Food & Family & Issue 02 of Life in the Making Quarterly
Food & Family & Issue Two
The print edition of issue two landed on the farm this week. I opened the box and immediately burst into tears.
Not because anything was wrong with the issue, I hasten to add. But because this issue is a love letter to family...and most of mine I haven't seen in 3 years. That hole is easier to live with in the busyness of spring and summer, but this time of year, it's harder.
So, to stop myself from blubbing all over the keyboard, I give you one of the chapter essays and urge you to buy or subscribe if you haven't. We don't have a lot of this issue left as it stands.
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Our family recipes were held in a beige plastic box housed in a cupboard by the stove. By the time it lodged itself in my memory, it was too full to close, stuffed with 3x5inch handwritten notecards with recipes from my Grandmas Thrailkill and Goldin, clipped from magazines and many of my mother’s own.
Opening that box felt a little bit like opening a time machine. Flipping through the cards, I would be taken back to the moments round the dining room table with my brothers and sisters, Christmas dinners, making cookies with my mom and favourite birthdays with my favourite cake.
Food has a way of connecting us through time and space. I think about my little brother every time I make a pumpkin pie, or my sister when I make anything with cream cheese in it. Pork crackling takes me back to the first time I met Kevin’s parents and cringingly told them my favourite book was Shakespeare to show off (it wasn’t - Mists of Avalon forever). Sweetcorn transports me back to Iowa summers and fried food to Fourth of July fish frys by the lake.
I think about it sometimes in the context of my own children. What are the things we make that will remind my children of home when they are older? What food will call back to them every time they eat it or when they are far away, what will they make to feel closer to us?
Really, that is what this first year of the Quarterly is... my own recipe box for my friends and family. Stories of my life with my kids on this land, weaving traditions in with this place I love so much and a way to connect them to us for years to come.
I did try to convince them that Issue 02 would be their Christmas present, but they weren’t having any of it.
