By Holly Moore
SUWANEE, GA. | In my grandmother’s kitchen north of Jacksonville, Florida, I learned to cook grits and white rice, I learned to shell peas and shrimp, and peel potatoes and chop radishes.
Moore
I watched as she shook chicken pieces or fresh shrimp in a mix of flour and spices, known only to her, in a brown paper grocery sack before frying them to a just-right golden crisp crust with perfect soft meat inside. I don’t remember many cookbooks, but I do remember handwritten recipes on 3×5 cards or a piece of steno pad paper. And I remember tables laden with food, very little of it store-bought. The vegetables were grown in my grandparents’ garden, and their fruit trees supplied an abundance of plums, figs, satsumas and oranges. Shrimp, crab, and fish were caught from the Broward River just outside the kitchen window below the house.
Meals at my great-grandmother’s house just up U.S. Highway 17 in Brunswick were also a culinary extravaganza. You’ve heard of a groaning table—-so many choices and so much delicious food. My grandmother’s kitchen was a modest size but big enough for a kitchen table for four. My great-grandmother’s kitchen was smaller still. I, vaguely, remember a tiny worktable in the middle with just enough room to scoot around on all sides (call it a one person kitchen.) In my early childhood, those delectable meals were cooked on a woodburning stove tucked on one wall of the kitchen in her shotgun house.
My mom, in her final and favorite home, ended up with her own one-person kitchen where wonderful meals were prepared and served. Somehow, the women in the family all fit in those kitchens and helped prepare, serve, and clean up after those memorable meals. There was always plenty of food no matter who showed up for dinner and you never went hungry. Meals were served in the dining room, and while my mother had a good-sized dining room, my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s were not large rooms by any measure, but somehow they seated everyone.
As a pre-teen and later an “evolved” college student, I sometimes complained about the women doing all the work while the men loosened their now-too-tight pants’ belts and parked themselves in recliners in front of the television. Humphh! And yet, my clearest and most joyful memories come from those kitchens and those women – my mom, my grandmother and great-grandmother, aunts and great aunts, cousins…amidst the clattering of pots and pans, chopping and stirring, mixing and baking. We worked, and we talked, family stories were told (I learned my history in those tales), and we laughed—a lot.
And the work didn’t seem like work at all! I miss those kitchens and mostly I miss those precious women—hardworking, preparing meals with a sense of obligation, but mostly as a sign of their love for their families and friends. What I wouldn’t do to roll up my sleeves again, shell some peas, prepare some shrimp, peel potatoes, wash stacks of dishes alongside them and talk and laugh again. Oh, if I could!
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