two grandmothers and an act of love

Life is hard. We have to nourish ourselves to function, but also to live. Often, we have to nourish others, and for some this can be a pleasure as well as a necessity. When I’m tired, and soulsick, taking time to nourish the bodies of those I love (myself included) can itself become the healing I’m in need of. While I love to do this through cooking, nowhere do I feel more connected to the past and future than when baking. It’s transcendental, man.

Here’s a story of two grandmothers. My Irish grandmother Sheila had to take care of her mother and siblings from the age of sixteen when her father died of cancer. She worked for a mean garage owner who made her stand handcuffed to the till. When she took time off to sit the civil service exams, he fired her. She passed the exams and worked for the Home Office, only to be fired without due process when her brother, sister and fiancé were arrested for alleged involvement in an IRA campaign. This was London in 1939. She ended up moving to Ireland, marrying my grandfather and becoming a housewife. In fact, she became a baker.

They were a working-class family, better off than many, though still affected by post-war rationing – my father remembers orange juice concentrate being carefully divided into egg cups for all seven children to enjoy. Times were hard, and women were expected to keep a home while relying on an allowance from their husbands. My grandmother laboured, and laboured, and her arms grew strong. She cooked, she cleaned, and she baked. There was always something waiting for growing, loved children to enjoy as a treat.

Many of these recipes were my starting point as a young baker, my fascination with our family history and the grandmother I never knew permeating the magic of the handwritten ingredients lists, copied out by my father into a fading orange notebook. My father would often reminisce over the magic of these recipes – baked Alaska! – and recreated treasures from his childhood for us to enjoy. Gur Cake, coffee biscuits, Dutch apple cake. Very quickly, I learned them myself, and over the next twenty years or so, discovered my own capacity for perfecting a recipe.

Not everyone is a baker. It takes time, and very real physical labour, as well as mental calculations, a sense of balance, an ineffable sense of what works with what. Like all skills, it takes some failures and a certain resolve; it takes knowing oneself and what you’re willing to do, or forego. Everytime I try to bake without having some sense of mental balance, it turns out wrong. In the Mexican novel Like Water For Chocolate, the protagonist’s cooking is infused with her emotions, inciting erotic passion one day, making people sick with her sorrow the next. It really does feel like that sometimes – every bake is imperceptibly infused with all the micromovements of my body and mind at the moment of its creation.

Perhaps that is why baking is such an act of love. My Peruvian grandmother Clarisa became a mother very young – today she would be considered a child bride. She didn’t have the chance to really live her youth, and her children felt more like brothers and sisters to her. She struggled to give them the love that they required, though I’m sure she also worked herself tirelessly in the home, trying to keep everything afloat. Living in London, I didn’t have the chance to develop my relationship with her in anything other than starts and bursts, occasional phone calls and a long-distance family history project.

The last time I saw her was in 2018. It had been a decade since we’d last spent time together, and she didn’t recognise me. I went to the supermarket in the tropical mountain town where she lived and picked up small, pink, apple-flavoured bananas; chocolate; flour. I opened the decades-old oven and evicted a family of cockroaches. Using a door to keep its broken cover closed, I managed to bake, from memory, a simple banana bread with chunks of dark Peruvian chocolate. She liked it, and I saw on her face a smile that was often hard to catch – the kind of smile that made her face look soft again, almost like a little girl. The smile that came when listening to old mariachi songs, or remembering a treasured memory.

To nourish others, and so to nourish myself – that is why I love to bake. And sometimes, it’s another good reason to love myself.