Cooking in College

My sister Sara and I have always made fun of my mum the health-nut. When we were younger, she would pack our lunches and would scrape off all of the sugar from our now-sugarless sugar cookies. In high school, my mum drew magic-marker smiley faces on bananas and left them by the front door—so that we would have to take them or trip over them as we rushed out the front door. Our dinners always consisted of a protein, a starch and a veggie.

For all Sara and I complained and mocked, I missed the nagging, the balanced meals, and the readily-available fruit my first year at Barnard. Also, I missed my mum. When quick texts popped up on my phone—“Almonds are very good for runners”—it reminded me of her and our dinner table at home, so I didn’t really mind. I found myself grocery shopping at Garden of Eden and mentally checking off the things in my basket: a starch, a protein, and a veggie for dinner, six fruits for the day, a bag of almonds.

I’ve cooked before—cheese quesadillas are a personal favorite, Boca burgers are great in a rush, and there’s a spinach bow-tie pasta that I eat the night before every important race—but it’s different at school. I don’t have the full kitchen with a center island at my disposal, and I can’t run to the bottom of the stairs and yell up, “Mum! What’s al dente?” I also don’t have my own kitchen as I originally envisioned when I said goodbye forever to my meal plan. Instead, I share it with three suitemates. I’ve learned that not everyone thinks the smell of halibut roasting is exactly appetizing. But I’ve also learned that walnuts make a great addition to any salad and that apples taste great in an omelet. Still, it’s when I make my mum’s recipes in the kitchen that I forget all the changes and all the things that aren’t home.

When I start out with a sandy leek, a potato, a hunk of gruyere cheese, and a carton of milk and end up with my mum’s melty potato-leek cupcakes, I feel kind of amazed that I’ve recreated what I once attributed solely to her cookbook-free expertise. No longer does this food appear positioned between a ready knife and fork at the kitchen table the instant I abandon my homework at the call “Sara, Kari! Dinner!” Now, when I face the potato, the leek, the cheese and the carton, I know my mum is probably doing the same thing. I think of her and try to emulate her as I chop the ingredients up and mix them together. Forty minutes later we can both pull out a tray of a browned, crispy dinner.

I sit at my suite’s kitchen table, look out at the honking cars on 109th Street, and heave open my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, but I still feel a connection to my home, a connection that can’t be severed by miles, or lifestyles, or missed calls and ignored texts. No matter how much time has passed or how much I feel my life has relocated itself to here—to homework, to writing papers, to long runs in Central Park, to answering my mum’s calls between the rush of classes—I can take one bite of that potato-leek cupcake and I’m right back home. I’m right back there with my family and our tradition of food, a tradition I didn’t even know we had until I unknowingly adopted it. It may not be a Madeline, but my cupcake, tasting just the way I remember it tasting at our kitchen table, can traverse any amount of distance or time and bring me right back home.

The author is a Barnard College sophomore.