by Nick Johnston, Sous Coordinator - St. Luke’s Kitchen
“Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor.” -- Jim Harrison, “Meals of Peace and Restoration”
“This is a hard place. God, it’s a hard place. But it wakes up every morning. No matter what you do to it the night before. It wakes up.” -- Jess Walter, “The Zero”
Photo by Airin Party
I was never very good at reading my grandmother’s handwriting. When I was a kid, her handwritten notes and postcards would arrive in the mail, and I would pass them along to my father to read them out loud. She wrote in a beautiful calligraphy — a dying art of sloping cursive letters that millennials like myself were ill-equipped to decipher. The one or two cursive lessons given in grade school were essentially useless. Some bang-up cursive seemed ineffective in impressing the young ladies of Ms. Lindsay’s 2nd grade class.
These letters from my grandma arrived in the brilliant dawn of the Email Age, when my love letters were more apt to be typed, thank you very much. So while I had trouble decrypting the lovely loops on the bird-themed stationary, I still hungered to hear what Grandma Ruth had to say, and my dad dutifully served as translator. She always wrote something about the weather, or her roses, or the approaching spring, or a visit she was looking forward to. I have a lot of these letters, recipes, and newspaper clippings stowed away.
The most valuable of the antediluvian artifacts my grandma had passed on to me was her recipe for banana bread. This recipe, along with a preserved and perfect loaf, I will perhaps one day submit to the Smithsonian. Its inclusion to the museum might tell Peoples Future a few things about the lives of Peoples Past. I imagine this loaf and recipe included in a large and fascinating exhibit devoted to explaining Life On Earth Before Covid-19. Students will hover about, notate on tablets, wonder about the coffee-stained recipe from a world where humans still shook hands and knew how to operate their own vehicles. They will also most certainly take pause to admire the graceful calligraphy of Grandma Ruth.
For me, now, waiting for a loaf of banana bread to finish in the oven, it is oddly comforting to imagine distant future school children gazing at my grandmother’s recipe. In a time of paralyzing uncertainty, there is comfort in knowing that this too will end, that history will do its thing, that the ache will dull with each generational wave. That the world will exhale this and that, spring will come again and we will rebuild tomorrow into something better. My grandma’s banana bread recipe calls for some seriously ripe bananas, or, in her words, “nearly rotten.” I’m also oddly comforted by easy metaphors and well-worn cliches these days, and it’s nice to think about something so warm, so profoundly simple and good, coming from something so rotten and dark.
In this time of unbelievable confusion and pain, we cling to the things that bring us comfort, and the most time-tested ways of feeling better is to cook and eat a good meal, to bake a loaf of bread. We are reminded of the meals we have shared with the people we love. We ease the sting of separation with delicious memories of dinner parties past. We honor those we have lost by cooking something that they have loved.
In this particular crisis, staying at home is in fact the heroic thing to do. While we are starved for connection in this time of isolation, it is nourishing to prepare the things that have been passed down to us on stained little pieces of paper, torn notebook pages, from our grandparents, our family, our friends. Our minds and bodies are fortified with the recipes of togetherness, and while we all have a little more time on our hands, we can hone these recipes for when we can cook and share them once again. When this is over the world will be hungry.
And for now we stay home. We clean up the backyard a little. We download Duo Lingo and give Italian another shot. We call our families and grieve the passing of our loved ones. We bake banana bread for our roommates. We turn up the John Prine. We rest inside stories of a world still breathing.
There is a letter from my grandmother I have been waiting to open. She passed away on April 2nd after a tragic battle with Covid-19. It has sat on my desk for a few weeks now. I have been waiting to open it for two reasons, the first being sort of morbidly practical, as this hellish virus can live on surfaces for a while. The other is just that it makes me sad still. I will open it soon, but not today.
Today it has been enough just to marvel at the cursive on the front of the envelope. The “J” in “Johnston” is particularly beautiful, two immaculate ovals that swoop bird-like into the o, h, and n, heading north to make the t, finishing off with an gracefully understated o, the n setting sail towards somewhere like the sun.
