She can almost smell her mother’s kitchen steaming peppers and salt water. And the longer she stares at the recipe, the more nostalgic she feels. It’s called “Brooks Avenue Fish Stew,” affectionately titled by Lennon Flowers after her childhood home in North Carolina. Even though this dish was a holiday ritual for her mother, she never wrote it down. So when she suddenly passed away 12 years ago, she carried on the tradition, until her family spent hours trying to recreate it as best they could. “Reconstructed from memory” is written in parentheses.
Later, as Flowers gathers fresh cod, scallops, shrimp, diced tomatoes, clam juice, olive oil, and seasonings for her digital recipes, her mother might be around. She can even visualize herself tossing chopped onions into a stockpot until they sizzle, cracking open shrimp shells, and fussing over the last red pepper flakes. The flowers were simmered in a cast iron pot with lemon slices and I was excited to finally be able to share this tradition. “He is my mother’s grandson. He will only meet her mother through the stories I tell him,” she says. “And one of those stories is why we make seafood stew every Christmas Eve.”
Her pain was still fresh in 2014, when Flowers co-founded The Dinner Party, a nonprofit that helps people grieve the death of a loved one share a meal. Last year, she gathered over 9,000 people through this platform. “Food and creating truly beautiful experiences can be an entry point to celebrating life, not just about death,” she says. “What we need more than anything right now is an opportunity to lower the barriers to connection. And food, precisely because of its familiarity and intimacy, is a great way to do that.”
Of course, it’s not just flowers. She is not very good at cooking, which is her hobby. She plans to make her mother’s stew only once a year. That’s true for most of us these days, between school, work, and kids’ own busy schedules. Balanced with the abundance of convenience that provides shortcuts to everyday basic foods, it means we don’t have to spend the day in the kitchen anymore, but that doesn’t always make sense. there is no. But her experience reminds us that sometimes the old ways offer more than we need to get through the day. But why do instructions and ingredient lists have such a huge impact on us?
Food can trigger memories of past meals or eating the same food again with other people. Food is special because it’s so intimate.
The human urge to save recipes is ancient and sometimes mysterious. The earliest known example is inscribed in cuneiform on a cracked clay tablet thought to be about 4,000 years old, housed in the Babylonian Collection at Yale University’s Peabody Museum. The tablet details his 25 meals in Akkadian, a language common during the First Empire of Mesopotamia. Its simple structure reflects modern recipes. Divide the pigeon in half and add the other meat. Prepare water, add fat and salt to taste. Breadcrumbs, onions, samidu, green onions and garlic (soak the herbs in milk first). Once the cooking is complete, it’s ready.
Many people still try to recreate these ancient meals without measurements or cooking times, and share their results through blog posts and video tutorials. We all like to share what we’ve learned, and recipes are one of the vehicles through which we communicate the wisdom we gain from our acquired knowledge and experiences. Our recipes also tend to learn from the environment. The first cookbook published in the United States, American Cookery, mixed British and North American ingredients. Cookbooks then provided a kind of companionship for isolated pioneers in the West, offering advice on everything from preparing meals to caring for the sick, like friends and teachers.
The training method hasn’t changed much. Americans buy approximately 20 million cookbooks each year. Between TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, he has over 25 million posts with the #recipe hashtag. Many smartphone applications and websites, such as Paprika and BigOven, specialize in storing recipes. None of that even begins to take into account the recipes exchanged between friends and family. A 2021 study published by Statista found that 44 percent of Millennials and members of Generation Z get their meal inspiration from family recipes.
We don’t just share with our peers. Sometimes it is shared across generations. Archiving favorite recipes from deceased loved ones has long been common in Central America. This may be in the form of a typewritten collection in a three-hole binder, a small box of index cards organized by type of cuisine, or a ward cookbook that was once a tradition in Latter-day Saint congregations. I might take it. In recent years, treasured casseroles and other dishes have appeared in hundreds of obituaries, serving as a living tribute to the culinary exploits of the deceased.
I was shocked by the story of Constance Joan Bradbury, who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. So she volunteered at a local Family Search Center, scouring records to help others discover their ancestry. “Connie loved to make casseroles,” her obituary on Legacy.com says. “In lieu of flowers and in her honor, please make a casserole for a loved one or someone in need.” Or Martha, past president of the Cache County Chapter of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. Kathryn Kirkham Andrews’ obituary said Sunday dinner was “mashed potatoes with pot roast and chocolate Texas sheet cake with nuts.” Her husband’s tombstone in Logan, Utah, is inscribed with her famous chocolate fudge recipe.
