Pulling the Trigger – the Real Meaning of Kitchen Inspirational

at my Mom’s retirement party at age 75

On Friday, I pulled the trigger on my NYU app.  I’ve been obsessing about this for a long time.  Searching for more enrichment and loving the learning curve I’m on, I began to think about a program that would provide more focus for my current areas of interest.

When I applied to Pastry School,  I felt I needed to take a step which would provide a healthy dose of street-cred.  Those six months working among mostly 20-somethings were wonderful – the eye-opening challenge I wanted on the practical side.  Cylinders clicking, I hopped a plane to Milan, Venice and Florence shortly thereafter in July 2011 with my kids.  The combination of my Pastry School experience and the amazing trip to these three cities pulled me fully into my disease.  The thirst was unyielding and I began my self-instruction in earnest after completing my internship.  I knew about the program at NYU but I questioned if this was more than I wanted to sign on for.  But, some hole in my belly about not having a graduate degree and the perfect-fit curriculum pushed me onward.  Last November I went in to the info session.  Again I was in a room with about 25 other 20 somethings, only a small fraction of the interested persons.  I eyed my peers – or competition.  Was this extreme folly?

I drove home with some strong level of conviction and began work on my essay.   As with much of my writing, I felt drawn to let it pour out right at that particular time.  I sat on this essay and fooled around with it over the last 3 months.  As the February 1 deadline approached, my stomach roiled.  Classes at night in NY?  Really, Marianne, what should you do?  But, with the encouragement of my husband and a good friend, I pushed ahead.  Even though the program director cautioned the session attendees not to apply unless dead-serious, I pushed.  I haven’t been to college since 1977.  But my Aunt didn’t get her Bachelor’s until she was older, like me.  She and I are born on the same day (Taurus the Bull).  If she can do this so can I, I said to myself.

Whether or not I get in, I’m happy that I at least applied.  For, along with feeling good about at least thinking I can do this, I got this essay down on paper.  Getting this to flow out through my fingertips was a good thing.  As I peruse the internet and learn from so many sites dedicated to food and the people and places creating it, I see that many are categorized as “Personal Blog”.  I guess mine is too – because all creative things flow from personal experience. And so, to my dear and wonderful Mom, I dedicate this piece:

The Link, aka the real meaning of Kitchen Inspirational:

Circa 1962.  A young girl is present in a dark kitchen.  She stands next to her Mother at the table and mixes cookie dough by hand with a wooden spoon.    Baking sheets and flour are all around her.  She stands next to a woman filled with kindness and love.  At this time she is not aware of the small ember that ignites there, but this scene becomes burned upon her memory.  There is much else to distract her, now and for many years.  While she mixes, she is only nominally aware of the many undertones in the house.  Most of them are dark, complex and painful and will emerge over time into major life-changing and heart-wrenching experiences.  They are like a gathering wave which will, years later, threaten to pull her under the water and hold her down till the brink of her demise.  And yet, at this moment of making Vanilla Rolled Cookies from the Woman’s Home Companion Cook Book, Circa1942, the tiny light that is formed creates an indelible link between the two generations, Mother and Daughter.  This light, this link, will one day form the passion of the daughter’s life and draw her forward and through the difficulty, her fears and horrific loss………

My love for cooking and baking began when I was a little girl. I made mud-pie cookies in the back yard on an old cookie sheet my Mom gave me to play with and adorned them with forsythia flowers.  We baked, side by side in her modest kitchen, and watched Julia Child and Graham Kerr in black and white in the 1960s.  I watched her bake and give, both to feed her own need for creative work and to be benevolent towards others who so enjoyed the fruits of her kitchen but didn’t know how or weren’t inclined themselves.  I watched how preparing and serving food to others fed her and gave her happiness.

And while, in the many years that passed, my Mom baked and cooked, she may have been unaware of how this vocation sustained and saved her on many a day.  It was a labor she could turn to and allowed her to suspend, if only for an hour, from the powerlessness and despair that was the reality of so much of her life then.  For those things she could not change, she asked for God to sustain her on one level.  And on a practical level, she persevered and used the fruits of her kitchen to show her love to others. That was long ago, and while I have loved to cook and bake for many decades, a multitude of other demands and interests kept at bay what would one day blossom into my all-consuming passion.

