A woman's legacy...

I am at my mother's cooking dinner. It is a quick throw-together meal that we often do while the boys are swimming. Her kitchen is tiny, as condo kitchens often are, so we are cramped for space. As I am chopping garlic and onions, I am meditating on the fact that we are moving about in symbiotic fashion. I open the fridge, narrowly missing her with the door while she is hunched over searching for ingredients in the cupboard. She peels garlic and places it on the cutting board while I chop. Onions are frying away in butter, the garlic is sizzling - wordlessly my mother tips a small measure from her wine glass into the sauce. I acknowledge this with a quick nod. One for the sauce, two for the cook...

The kitchen, and consequently the whole apartment, smells positively divine - when the boys come in from the pool, I watch them pause at the door and take in the aroma. You can almost see them relax - the tension leaving their shoulders. The boys change and gravitate toward the kitchen, the most social room in any house. They snatch bits of ingredients from the various piles; they are too fast when I try and slap their hands away. Buns are cooling on the counter, fresh from the oven. Ryley and Lincoln love these buns. They are my grandmother's recipe and their taste and smell has been around my whole life, as well as my mother's. There is nothing better than when they are warm, smothered in butter (or peanut butter). I have to limit the boys to 3 each. My mother scolds me for this: "Let them have what they want Lisa - food is love." I roll my eyes - she was never this permissive with her own daughters.

Not only is food love, it is also a legacy. It is a way of remembering. The smells and tastes of these recipes transport me back to my childhood - to hot Saskatchewan summers sitting at a formica table, my legs sticking to the chairs, to grandmother's crystal dishes loaded with pickled vegetables, sweet jams, and finely carved ham. My grandfather loved her potted beef. She would cook it slowly for hours until it would literally fall off of the bone. Grandpa would fish it out of the stew and pile it on a fresh baked bun with a little bit of gravy. To die for.

I am working at mastering this dish because I believe it is the only thing really worth handing down to my children. Possessions gather dust, or get broken, or get lost - but food is for the living. It is a living reminder of the women that came before me. Great grandma Harris' bread recipe carries with it a story - a multitude of stories. She brought it with her from England to Saskatchewan as a young widow with 3 children in 1915 where she was to marry a homesteader named Charles Mackenzie, a man she had never met. My favorite story of great-grandmother Stewart (the author of the bun recipe) pertains to her vanity at having her picture taken for the first time with her six children. She had spent all morning pressing the children's clothes until they were starched to high heaven so that they would look smart for the photo. At the last moment, to her horror, she realized that she had not done anything with her hair. In a pinch, with prairie ingenuity, she removed the gloves she was wearing and tied them together. She then wound her hair around them, piling her massive curls into a bun. She looks formidable and proud in the photo.

My grandmother Colter would bake apples for us, as her mother had done for her, coring the centre and filling it with butter, cinnamon and brown sugar. But that is not what she is remembered for. She is remembered to this day as a hostess that we all aspire to be. It didn't matter what time we arrived at her home, we never saw her cook. I cannot recall a time, nor can my sisters, where we saw her harried running around the kitchen with pots boiling over. The notion of being seen preparing food offended her British sensibilities. We would arrive and she would be seated calmly in her high-back chair, the table was brilliantly set with china and crystal no matter what time of day. We would visit, and then almost as if by magic a meal was placed before us on the table. No effort, no fuss. The food was always perfectly cooked. We still marvel how she did it. Now, if we come into one another's homes for dinner and see the table set and the meal already prepared, we say: "Look at you go, Lois."

The meals are changing with this generation of women. Now my sisters and I share time-saving recipes, or meals that are easy on the budget. My sister Gayle has been invaluable to me in this regard, because as much was we think boys are huge eaters, three teenage daughters practically inhale everything before them. Wendy's sons do the cooking in her house - she raves at their abilities. We talk calories, contents, carbohydrates to protein ratios, yet the experience of cooking remains much the same as it always was. It is a gift we give our families. Good food, lovingly prepared.

I like to cook with my mother. She is free and spontaneous with her food and is never limited by a recipe. She cooks from the heart. As we all sit down to dinner, I wonder what, if anything, my boys will take from these moments in the kitchen. Will they remember the tastes and smells or the hotly debated politics and laughter? I wonder what my dish will be that continues on after me, and what stories they will tell...