Lessons In Cooking, From My Grandmother

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

“You spend too much time thinking about food and wine.” This is what my grandmother said to me as she drove me to meet the Marin Airporter at the end of the summer I lived with her. I didn’t really know my grandmother before that summer, and it’s fair to say she didn’t really know me. I had somehow gone nineteen years with little knowledge of her beyond her professional accomplishments and the stress my mother often felt over their relationship.

Other women in my family I had known intimately all my life. It was my mother who made bread from scratch weekly and let me stand beside her with my fist-sized ball of dough mimicking her punch, fold, and turn method as I learned how to knead. It was with my great-grandmother Nadine where I learned how to bake all forms of pies, cakes, and cookies while she regaled me with Depression era conservation stories of a Prince who chose his bride based on who could scrape her mixing bowl the cleanest. Even my paternal grandmother cooked with me, albeit strange foods like neon green pistachio pudding salad and chipped beef and toast which I have never seen nor consumed anywhere but with her.

As for my maternal grandmother, since we didn’t even spend holidays together I didn’t have so much as a stuffing recipe to attach to her. What I did attach was the sort of fear and respect that comes with being related to a woman as fiercely intelligent, successful, and opinionated as she was. All I knew about her was really from afar. How she worked to get her doctorate in Humanities from UC Berkeley while raising my mother. How she often took off on her own for several week-long trekking and research trips in Spain with the approval of my grandfather. How later in life she managed to ride her Arabian horses, tend her garden, keep her figure, teach classes at Cal State Sacramento, write books, and still manage to throw dinner parties and socialize in her free time.

Those parting words from my grandmother were meant to let me know that thinking about food was not an intellectual pursuit in her opinion and therefore a bad use of my brain. The funny thing is that either because or in spite of this opinion, much of what I remember from our time together that summer involves food.

In spite of my grandmother’s disapproval of my mental wanderings, she had a way in the kitchen that I still envy. It is not that she was inclined to spend hours baking bread on the weekend or rolling out pie dough for a weeknight dessert. Rather, like with many aspects of her life, my grandmother could pull off simple dinners with what appeared to be almost no effort, meals that stay with me today.

What I learned about eating from my grandmother was the importance of “dining”, a habit I am sure was influenced by her time in Spain. This meant that when I came home from my summer job my grandparents always offered to have me join them for a cocktail on the patio. The poster children of self-control, this evening gin-and-tonic was not meant for getting drunk but as a way for us all to unwind from our day before heading inside for dinner.

The food my grandmother served was always simple but never ordinary. One night we might have steamed Dungeness crab with clarified butter and lemon wedges. Another night would be Petrale sole, a delicate white fish that she would dredge in flour and pan sauté, again served with little more than perhaps a sprinkling of capers and a squeeze of lemon. She made a dish one night that summer that she did bring back from Spain; a sort of tomato and chorizo stew topped with an egg served in individual dishes that would bake in the oven just until the whites set. And every day there would be fresh baked bread from one of the artisanal bakeries in the area, a simple green salad served in a beautiful hand painted bowl brought back from her travels to Italy, and local cheeses to nibble on while we waited for her to assemble dinner.

It was almost exactly two years after that conversation on the drive to the airport shuttle that my grandmother lost her battle with breast cancer. We may not always have seen eye to eye but whether she cared to admit it or not, food was part of her legacy as much as it will be part of mine. Every time I see my grandfather and we sit outside drinking our gin and tonics and every time I crack into legs of Dungeness crab and dip the sweet meat into drawn butter, I think of her. And when thinking about food means you are thinking about the people you loved, there is never enough time for that.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 2 pounds Petrale sole fillets
• salt and pepper
• 1 cup white flour
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup capers
• 1/4 cup chopped parsley
• 1 lemon, cut in wedges