Laminations

A version of this essay came out a year ago as “Laminations of Grief” in Kitchen Work’s Home Cooking issue. It’s my first piece of writing to be properly published; so much of what I’ve written since this essay feels tethered to it, like it branches off of the themes within it, including grief, community, local food, and ultimately, what gives our lives meaning.

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“‘When shall we live, if not now?’ asked Seneca before a table laid for his pleasure and his friends’. It is a question whose answer is almost too easily precluded. When indeed? We are alive, and now. When else live, and how more pleasantly than supping with sweet comrades?” - M.F.K. Fisher, Meals for Me

There is a photo of my dad and me when I was about two years old: he’s holding me beneath the armpits, hoisted above his shoulders, next to a patch of corn in our Milwaukee backyard, demonstrating how high the corn had grown. That photo of the two of us replicates one of his mother sitting on her father’s shoulders in a cornfield on their northwestern Wisconsin farm, the tops of the corn stalks still high over their heads. These photographs create a sequence of remembrance, of preserving the family’s lifeways, which is also to say their foodways. 

My dad grew up in that same northwestern region of Wisconsin where the first picture was taken. Being one of eight children, frugality was central to the family’s ability to eat. It informed all of his consumption as an adult: the ways he treated food, and all material resources, meant conscientiously taking care not to waste. We did not always grow corn in the backyard, but there was always a vegetable garden as well as a compost pile. Creating layers of food scraps and autumnal fallen leaves, we reused kitchen waste and made our growing and cooking habits part of a soil-enriching process of regeneration. 

My childhood memories are full of time spent in the kitchen, whether preparing something for a special occasion, or gathering each night for a simple dinner at the kitchen table. Such moments have links to our frugal existence (such as homemade birthday dinners rather than at a restaurant), but that would dismiss the love and care that the family’s home cooking expressed. Until I was a young adult, living on my own, I don’t think that I truly understood how significant an influence home cooking and gardening had on me. I certainly had not fully grasped the significance of these traditions and lifestyles stretching back much further than my childhood, or to my parents’ generation—my placement of the childhood memories involving cooking or gardening were not yet as vivid as they are now. It was being able to cook for and with my friends in college (and feeling helplessly lost without being able to compost) that connected me with the seemingly simple form of generosity and expression of love that shaped my childhood. 

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When my dad was diagnosed with leukemia and first hospitalized, for eight weeks, it was the end of October, 2019. The scary uncertainty of his illness amplified November’s grayness and the increasing shortness of December’s days. When I think back to those first few months of his illness, my memories of the dark, cold walks home from work when I found myself in isolation with my sadness and fear sharply juxtapose times spent with friends, most often in our kitchens.

That autumn, my friend Sara and I signed up for a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm share: each week, we received a bounty of beautiful vegetables and eggs, all locally and organically grown and raised. The day of the box’s arrival, we made it a custom to cook dinner together, a pastime that Sara and I have enjoyed as long as we’ve been friends. This weekly ritual of commensality, of sharing our vegetables and a meal, was a source of vitality, antidotal to the sad sense of impending loss I was feeling: it rendered deeper connections to so much around me, the vegetables in my diet, the farmers who provide those vegetables, and the people I share them with. Having cooking, and finding community through food, to turn to was a significant reminder of what I hold important in life; the act of deepening friendships through communal cooking became a necessary form of sustenance.

Sara and I prepared each meal with excited spontaneity, figuring out what we would cook practically in-the-moment of doing it: quickly determining which combination of vegetables would work well in a soup, a hearty salad, or a quiche, relishing the simple-yet-enlivening traditions that Fisher writes about. In these acts of cooking, connecting and sharing, I temporarily shifted myself away from anxieties about my dad’s illness. Cooking gave me a refreshing sense of purpose in the midst of attempting to cope with something completely out of my control. Going home to Milwaukee for hospital visits usually involved cooking with my mom, often with the CSA vegetables I hauled from my home in Madison.

Throughout my dad’s illness, cooking proved a meaningful distraction, forcing my attention to shift from disease to the task of transforming vegetables, to remind myself of the things that bring me joy. One of the pleasures of a CSA box is relinquishing control over what produce you will eat to the farmers who grow the food and pack the box. You are also at the mercy of the seasons, and November in Wisconsin means the boxes arrive heavy with multitudes of root vegetables and brassica family members. That fall, in an effort to keep up with the influx of napa cabbage and carrots, I made kimchi for the first time, and marveled at the active, bubbling, life force of lacto-fermentation happening on my kitchen countertop. Sara and I made a vibrant carrot, beet and goat cheese galette, and tested our quickness and co-cooking coordination when layering phyllo dough and filling it full of sautéed greens and cheese to assemble a burek. I was so nourished.

