through the recipe as if I couldn’t quite remember how to bring it all together.
Mom and I had a complicated relationship, to say the least. As a child, I asked too many questions, played with race cars as much as I played with Barbies, always had skinned knees, and preferred mud cakes to tea cakes. As a teenager, I rejected her Laura Ashley, Estée Lauder, and Oscar de la Renta preferences and instead gravitated toward tie-dye, Dungeons & Dragons, and the Grateful Dead. I was never quite the daughter she had hoped she’d get, and she told me more than once that the doctor must have put the wrong egg in her basket.
But about food, we could always connect. Even after I came out as a lesbian. Even after she would call me screaming about my destiny of eternal torment for “living in sin.” Even after we hadn’t spoken for years, and much later, even as her brain tumor claimed her mind little by little, we could occasionally shift into a relaxed, connected moment over a casserole recipe, or advice on the best way to keep my cast iron skillet seasoned, or how to get the tea just the right amount of sweet.
And now that she is no longer on this earth, my chicken casseroles really never taste the same. I can get every ingredient I need at a Fairprice a few bus stops away here in Singapore that I could get at the Murder Kroger on Ponce de Leon Ave in Atlanta. I can cook the chicken just right, sauté the onions perfectly, and blend the mix of creamed soups precisely - and still, something is missing. Black pepper? I remembered it. Eight ounces of sour cream? Yup, it’s in there. Butter-soaked stuffing mix on top? Oooooh yes.
So what’s missing?
The phone call. That moment in time when all the generational trauma faded and we found each other in the sharing of a ritual that we both knew was unnecessary - and wholly sacred.
So today, the season of coming home and family feasts, I’m sharing a few pics. The cracked cheesecake. The nearly assembled casserole and snapshots of the recipes, all stained with years of sharing what is real in life. I’m sharing the recipes, not because they are precious or secret or even especially impressive, but because recipes are how we reach for one another.
This is how I remember the people who fed me, even when we did not always understand each other. This is how I keep a thread stretched across distance and time and loss. A recipe shared is not just a set of instructions. It is a small act of connection. A way of saying you can come sit here with me.
So here they are. The recipes. The food.
Not perfect. Still sacred.
