Cooking with Grandma

Back in ancient times, there were home movies. Families would bring a bulky 16mm camera (later, a Super-8) along on vacation and film the St. Louis arch, kids on carnival rides, Mom lounging in the pool. Elders grinning, shy and motionless, unaware that they didn’t have to hold still.

There was a similarity between the home movies of one family and those of any other. Everyone smiled and waved. There was the Alamo, the dog, the Eiffel Tower, the giant slide. Everyone laughed the picnic table. Kids made faces.

It became kind of a joke in mid-century culture: visiting another couple or family and having to endure their home movies. For the guests held hostage on the sectional, smiling and discreetly glancing at their watches, it was a hard sit. These grainy treasures were never as interesting, adorable, amazing, or hilarious as they were to the people who made or appeared in them.

In the past twenty years, a lot of poets have written about their grandmothers’ kitchens, and the flavors created therein. The trend is understandable. In these terrifying times, we crave comfort food, on the plate and on the page. Before public life and human contact were torpedoed by Covid and screen addiction, our interactions with real people, especially family, made us whole. Food became love.

Paraphrasing the late Johnny Thunders, you can’t put your arms around a memory — or an image on a 4-inch screen. There is a real longing for IRL moments that spin out in their own quiet, unedited rhythms, connecting us with what’s real. And what’s more real than Grandma?

But the problem with grandma kitchen poems is their home-movie sameness. Because they feel so warm and delicious to write, everyone is doing them, following a similar recipe:

Grandma Kitchen Poems
Serves 3 – 6 various purposes

1.        Serve up a few italicized food items that proclaim your family’s heritage.

2.        Describe the matriarch’s gnarled hands in loving detail.

3.        Sprinkle in her smile, her careworn apron.

4.        Season with your pre-verbal name for her and her nickname for you.

5.        Add a pinch of poignancy as she patiently teaches you the technique for making whatever-it-is, now an edible family heirloom.

6.        Frost liberally with the sweetness of unconditional love: No one cared more about you than your grandmother.

There you have it: a poem to make your family hug you. Even some journal editors will want to hug you, too.

Like other lucky people, I had happy moments with my grandmother in her kitchen. I watched her breathe life into recipes her own grandmother taught her before the family line arrived on this continent. Good for me. If I’m writing about this to preserve a moment of joy or familial pride for myself, I can tuck the poem in my drawer or send it out with my holiday cards to family. But if I want to send it out in the world, I should consider the reader, sitting patiently on the couch in my den, watching me get teary-eyed behind the Super-8 projector like Sparky Griswold at Christmas.

Thank the Muse, even the most tired cliché can be refreshed in the right hands. It’s hard to write a good grandma kitchen poem that doesn’t sound like myriad others, but it can be done.

Poets.org, which I read daily, recently posted Stephanie Colwell’s “Livestreaming My Grandfather’s Funeral.” Three lines in, we’re with grandma and her cooking:

“I want my grandmama’s soft-scrambled eggs
for breakfast, cat-head biscuits, cane syrup thick as any of us.”

I admit: Colwell had me at “cat-head biscuits.” I settled in.

In “Livestreaming,” Colwell goes beyond gustatory family nostalgia and taps into what makes grandma kitchen poems so symptomatic of our longing. The poem describes phoning in for a major family event, being there but not there. The food is what’s missing in a medium that delivers two senses rather than the full five that make experience real. A storm knocks out the wifi, and she’s cut off from this tenuous connection. She sits down to eat a good breakfast “that is not good enough.” The poem disconnects softly to conclude.

Colwell takes a well-worn device and makes it something deeper, more resonant. In allowing the shadows in, the poem achieves three dimensions. It’s a good poem, and I’m not just saying that because I love breakfast and cats and biscuits.