Eating has long been associated with death and mourning. The ancient Egyptians depicted food being prepared in the tomb so that the dead would have food in the afterlife. On Day of the Dead, Mexicans leave traditional dishes such as tamales and pan de muerto (a type of sweet bread) on altars for deceased loved ones, with the goal of bringing their souls back to this world. . Korean Buddhists celebrate the Yeongsan Festival, marking the entrance of the dead into heaven with a tea ceremony and a ritual meal of rice cakes and fruit. Greek Orthodox Christians still pray and remember the dead by preparing koliba (a spicy dessert made with wheat berries, nuts, and fruit). In Judaism, visitors to the shiva sitters (who grieve for a first-degree relative in the home of the deceased for seven days) bring round-shaped food, like a bagel, symbolizing the circle of life. Masu. Throughout the Intermountain West, burials are often followed by a luncheon, where “funeral potatoes” are a popular cheesy comfort food.
So why are certain recipes such an effective way to remember a loved one? The answer begins with our relationship with food.
“What we need more than anything right now is the opportunity to lower the barriers to connection.”
Consider a scene from 20th century French writer Marcel Proust’s seminal novel In Search of Lost Time. Marcel, a semi-fictional narrator, is overwhelmed by the taste of an ordinary madeleine (a small sponge cake in the shape of a seashell) soaked in lime flower tea. “A sensation of exquisite pleasure assailed my senses, but it was personal, isolated, and had no hint of its origin,” he wrote. As a child, on Sunday mornings, Marcel would greet his aunt Léonie in his bedroom and she would offer him a madeleine steeped in tea. Now he could feel her aunt’s presence and even imagine the flowers that once bloomed in her garden.
The olfactory nerve transmits smells and tastes directly to the part of the brain that processes our most difficult emotions. The olfactory nerve is located near the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure that controls fear and imbues our memories with emotional meaning. Next to it, the seahorse-shaped hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory. Both are part of the limbic system and are primarily involved in our survival. No wonder olfactory memory is so powerful. Studies have shown that even after spending an entire year smelling something, we still recognize it within just 30 seconds 95 percent of the time. These memories also retain their relevance.
“Food can certainly evoke memories: memories of past meals, memories of eating the same food again with other people,” says the study, which focuses on the role of food in human life. says Paul Rosin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Food is special because it’s such an intimate thing. It’s so personal. It’s such a physical relationship. And we’re constantly exchanging food with other people, so it’s inherently social. That’s the point.”
There is also a chemical component to these relationships. Approximately 95 percent of serotonin in the body is produced in the gastrointestinal tract. This neurotransmitter contributes to our sleep, appetite, emotions, and pain responses. Also, when we eat something we crave, such as sweets, our brains are flushed with dopamine, a brain chemical characterized by contributing to motivation, satisfaction, and pleasure. This feels like a reward, but it also helps the hippocampus convert short-term memory into long-term memory.
In the context of grief, these psychological and chemical reactions calm and support the mourner while keeping the memory of the deceased loved one at the forefront. He is an associate professor of religion at Baylor University and author of “Eating to Die: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife.” ” This book is dedicated to my late mother. “My recipe box is a temple of memories with you.”
Family recipes rely on continuity, the ability to nourish generations. It’s always based on who prepared this and why they’re still doing it that way.
Kaishawn Lee was surprised when a woman with a long neck and a thick body came out of the kitchen holding an empty green bottle. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville culinary arts professor and former pastry chef is researching eight families in Oklahoma to study food-related memories and cooking as a cultural heritage. She offered to share the tools she uses to roll out her noodles for her grandmother’s chicken soup recipe. “My grandma used to use wine bottles,” she says. “If you don’t have that available, use a bottle of olive oil.”
Lee found that all the families he surveyed had the same pragmatic mindset. Unlike recipes written by commercial restaurant chefs, family recipes rely on continuity, the ability to nourish generations. “There was nothing about taste. It wasn’t about technique, but more about reminding people of where they came from,” he says. “It’s always based on who prepared this and why they’re still doing it this way.”
The brain processes involved in preparing meals fall under the category of executive functions, which help the brain plan and control thoughts and actions toward specific goals. These same functions also help the brain manage frustration and regulate unpleasant emotions, such as the pain of losing a loved one. Because cooking is a creative act, it can form new neural pathways, which is known to relieve stress in dementia patients and even slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. In other words, following recipes helps us remember as much as the food we make.
The first time I recreated my Hungarian father’s chicken paprikash, I wasn’t sad, but as a college student living four hours away, I might have been a little homesick. I had watched his father make this dish many times as a child, but never paid much attention to its basic parts, much less its origins. I laid out the ingredients on a dirty kitchen counter, sharing them with four other girls: chicken thighs, Hungarian wax peppers, and good quality paprika. Hungarian recipes are traditionally written in the first person plural, meaning the instructions rely heavily on the word “we”. Even though I was doing it alone, I could feel that this was a shared experience.
As the flesh hissed and sizzled, I was shocked to see my father clearly visible. I could see him putting a paper towel within his reach to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Even the plastic mug with a random pirate flag on it that he was drinking from. It felt like he was in the room with me. So I wondered what goes through his head when he cooks since he was a child. I think he has met his parents, but his parents aren’t alive yet so I can’t critique or praise his work like I can.
This article appears in the April 2024 issue. Deseret Magazine. Click here for details on how to subscribe.
