suited our visions of ourselves as solid, grounded people who couldn’t be blown about in the wind.
10
THE GREEKS BELIEVED THAT a woman’s womb could spontaneously start wandering in her body, causing physical and mental problems. By the Renaissance, the wandering womb was considered the cause of more psychological illnesses than physical ones. One solution developed over time to keep the womb in place: a womb could not wander if the woman was pregnant. Some considered that the problem was that a woman’s energy should be focused on her womb and if she was not pregnant, that energy could escape to her brain. My mother no longer has a womb. My sister is pregnant. My youngest sister and I do not have children. My maternal grandmother bore one child; my paternal grandmother was mother to five. My great-aunt K. never had children of her own, but she wandered Central America with her own private pilot’s license, then cycled through Europe in 1950 with a friend. My father’s aunt Edna never had children. The family story is that her mother, Ida, had Edna sterilized in the 1920s under the guise of an appendectomy because she thought Edna too frail for children. I wonder if Edna ever knew the truth.
11
AGNES IS THE COLOR of risk, the risk of taking a chance on a thrift store skillet and entering a new world of wonder. I used to be afraid of cast iron, the idea that it is hard to use, hard to maintain, and What’s the point when Teflon exists? We grew up with aluminum and that’s what I knew: my grandmother’s WearEver became mine when she moved into assisted living and my mother’s Club is still in use after forty years. Cast iron—and Agnes—is nothing I know, but I find myself addicted. I think, If I can’t do it in the skillet, what’s the point? I learn how to bake cakes in the skillet, cobblers, pannekoeken, clafouti, eggs, hash, and the possibilities become delightfully endless. Building up the seasoning isn’t hard when it’s part of my routine: a wash, a dry, back on a warm burner to make sure the remaining water has evaporated, and then a thin swipe of oil. Agnes is now cured to the point of being indestructible and it’s good to remember that. Agnes is a delicious constant in a world where nothing makes sense anymore.
There’s a legacy to the cult of cast iron that I envy in these days of trying to understand cancer, a desire I have for specialized knowledge and not having to create a world from scratch, like someone has been down this road before, because the road less traveled is not always a path worth taking. I’m new to this cast iron world, my growing collection having come from thrift stores, colorful vintage Dutch ovens of varying colors and sizes, skillets like Agnes, but it is a world I want to understand, a community I want to be a part of. It’s the equivalent of being passed down a hundred-year-old pan with seasoning like silk, the kind of long knowledge that rings with the voice of a great-grandmother you never met, the flavor of old laughter and bright pride.
12
ANOTHER ORIGIN STORY: I’M standing in my friend A.’s bright kitchen in Ohio probably ten years ago now, a 1950s white rental kitchen full of Le Creuset color and a candy-pink KitchenAid mixer. I’m a little in awe, a little intimidated, because A. knows what she’s doing and I know only enough to be dangerous. We teach together, A., her husband, and I, and we live one street apart in this small town. She’s six inches shorter than I am, her husband six inches taller. We’re in our midtwenties with fairly fresh master’s degrees. A. is the friend who first brought me to the Toledo Farmers’ Market, the friend who once told me I should open a bakery called Cakes and Shit Like That. She’s the one who taught me that cooking could be fun, that it was not a betrayal of feminism, because who has time for that nonsense when you’re eating really good food?
A. is teaching me about cast iron and kale as we settle in for a girls’ night. Her cast-iron skillet heats on the stove, a pile of kale torn and piled on the counter next to it. Greens are not something I know, beyond the fragile leaf lettuce that my mother and grandmother would eat in a bowl with sugar and milk. A. pours olive oil into the skillet and adds a pat of butter. I will learn later that this lowers the smoke point of the oil, but at this moment, I don’t even know what a smoke point is. She piles the kale into the skillet, mounded beyond the sides of the pan, and starts to press it down with her tongs, then twists the seared greens. Press, twist, and toss, press, twist, and toss. When that entire mountain has wilted to a quarter of its size, she flicks salt and pepper into the pan, then finishes it with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice that sends up objection in steam. One more twist and she divides the pan between my plate and hers. We devour the kale in less time than it takes to prepare it. The butter and oil take down the bitterness, the bright of the lemon juice just enough to heighten the green flavor. It is this moment where I understand kale. Years later, I will swap kale for spinach in my favorite soups; I will add it to frittatas courtesy of Agnes as I teach my niece how to crack eggs. I will rarely have it fresh, but I always have a frozen bag or two waiting. I will sauté up fresh summer kale to eat with fried eggs, grateful that I don’t have to share, but still wishing I could just hop one street over to exclaim This is so good, you have to try this anyway.
13
AT HACKENMUELLER’S MEATS IN Robbinsdale, the smell of smoking meat seeps through the brick walls into the street. The door to the butcher shop is old wood, the kind that makes you believe in your bones that the small shop has been in business for more than a hundred years. There’s something here that rings of the 1960s, like the old photograph we have of my grandfather with his feet propped on his desk, horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. I imagine that man might have frequented a place like this, perhaps with my grandmother in a calf-length skirt holding my toddler mother by the hand. It is a satisfying image. The staff in their white aprons are energetic and knowledgeable enough that when I say, “I want bones for stock,” they tell me I have choices. As a vegetarian in a butcher shop I trust their expertise, because until today, I didn’t know the difference between stock and broth. I walk out with seventeen dollars’ worth of soup bones and marrowbones. Bones are not cheap. Maybe they shouldn’t be.
After we learned that embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma is a soft tissue cancer, one whose cells appear like the skeletal muscles of developing embryos, which is ironic considering the tumor developed inside her uterus, after the hysterectomy, after her first chemo treatment, after the failure of her antinausea medications under the doctor’s terse orders Don’t let her throw up, after several days passed before she could be convinced to eat anything, we wondered: Starve a fever, feed a cold, but what do we do for cancer? There is a desperation involved in feeding someone undergoing such treatments, not only because of the horror of it, not only because those chemicals change taste perceptions, but the failure to care for the most basic needs of someone you love so deeply is unacceptable. My mother’s palliative doctor tells her that dysgeusia is the technical term for food tastes like shit, but this information does not help, so he prescribes Ritalin to stimulate her appetite. We laugh, knowing how many of her fourth grade students were also on Ritalin. We learn that our friend M. survived chemo on mashed potatoes and ice cream; F. couldn’t tolerate sugar. My mother has trouble swallowing, complicated by a feeling she calls dead belly, like her entire midsection has filled with concrete, exacerbated by incessant belching, so my days are spent in her kitchen with the press of chicken under my fingers, the heft of beef bones, the slice and chop of carrots, onion, and celery, in pursuit of bone broth and a miracle.
14
THE YELLOW OF MY vintage four-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven named Estelle is the faded sunshine of summer lemonade, as viewed through a screen door from the distance of November. She is the first Dutch oven I found, the second of my cast iron collection, vintage Le Creuset like Agnes I could never afford in real life, sunny on a thrift store shelf for $4.99. I don’t know why I felt like she needed a name or why I thought she had a Count Basie vibe, a blues personality with a sassy grin, the weight of her so spectacularly solid and comforting, but she was perfect to attempt bone broth for my mother at a point in my culinary experience where I knew nothing about such things. I hadn’t made a soup from scratch, ever. The idea of a bone broth is to simmer a stock long enough—even up to twenty-four hours—to pull all the nutrients from the bones,