My Grandmother and Julia Child

Before James and I moved ever-so-briefly to Texas, my grandmother, Lita (short for Abuelita because she's small and Spanish, but mostly because "abuelita" is a mouthful to say when you're three years old), taught me how to cook many of her special dishes. We're talking about everything from her traditional arroz con pollo to her sauce-drenched spare-ribs. It took us about three months to get through the catalogue as I could only go to her house one or two afternoons a week, but even as we were spending the time, I knew that this experience, the experience of cooking with her, was going to be one I remember for the rest of my life. 

At the end of the last recipe (chicken croquetas and sopa de pollo), she pulled out her favorite cookbook. Imagine my surprise when I read the cover, which was stained with sauce as any good cookbook should be. Apparently, my very nationalistic, proud, non-frills grandmother had based most of her cooking on recipes from Julia Child's classic, The French Chef. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but I was kind of shocked. I was even more shocked when she told me that it was a very good book and that she wanted me to have it. This meant a great deal to me - enough, actually, that I don't have words for how it made me feel, so I'm not going to try to describe it.

Anyway, I was browsing through her copy of The French Chef the other day, looking for souffle recipes (I'm obsessed right now), and a bunch of her page-markers and notes fell out. As I was putting them back, I found a lot of the base recipes for the dishes that I grew up with and I was struck by the fact that the reason I love cooking is because you can take someone's wonderful idea, and make it your own. Julia Child's beef stew bears only a passing resemblance to Lita's gisado, but I can see the basis for Lita's variation in the Julia Child's recipe.

It made me think about how my chicken soup has started to look less and less like Lita's Sopa, but I can always go back to her recipe and do it her way if I'm feeling a little homesick for my childhood. This is wonderful - a sort of metaphor for life. You take the examples of others and the lessons you learn early on, and build a foundation from them. Then you go out and live your life. But when push comes to shove, you can always revisit that foundation again, sometimes for the pure nostalgia of it, sometimes for deeper reasons. 

Even if I didn't love cooking this would be reassuring, but because I do, it's even more so. It's a tangible continuation of the experience Lita and I shared when I spent those afternoons with her in her kitchen, learning her recipes. Given that she's 91 years old, I'll take as much continuation as I can.