Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,85

since we were able to stand up on two feet and greet any stranger, guest, or friend who would arrive at our house. Her posture is still, at seventy-four years old, erect as a ballet dancer’s.

She leads us into the house and we are hit immediately by the luscious scent of our meal. She has prepared a delicious dinner, with meat—which is way out of her budget—and she has stayed up way past her usual bedtime to eat it with us at the well-set table. She makes apologies to me, her chef daughter, in advance of the meal even though I am certain we both know that I learned to cook, exclusively, from her. There are two chickens. She has splurged. She uses a shallow, oval, glazed clay baking dish that she has had the entire time I have known her. It is cracked in several places and glued back together in those same places. It now has the beauty of an antique. Its edges are black and thickened with accumulated cooked-on crust and its surface is bumpy and textured now from so many years of use. The chicken is perfectly roasted with garlic and rosemary and Dijon mustard and lemons; it’s the same chicken I roast at the restaurant and at my own home.

I have washed that baking dish carefully and dried it and put it away, properly nested in its pile, not casually and sloppily set down in an indiscrimate tower in the cabinet, probably thirty times in my life. Considering I haven’t lived with her since I was a twelve-year-old, when our family imploded from divorce and relocation, that is a lot of young handling of this platter. I am sure I am responsible for at least one of those glued and reglued cracks.

“There are no accidents,” she’d say, sternly looking down at the eight-year-old offender with the two broken pieces of some dish in her soapy hands. “Only carelessness.”

I admit I have said the same thing to young cooks at my restaurant.

I look around the house and see many things from my childhood that I haven’t seen in so long and that it feels good and sad at the same time to see. It’s a marvel to see the things themselves but I am also stunned by how far back in time I have to carry myself to when these things were routinely in sight. She keeps her dish soap—pearly white Ivory Liquid, the only kind we ever used in our house—in a good-looking old clear bottle on the sink ledge. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pot is on the back burner of the six-burner Garland stove. She keeps her coarse kosher salt in a wooden spice mortar next to the stove. She has beautiful red enameled tin cooking spoons that she has been using to stir food in pots with for the full thirty-nine years that I have known her. My childhood is a lot further away and harder to recollect, I notice, than it used to be. Everything in the room seems to illuminate just how many intervening years there have been since the dish soap, the ticking and winding of the clock, the clay oval baking dish in the soapy water, and the kosher salt in the wooden bowl were all backdrop to my daily life.

Her home looks warm and generous, picturesque, aglow with soft lighting, interesting old brass reliquaries from Greek churches, a wood fire burning in a cast-iron stove, dried hay and grasses hanging in artful but not cutesy-craftsy arrangements from the open rafters of her wooden-beamed kitchen. The old windup clock that we had in the house when I was a child, a heavy, warped black steel box with a white-enameled face and black-enameled Roman numerals kept ticking by a hammered brass disc that looks like the sun—the whole contraption looking like an instrument that Picasso might have made when he devoted himself to sculpture—chimes nine times, and she doesn’t even hasten us from the table. Michele raises his eyebrow at me as if to say: This? This is the snaggle-toothed, fire-breathing dragon you’ve been cutting off?

And he turns back to my mother, determined to enjoy himself, because he knows just exactly how to abandon me.

My most relieving, comforting experiences surrounding my mother are when strangers meet her and later say to me, “Wow. She is one piece of work.” I never feel embarrassed or defensive on her behalf; I feel, rather, relieved to have my impressions of her confirmed