light & gather

I had been planning to host Easter for a few weeks.

I had a menu. I made and sent invites. I changed the menu. I started buying ingredients
and then I canceled it.

Every morning, as most people do, we check the weather to know what to wear.
Leggings or bike shorts. Hoodies or t-shirts.

That’s when we noticed there was a 60% chance of rain on Easter.

I originally chose to ignore it. I thought maybe the rain would go away, or at least turn into a scattered drizzle. But then the percentage increased from 60% to 75%, and then 90%.

My husband made the final call.

We were supposed to have a bonfire. But no one wants to eat wet food in wet lawn chairs, around a fire that won’t start because the wood is too damp. So we decided to reschedule.

And, if I’m being honest, I was a little relieved.

There were a lot of moving parts to this dinner that didn’t feel right to me.
Especially the menu.

I wanted to do a Martha Stewart–esque Easter dinner. Something elevated, but effortless. I wanted my menu to say: honeydew spritz and crab in the deviled eggs.

I wanted decadence. Refinement. Something completely different from what I normally eat.

But while it was aspirational, it was also entirely out of budget. I didn’t have the resources or the tableware to support the weight of that kind of sophistication.

And even more than that… it just wasn’t me.

I couldn’t commit to something that was pulling me in so many different directions.

I could say the rain cleared the clutter in my mind and gave me a new perspective.
But instead, I’ll say this:

I got my sister to watch my son, so I could go to the library.

I found a “cool 90’s mom jams” playlist on Spotify. I got a chocolate milkshake and listened to Strawberry Wine while driving down a backroad.

And I’m telling you this for ambiance because you need to know where my head was at when I found this cookbook.

The cookbook is When Southern Women Cook.

And I have to stop you here because I want to know: have you ever realized something about yourself after the fact?

I had a teacher whose favorite color was blue. He realized this when he noticed that he had a lot of blue shirts. That and the color of his wife’s eyes were also blue. 

That’s how this cookbook hit me.

For the past year, I’ve been checking out Gullah Geechee cookbooks. I can’t even remember how many. But every time, I thought the same thing:

These recipes were the closest thing to what I ate when I was growing up.

That’s when I realized I had a palate.
And by that, I mean a sense of taste rooted in sentimentality, and not aesthetics.

Whenever I found a recipe I recognized, I got so excited.

Once, I almost cried over a fried fish recipe because my aunt used to fry fish in a deep fryer on her porch. Fish was a big deal in my family.

There were recipes that got me through college. Recipes I hadn’t had since then. Recipes from church dinners. Recipes I loved but never knew how to make for myself.

And they were all written in plain English as if someone translated them just for me.

I picked out all the recipes I wanted to try.
Which is to say I’ll probably cook through the entire book.

And that’s when it clicked.

I’m not a Martha Stewart kind of girl.

I admire her. I respect her craft. I think her menus are beautiful and inspiring.

But they’re not a reflection of how I eat.
And I don’t feel reflected in them.

Maybe part of me wants to be.

But another part of me, a louder, more opinionated part, wants to know how to properly make gravy for shrimp and grits. I want to learn how to make and fill kolaches. I want to know, once and for all, how to make southern-style green beans from fresh green beans.

Because these foods mean something to me.

When I think about them, I remember where I was in life. What I was doing. Who I was with.

It’s like a smell that brings you back.
Or a line in a book you never forget.

And if I’m being honest
Martha Stewart is elegant and chic but she is not southern.

And southern cooking feels like home to me.

And if it hadn’t rained…
I probably never would have realized it.