As I wrote yesterday, I do think of cooking as a luxury that has been granted to me, one of those things that you had no right to expect, and yet you got it. So perhaps that is why I care, that is why I treasure the recipes that were passed on too me, and why I try to ask whatever recipe somebody has from his or her family. And understand when it is not given, but some vague excuses instead, “I don’t really remember the proportions” or “the ingredients are not to be obtained here” I understand. I see the glimmer of the eye, considering me as the intruder in a long guarded tradition. Why would I get to share their family treasures?
And then again. What if cooking is what you do when you are poor?
Nowadays I can go on and on, pretty much forever about the pleasures of rescued traditions, and the intimacy of cooking for those who you love. Somebody will read me and nod approvingly. All the same I bet that from the hundreds of books that have popped up in the last ten years under the name “cooking” there are quite some that would be way more eloquent than me on the matter. Perhaps it is a good thing to write about the other side of that coin.
Not that long ago I was running with a friend in the outskirts of Utrecht, running along one of those (at least in my perception) very north European phenomenon, the volkstuinen. Translated as people’s garden, what you are likely to find outside most cities are areas of the size of a park, divided in tiny parcels, about the size of a small garden. Each of these parcels, of course, assigned to a family. So the people that lives in a flat, or in a little house downtown, has yet a garden. They have always seemed to me between silly and cute, since I have never felt the need of a garden myself. So I believe I said something along these lines to my running mate. Cute, no? might have been my words between breathing. She said no. No? no. So we went on running.
Not cute at all, she said afterwards. Poor people needs them to eat, where I come from.
As a matter of fact, she told me later, that is why I hate cooking. It reminds me of the crowded flats, the smells of others cooking the same soup day in and day out. I don’t want to cook, ever. Being a successful professional means that I can eat out, or order my food. Not cook it myself.
And there you have it. All my memory-tradition-heritage fancy theories to the garbage in five sentences. How could I even begin to tell her about my grandmother cooking pasta herself, and how I remember her as a link in a long chain of valuable traditions… How can I indeed, if I also remembered, hearing my running mate, that my own grandma preferred the fresh pasta bought in the shop around the corner. It is always better than mine, she said, and we save the mess, the flour on the table, and the extra work, she said.
Traditions, or the past, are indeed more complex than our memories.