Food Memories

Excerpt from Interview with Ashley May, Lacey May Jackson, and Suzarn

Q: You mentioned cakes, so was that your grandmother’s thing? Baking?

A: Yeah, she's a cake baker. She never really made pies. I remember her making banana pudding, right? But mostly she was like a cake maker, and she wasn't a from scratch cake maker. From her, I learned how to doctor up a Duncan Hines box with like replacing the oil with butter, replacing water with milk, right? And like adding all these things to it. And, I actually inherited her Kitchen Aid stand mixer. I left it in Los Angeles, because I could not risk it getting broken traveling with me to the East Coast. But it was the same stand mixer that we use together. And, like I have all of her recipe clippings. I have their.... She had a famous Madeira wine cake and so I have a copy of the magazine where I believe she got the original recipe from, and I have, like one of the community cookbooks, which I also inherited from her, where she put that recipe, her Madeira wine cake recipe in. And then, when my sister got married, I actually gave her the original handwritten card, because that was my sister's favorite cake that my grandma made. When you are holding like archival documents for your family. I think part of being the person that holds the memory is that you have to know, like what is not yours, and what maybe has meaning for other folks, and so I really felt it was important for her. I didn't love Madeira wine cake, but I made it with her. But as like my sister, this is something that could be special for her. And so yeah, so I'm just like, I just love her cake. She always, when you when you walked into her house. So, she's very similar to you, Dr. Reese, in that, like my mom and grandma and my grandparents live on the same property. But my grandma is not in her home right now. She's upstairs at my mom's house. They have a triplex, and so she is also displaced in a way, from the kitchen, and where she did all of her work. And so, when you would walk into her home, like she would say, she would like greet you. She always kind of like, said hello, in a singing voice, I remember. And she would always have a cake on the… on her counter in the… it was either the glass dome or the plastic dome. There was all… it was like she baked every few days a cake. And so that was like one of my core memories from her.

B: I’ll just share the whole, how my mother went to box and not scratch. My grandmother, her mother was a pastry chef untrained, but she cooked a dessert every other day of the week. One day it would be a cake, the next two days it might be a banana pudding, then another two days it would be a sweet potato pie, then another two days, it might be coconut pineapple cake. And my mother… Unfortunately, my grandmother was a very particular cook. She didn't like anyone in her kitchen, and, like your grandmother, we had to actually disconnect her stove because my grandmother had Alzheimer's as well, because she wanted to cook continuously. We found her purse in the oven at that point, at the end of her life, when she had Alzheimer's. So, my mom unfortunately did not pick up those recipes from her mother. But my mother was a different type of cook. She would probably do more exotic cooking or gourmet cooking. She had a AA degree in nutrition, so she was thinking of those things, more or less, and my grandmother kind of kept those things top secret, but my mother's sister, who's 7 years younger, seemed to be able to insert herself in the kitchen, and she picked up some of the skills from my grandmother. I almost think that my mom just wasn't that interested to tell you the truth, at that time in her life, where her sister is, and she's no longer cooking. She's in her eighties, but she picked up where my grandmother left off. And I have to tell you some of the moments when I'm cooking myself, my grandmother's voice comes to my head. She will tell me: “stir this way. Okay, when you make those pancakes, make sure you get those lumps out. You add a little water at a time.” And that's what she taught me. So, as she got older, she became more tolerant of others being in the kitchen with her.