Food is Love and Cookbooks are Sacrilegious

Lessons from an Italian Grandmother

My Italian grandmother taught me that food is love. She lived ten minutes from us growing up and never came over empty-handed, so my siblings and I were the recipients of an awful lot of love. And it was all from scratch. I don’t know if cooking from scratch is in every grandma’s playbook, but for my Grandma Lena anything else was practically sacrilegious.

Apparently, so was using a cookbook. Because the only drawback to having an Italian grandmother who cooked from scratch was that she never wrote down her recipes.

Learning to cook

As a young bride I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my fledgling culinary skills, so I gathered favorite recipes from both my mom’s and my mother-in-law’s kitchens. I figured those dishes would win high marks with my new husband simply by their tradition, even if they didn’t turn out just like Mom’s.

But I couldn’t make anything “just like Grandma.” I tried finding similar recipes in my cookbooks, but not being able to speak or spell in Italian severely hindered my research. (There was no Google Translate back then.) My mom couldn’t help because she didn’t make Grandma’s recipes either. If she wanted one of Grandma’s specialties, she’d call and ask her to make it.

When married life moved me beyond a ten-minute access to Grandma, I grew more determined to collect her recipes. One weekend I called Gram to learn how to make her lentils, a pasta dish she made often in my childhood. She used to stop by on Saturday morning with a kettle of it, and no matter how full we were from breakfast or raiding the cookie jar, we always grabbed our spoons and dipped right in. No plates necessary.

Pure, nostalgic comfort food.

Not that my own dear spouse would find the dish as comforting as I did. Back then he was decidedly not a fan of legumes and viewed meatless meals as a crime against society. But that day I was determined to make some lentils for myself anyway.

It’s not as easy as it looks

My first hurdle was that Grandma didn’t actually have a recipe, even in her head. She just combined things until they “looked right”.  Second, when I pressed her to guess at the amounts of ingredients she used, I learned she didn’t measure. She filled her pot with enough water, poured in a partial bag of lentils, and shook some pasta from the box. To that she added a bit of onion, a pinch of salt and a dash of olive oil. And a little tomato paste, she told me, “for color.” Finally, she sprinkled fresh grated Parmesan over the whole mixture. Simple, right?

Except, how was I supposed to reproduce that? In fact, how did Grandma reproduce that? But every pot she made tasted exactly the same. How could she be so consistent when she didn’t use a recipe?

Food is love

It wasn’t until I was cooking with my own daughter that I figured out Grandma’s secret. We were making scones for Sunday breakfast, and as she was struggling to knead the sticky dough my daughter said, “Mom, you are so much better at this than I am. I need to make scones more often.”

And I realized Grandma’s secret was time. She made those lentils time after time after time for over 70 years. Of course she didn’t need to remember a recipe, although she probably did have one, once. Of course she didn’t need to measure. Her hands, her movements, the mechanics of filling, pouring, shaking, pinching, dabbing and sprinkling were so automatic they required no thought.

When Grandma cooked, she didn’t think about the “how.” She thought about the “who.” She cooked those dishes, the ones only she could make, to bless her kids and her grandkids in a way no one else could reproduce.

So when I say that Grandma taught me that food is love, it was way more than a cooking lesson.