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My dad passed away just over two years after his diagnosis, on the day after Thanksgiving. We had very little responsibility to cook for ourselves in the weeks after he passed away: Sara brought portions of everything from her family’s hearty-yet-elegant Thanksgiving meal, and later a fresh-baked burek; old family friends brought a hefty tray of mostaccioli, salad, garlic bread; we finished our meals with boozy pudding cups left over from a neighbor’s holiday gathering. The sharing of so much home-cooked food enveloped us in the generous traditions of our friends’ and neighbors’ lives. Our roles were not to be standing over the stove, but just to be sitting at the table, together.

During the weeks immediately after my dad’s death, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I watched a lot of the Great British Baking Show for the dopamine-inducing effect of seeing friendships form among the bakers while they whip up breads and pastries, struggling through tasks together and supporting each other in the process. Eventually, though, passively watching flaky tarts and moist cakes form wasn’t enough: What I needed was to be in the kitchen, making something.

And so, I turned to pastry dough, something that was approachable enough for me and a source of comfort. Tart dough is one of the first things that made me feel like a competent home cook when I was in my early 20s. After years of eating my mom’s spinach quiche (my childhood birthday dinner choice), I at first replicated the version that she makes, based on recipes for the custard filling and tart pastry in Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook. It became the dish that I first turned to for special dinners with friends and potluck-style brunches. I eventually branched out from that first tart dough recipe, but it gave me fundamental knowledge about butter, flour, and cold water, a deep appreciation for the flaky potential of pastry dough, and the confidence to explore pastry dough beyond its application in tarts.

I immediately took to the process of making puff pastry: I fell in love with the way the dough felt as it seemingly at once strengthened and became more delicate with each fold and development of new layers (in pastry jargon, this folding and layering is called “laminating”). While the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years remain a foggy jumble of confused moments, shrouded with the sentiment of just trying to get through, making puff pastry was a turning point. My excitement about a new culinary challenge reignited the creativity that I go to the kitchen to engage with. That first thing I made was savory turnovers for dinner: I had finally found a way to use cabbage and leek from the CSA box we had received a month earlier, sautéing that and seasoning it with za’atar before filling the pastry squares with the vegetable mixture and some feta; I roasted carrots; I whipped up a lemon-dill yogurt sauce. Once again connecting over the joy of cooking with my partner, I was reminded of the emotional nourishment of sharing home-cooked food with the ones we love.

My fresh energy from making puff pastry pushed me to take things a step further. I wanted to add yeast to the equation. I wanted to make croissants. I had been a home bread baker for about five years, and while I’d made hundreds of boules and bâtards, leavened pastry was new territory. In Claire Saffitz’s video on how to make croissants at home, she talks about getting “obsessed” and about being “possessed” by the project of developing a process for homemade croissants. I, too, became obsessed with the process, with the feel of the dough throughout the gradual addition of new layers of dough and butter. Making croissants takes three days: mixing the yeasted dough on one day, then letting it rest in the fridge overnight; incorporating a block of butter into the dough through three careful, timed-out series of folds to give the dough more time to rest and to ensure that the butter doesn’t melt into the dough; finally, shaping the croissants and letting them rise before baking them.

Undertaking this project required relinquishing myself to its timetable and devoting myself to the precise monitoring of the temperature and texture of the butter and dough. I had to get out of my head a little bit; I had to let the croissants possess me. In this intricate, intense diversion, I felt like I was starting to re-find myself. The fog of my grief felt like it was starting to lift: each set of folds that I performed on the dough was a source of newfound meaning and purpose toward a satisfying end goal.

Losing my dad, something impossible to truly make sense of, created a void that was at once material, emotional, and spiritual; it took putting my own emotions and the spiritualism of commensality into making something new, something material, something that I could excitedly share with the friends who fed me through December. I only wish I could have shared the croissants with my dad, that he could experience a new addition to the lineage of our family’s foodways. I can imagine what his reaction might have been: probably laughing and shaking his head, saying, as he often did about my culinary projects, “You did what?”