My current “state of affairs” really began in earnest on two separate days as I progressed through the nightmare that was my Mom’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease. As life had progressed from one family trauma to another, beginning very early on, I felt myself constantly trying to find a normal, and more than one moment of peaceful safety. But my Mom’s sudden illness was something  paralyzingly debilitating, on top of all of the other issues over time, as the one sure thing in my life was now threatened with certain, premature and a rolling demise.

The first day was when, at an Adult Day Center, Mom was given two eggs to crack into a bowl in the prep stages of baking a cake.  Mom was already on a road of descent that I was desperate to hault.  The aid placed the egg in her hand and she looked back blankly at the woman.  At that moment I saw that she had no recollection of this simplest of steps she had undertaken, merrily, thousands of times before.  Nor did she understand what the lady was asking her to do, even when carefully instructed so on that day.  She gazed at the woman in bewilderment.  The woman took the egg from her hand.  There were no words to describe the crushing blow I felt at that moment, as I knew my Mom, as I had known her before, was gone.  A few months later, I watched her again, her face blank, and realized that the “knowing part” of our lives together was over.  In despair, angry, broken and panic-stricken, I walked to my car in a haze.   I had two young children to care for and I knew I couldn’t break down now.  An outlet for my grief was dearly needed.  In the fifty feet between the door and my car, I resolved to start writing, about her, about food, and vowed that someday I would write a cookbook in her honor.  This vow and thread to an outlet, became my lifeline and saved me on that day.

I began writing in earnest then, amassing recipes and stories in a binder at my dining room table.  The Book was entitled Debt of Gratitude.  That was in the 1990s.  This particular book remains unfinished, perhaps because so is the story, but what was born was something greater and self -sustaining.

It wasn’t until  I sat down to write this essay, that it dawned upon me that there was an existential link between what my Mom had done in her kitchen and what had come to me in that moment of despair about losing her.   She had turned to her kitchen as an outlet for grief also.  It became her lifeline, one that allowed her to please and delight others.  Powerless to help an alcoholic husband who was slowly killing himself and marginalized by the grief of a handicapped child, my Mom had little latitude to move.  She took seriously her marriage vows and when she realized her dreams were not destined to be, she turned her heart to baking.  And, hence, the link.  Just as my Mom turned to her kitchen to save her, I turned to my kitchen, and supplemented it with a pen, to allow the outflow of great emotion, to save myself.  Over the past 15 or so years, my vocation has unfolded in earnest.  I now spend my days researching, learning, cooking and baking and traveling to learn about food.  What has emerged has been great delight, far from despair.

That I had not thought much about the origins of food cultures, particularly those of western Europe much before, is now completely puzzling to me.  That I had not yearned to travel to Europe as I do now, more than a few times before this, is baffling.  That I had not enrolled earlier than I did, in Pastry School, at the ripe age of 56, and less than a year later strode into a bakery to ask for an internship is puzzling.  Perhaps the clarity needed hadn’t come upon me yet.

In the process of grieving my Mom, and the loss of my Dad and Sister as well, I claimed for myself something to cling to, something to be only mine.  I saw in front of me the opportunity to learn about food:  how to make it well, how to explore countless iterations of it, how to understand the craftspeople who have and do their craft to this day in their villages in every corner of the world, how to learn some of their languages, and how to feel what they have and explore their connection between food and life-well-lived, to explore the origins of their cuisines, follow the thread, so-aligned with the economic, social and political conditions that inspires their plates.  Some people understand this instinctively, and just do it even though it is totally out of context with the fast crazy pace of the world in which we live.  Others, like me have grown into this passion later in life, and consider it to be one of the greater gifts gotten – somewhat serendipitously, as my hands-on parenting responsibilities and years of caretaking of others wound down.  Perhaps it was the first time since I was about 10 that I could breathe.

For many years now, I have been pulled into the kitchen and to the pen and to the keyboard, seeking a quenching for my thirst to both learn and create.  For many years I have been pulled to this book and that.  And lately, I have been pulled upon a plane or two, only to step down onto another’s soil, and smile with great and good feelings of abandonment and fulfillment at the same time.

And so, to honor the link with this woman who was my Mom, who for a thousand reasons so deserves to be honored and loved, and who had taught me to cook and bake and shown me the love and happiness to be reaped from the process, I now hereby apply to this program.  This step honors her and places me forward, in the hands of those who share my fervor, those who can enrich me and take me to the next level of my passion.

I thank you today for indulging me this story.

Marianne S. Hanley

still hear your voice, Mom:

 “Use your head for something other than a hat”.  as said by my Mom; with Michele and Me Circa 1959?