The first recipe I ever attempted was Baked Alaska. I was eleven.

I’m not sure how my mother conveyed that she didn’t want to teach me how to cook. It was more implied than directly stated. I understood her meaning in the same way I understood that I should not ask why, unlike my younger, fair-haired brother and sister, who looked nothing like me, I was born in a town four hours north of our home in Hanford, California.

My mother made dinner every single night. We didn’t eat out. Ever. I grew up on sixties Midwestern food, colored by my mother’s aversions and preference. She loved her meals fiercely, but anything could be ruined by a bite of shell, bone, or gristle. No one likes biting down on whatever reminds us of our protein’s genesis, but for Mom it ground the meal to a halt. She preferred everything as processed as possible.

Disclaimer: When I was a kid, Hollywood had me believing that The Typical Grandmother was, among other things, soft-spoken, petite, and cute, with an old-lady name like Alice, Betty, Dottie, or Mildred—Millie for short. She played Bingo or canasta, spoke of the days when a soda cost a nickel, and baked cookies better than Betty Crocker.

Mine was not like that.

Last January, I googled couples’ classes NYC, confirmed macarons were gluten-free, and booked me and my wife a chilly, late-night adventure in the East Village.

Jessa has always fed us. Her friendship set the table, asked us in, kept the bowls full. For decades she has reminded us that nourishment is more than survival—it is comfort, it is delight.

On an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.

I grab a blue-and-yellow rip-stop plastic tote with IKEA repeated up its handles. A worker greets me. Other customers disappear on their way to the ballroom. No thank you. The bag is for show. I don’t need any help. What I came for does not appear in any catalogue. I take the escalator past a miniature farmhouse with its candles, books, and modular kitchen, the promise of all needs met. It recedes below me as a black and white mural of a smiling face invites me further, all the way in. It will be wonderful! The white teeth beckon.

It’s December 1999, and the world hasn’t ended yet. The dreary weather reflects the pit of dread in my stomach, and nothing tastes right. My mother pulls down her largest pot from the top shelf of glory, and she shines it for show because today is the day.

Tucked between the food-stained pages of my old Betty Crocker cookbook is a handwritten recipe for meatloaf. It’s written on the back of a menu from Gustaf Anders, the Swedish restaurant in Southern California where my stepbrother, John, once waited tables. It was 1992, I think, and John and his Norwegian wife were in the middle of a divorce. Or maybe it had already happened. We were drinking a lot and smoking weed in those days. We had flown back from Norway together, drunk for the entire fourteen hour flight from Oslo to Los Angeles, with a stopover in New York for Customs. I think it was New York; I was in a brownout then. The valium and booze had performed their customary magic. What I remember: putrid green cinderblock walls and men in uniforms. Our bags were screened and some item was questioned and we almost missed the connecting flight. We reeked of Marlboros and sweat and Kahlua. We’d drunk the liquor cart dry.