1. Ingredients
I try to find solace in the little things. Making bread, for example. The refuge of repetition as I knead the dough, fingers sticky, folding, pressing, then folding again, the enforced patience of setting it aside to rise, damp cloth laid carefully over the top. The letting go when you slide the formed loaf into the oven. Growing up I watched my mother bake sourdough and buttermilk biscuits, blueberry muffins, and apple pie, which she served a la mode with a large scoop of vanilla brought home from Swenson’s. I packed her recipes in my carry-on when I moved to this country.
2. Procedure
The truth is, I found the recipes in a hinged wooden box in the attic of this cottage by the lake. The recipes are not for blueberry muffins or pie but for kreplach and noodle kugel and kasha varnishkes. The real estate agent that rented me this house told me they were left there by a German Jewish woman who abandoned the house and its contents during the war. The previous owners left the box in the attic. No, that’s not true either. The recipes are for borscht and pelmeniand were handwritten on lilac-colored stationery and given to me by the Russian ballerina who lived in the apartment above me in New York, compensation for her hosting late-night dinner parties. Tanya knew I liked staying in and reading Tolstoy. She preferred Chekhov. I’m sorry, I lied to you again. I found the recipes on the internet and took a screenshot of them on my iPhone.
3. Serving
I don’t like to cook, and I would not make any of those things. I’m confident my mother would have cooked all those things if she had ever lived here, in this cottage by the mountains. I mean house by the lake. If I had a mother who baked warm loaves of apple strudel and told stories as you lay on a blanket under the apple trees and blue sky. If I even had a mother who baked strudel so tender it melted on your tongue. The truth is, I had no mother.
Stephanie Buesinger writes fiction and children’s literature and enjoys illustration and photography. She is Photo and Blog Editor at Literary Mama and her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Women on Writing, and The Bluebird Word. She lives in Florida with her family and pets.