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COOKING ENCOUNTERS
Lillian loved best the moment before she turned on the lights. She would stand in the restaurant kitchen doorway, rain-soaked air behind her, and let the smells come to her – ripe sourdough yeast or garlic, mellowing as it lingered. Lillian breathed in, feeling the smells move about and through her, even as she searched out those that might reveal whether the new assistant chef was still double-dosing the curry in the dishes. She was. The girl was good enough with knives, but some days, Lillian thought with a sigh,
it was like trying to teach subtlety to a thunderstorm.
Tonight was Monday, a cooking class night. Lillian’s students arrived with a variety of motivations, some drawn by a yearning as yet unmet to hear murmured culinary compliments, others trying to find a cook rather than become one. A few participants who had been given the course as a gift, had no desire for lessons at all, arriving as if on a forced march to certain failure; they knew their cakes would always be flat, their cream sauces filled with small, disconcerting pockets of flour. And then there were those students who seemingly had no choice, who could no more stay out of a kitchen than a kleptomaniac could keep her hands in her pockets. They fantasized about leaving their corporate jobs and becoming chefs with an exhilarating mixture of guilt and pleasure. They always came early and stayed late. If Lillian’s soul sought out this last group, it was only to be expected, but in truth, she found them all fascinating.
It was during her early years that Lillian discovered cooking. After her father left, housework became for Lillian’s mother a travel destination rarely reached; laundry, a friend one never remembered to call. Lillian picked up these skills by following her friends’ mothers around their homes, while the mothers pretended not to notice, dropping hints about bleach or changing a vacuum bag as if it were just one more game children played. Lillian learned, and soon developed a certain domestic routine. But it was the cooking that occurred in her friends’ homes that fascinated Lillian the most – the aromas that started calling to her just when she had to go home in the evening.
Lillian liked thinking about smells. She often remembered the time Margaret’s mother had let her help with a white sauce, playing out the memory in her head the way some children try to recover, bit by bit, the moments of a favourite birthday party. Margaret had pouted, because she was never allowed to help in the kitchen, but Lillian had ignored all twinges of loyalty and climbed up on the chair and stood, watching the butter melt across the pan like the farthest reach of a wave sinking into the sand. Then she gazed at the flour, at first a hideous, clumping thing destroying the image until it was stirred with Margaret’s mother’s hand over Lillian’s on the wooden spoon when she wanted to mash the clumps, moving slowly, in circles until the flour-butter became smooth and until again the image was changed by the added milk. Each time Lillian thought that the sauce could hold no more, that it would break into solid and liquid, but it never did.
adapted from The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
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