The Kitchen Forgives
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By Jordan Anderson
My food obsession began after my parent’s divorce. I guess it wouldn’t surprise you to read about yet another generation x cook who became interested in food after watching Julia Child on PBS, but here I am. Of course, I loved watching her do her thing, and as a kid who grew up with food insecurity and a mom who hated to cook, even the ingredients that probably seemed ordinary for most families still felt pretty exotic to me. Through the television, I was introduced to foods that didn’t come from boxes, jars, and cans, and it was so thrilling. I started checking out cookbooks at the library, trading in my regular fare of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary for “The Joy of Cooking” and “Marcella’s Italian Kitchen”. I would tear through “regular” books, but these cookbooks I read slowly and deliberately, saying the names of ingredients out loud over and over, even when I didn’t really understand exactly what they were. Honestly though, while the food might have been the thing that kept me watching, it wasn’t what got me hooked.
Julia Child messed up sometimes—that’s what got me. I know her mythology is so massive and so universal that sometimes we forget that what drew us in in the first place was her humanity. She dropped chickens, she made lobsters dance, she was clumsy, she was forgetful, and sometimes she even talked smack about her own food. She’d pipe out some mashed potatoes, hate the way it looked, scrape it all up and start over. I had never seen a grown up admit they were wrong or had made a mistake. I grew up with an extremely religious mom who believed very much in the infallibility of authority, so to see an adult get something wrong was a revelation. What blew my little 9-year-old mind even more was that she didn’t see her mistakes as the end of everything. The cameras kept rolling, the lights stayed on, and she just kept cooking—no big deal. When everything else in my environment screamed at me that screwing up made you bad, even potentially unredeemable, Julie told me that it was a totally normal part of cooking. The kitchen would never shun you for an over-salted soup or an under-cooked roast. You just started over again and did better the second time. No one was going to be destroyed at Armageddon for sloppy knife cuts. As long as there was food to cook, there were unending chances to get it right, and that was true for everyone. The relief that gave me kept me grounded when things got hard.
I don’t know if that’s the message Mrs. Child intended to send. I like to think she understood. What I do know is that for as long as I’m alive and able to cook, my love of food and the absolute sense of belonging I feel in my kitchen will be inexorably linked to her. We should all be so lucky to have such a legacy.
Jordan is a food and labor activist, perpetual volunteer-er for things, culinary school graduate, and owns a small personal food shopping business. She lives in Portland, Oregon and spends her spare time being a giant food nerd, consuming new cookbooks and food writing as if learning all the things might someday pay her bills.
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