Everyday Magic
The day I moved into my first apartment I drove to the store to collect the essentials: flour and spices, fresh parsley, eggs. A fully stocked kitchen, I reasoned, works a kind of alchemy to make any space a home. It wasn’t until I put the groceries away that I realized I’d only bought ingredients. In my eagerness to start playing house, I had forgotten I didn’t know how to cook.
I stood with the cabinets open, looking for anything I could fix quickly. Pancakes? No recipe. Toast? No toaster. Finally I looked in the fridge. Eggs! I would make myself an omelet. Not knowing how many eggs go into a single-serving omelet, I cracked six in a bowl. The butter sizzled deliciously in the bottom of the pan. I ate that omelet steaming hot, sitting in a kitchen bathed yellow by the summer sunlight. Each bite felt like an arrival. “First apartment,” I thought to myself proudly as I chewed. “All mine.”
Food has always been a signal of home to me, a love language that speaks to my heart as well as my stomach. Eating together was the centering experience of my childhood, a daily ritual and pleasure. My dad’s meals are the ones I remember most vividly: roast chicken with rice pilaf, buttermilk biscuits in the cast iron skillet, eggplant spaghetti sauce made straight from the garden. Dad grew up working in his father’s luncheonette in Mount Vernon, New York. There he learned to make eggs any way imaginable and to speak the secret luncheonette code, turning orders into mnemonic devices. “Tuna tommy down!” Dad would call out as he heaped a scoop of tuna salad on to toast layered with thick slices of tomato. Hearing him describe those days always made me hungry.
It was my dad’s love of cooking and eating that led him to start gardening and raising chickens. I was three when he brought home a henhouse in the back of a borrowed pickup truck. We raised chicks in the family room that year in a wooden incubator fitted with a bare lightbulb for warmth. I delighted in their perpetually startled expressions. Once they started laying, it was my job to collect the day’s eggs. I can remember the soft thrill of pulling out a body-warm egg, the shell smooth and glossy. I learned to count this way, dipping my hand under the cloud of feathers, each integer something I could hold.
My dad liked to start his day with a fried egg sandwich, and sometimes he would give me a bite right from the center, the best bite: a perfect swirl of yolk, ketchup, and black pepper. I loved to listen to him flip the eggs and butter the toast. I cherished those early morning bites like they were love itself: warm and comforting, I always had room for more.
In those days, our neighbor was a fisherman. I remember them trading wares at the end of the driveway, a dozen eggs for a pound of fish wrapped wetly in paper. When he brought home sole, my dad soaked the delicate fillets in Dijon mustard and white wine and cooked them over finely chopped shallots. The fish was so light we called it “fluffy,” and it became a favorite meal of my childhood.
It was fluffy fish I remembered years later, standing in Star Market with an empty cart, wondering what to cook my sweetheart for dinner. I had spent my 20s learning that like my dad, I enjoyed making food for people. My jambalaya was a secret of the Patriots’ 2004 Super Bowl success. But it wasn’t until I met my future husband that I finally had someone to cook everyday meals for. Seeking inspiration one evening, I called my dad from the seafood counter.
I could hear him smiling as he suggested side dishes. Soon, I was calling about food regularly. We talked through tomato sauce and buttermilk biscuits, roast chicken and turkey soup. We discussed what to do with leftovers and how to make a meal out of whatever I already had in the house. The year I got married, Dad’s Christmas gift to me was a wooden box packed with recipes. He had written comments on each one, not just instructions but also memories, suggested menus, and techniques, everything he could think of to pass on. I felt like he had given me his very heart. The recipes include his notoriously bad spelling. My favorite mistake is when he cautioned not to overmix the blueberry muffins, because to do so “brings out the glutton in the flour and results in tougher muffins.” I haven’t mixed a muffin since without thinking about my inner glutton being brought out.
Over the years I have added new recipes, family favorites like the chicken marsala my husband says made him fall in love with me and my mother-in-law’s spaghetti sauce. The box is an artifact that keeps changing, a catalog of tastes I have offered and been offered. It reminds me I am someone who practices everyday magic: turning ingredients into meals.
In 2013 my husband and I bought a house with my parents and entwined our two families here in Harvard. We eat family dinner together every week, often made with ingredients from our own backyard. My dad is cultivating a huge garden and an orchard, and I’m raising a flock of chickens. Now, it is my kids who collect the day’s eggs. This spring, encouraged by a refrigerator full of eggs, my 10-year-old taught himself to cook. He is relaxed in the kitchen, curious and confident. I watch him slide a pair of eggs over easy onto the toast with a chef’s flourish. He cuts himself a bite, a perfect swirl of yolk with a shake of pepper. As he chews, he closes his eyes. I see a look of pleasure on his face I am sure he learned from me.
—Lucinda Bowen
Littleton County Road
