Stirring the Pot

On the practical magic of cooking and being fed.

Kitchen witch.

A lot of female ancestors came through this year’s Mother’s Day readings.

It wasn’t a huge shock. The deceased are more able to connect to the living when they already are on our minds. It’s why the recently departed can connect with loved ones so easily, often by messing with electronics and lights. The gravitational pull is still powerful, and gravity travels across all dimensions.

It’s a physics thing.

What did shock me were the two female ancestors who communicated via potato soup. One woman had lived her whole life in Derry, and she gave me a classic Irish recipe for her great-grandson, born in America long after she died. (The measurements—units like as much “as will lie on the head of a groat”—cracked me up.)

Another woman, more recently deceased, appeared stirring a magazine-ready potato-leek soup. My daughter knows the recipe, she said.

Her daughter did.

I remember less about my sessions than I do about my dreams, but details from both break the barrier of waking consciousness at the oddest moments. I’ve learned to pay attention when they do.

So it didn’t matter that I’d always regarded potato soup as a starchy mess, more sauce than broth. I felt grateful to these other mothers for what seemed like just the ticket for this still-cool May—a bolstering platform for the spring greens sprouting again from the earth.

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Time slows down in the kitchen, offering up an entire universe of small satisfactions.― Ruth Reichl

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Cooking is the best way I know to return to myself after visiting other people’s higher selves. It’s where spirit most effortlessly meets the corporeal, where creativity affords immediate rewards.

Though mostly I cook alone, I never feel lonely when I do it. I cook at least once a day, and the ritual grounds me in time and space. It conserves money, soothes the nervous system, and links to the seasons, soil, and sun—everyone who’s helped the ingredients grow, everyone who’s fed me or taught me to cook.

Truly, cooking is the epitome of practical magic.

Now I pulled out some cookbooks, did some googling, and put out a call for potato soup recipes on Facebook, that Gen X equivalent of a home-town newspaper.

There’s an elusive sweet spot between reinventing the wheel and cleaving too closely to received wisdom in the kitchen. Follow recipes too closely and you miss the fun of tapping into your own intuition. Eschew recipes altogether, and you run the risk of making meals that always fall into the same flavor profile. I had a roommate who used nutmeg so indiscriminately that the thought of her scrambled eggs still makes me shudder.

Alison Roman’s recipe looked intriguing, though it was alarmingly dill-forward. (Once dill is involved, that’s all you notice.) A kindergarten pal posted a favorite vichyssoise recipe; a former coworker linked to a recipe from his Swedish mother-in-law.

I took all it in, then laced on my sneakers

NYC greenmarket booty.

In May, the greenmarket is agog with alliums of all shapes and shades. I bought: ramps, purple onions, scapes, green garlic, leeks, fennel, mint, parsley, dill, thyme, chives, pretty little Yukon potatoes. Also: fresh dairy butter and bunches of spinach and kale.

I went a little crazy.

Then I bought some bacon, which I hadn’t craved since an ill-advised vegan stint in the ‘90s. (I don’t judge veganism for others; my brain and blood just require animal protein to flow.) On the way home, I picked up a bright, young wine at a friend’s store.

Back in my kitchen, I arranged this prose poem on my yellow formica table and purred, my permakitten joining me companionably. I’d done my due diligence. It was time to trust the Force.