I begin by trying to remember the first white woman who taught me to cook. As a teenager, I watched Sara Moulton because she was so smart about food. She often made accessible dishes on her shows, especially on Sara’s Secrets, but her experience in restaurants and as a recipe editor and editor for Gourmet empowered her to explain why she did the things she did, as well as what was important to spend time and money on. I didn’t shop for a family, and I only earned money here and there—first as a babysitter, and then as a teacher at the tae kwon do studio where I studied—so I couldn’t go out and buy the things she named as she set up her mise en place, a phrase I learned from food television. When I walked to the grocery store between tae kwon do classes, I bought snacks: watermelon cubes in plastic containers, single-serving yogurts, boxes of six granola bars to keep in my backpack. But I was learning. I now knew how to mince a shallot, how to debone a chicken. By studying the way Moulton cooked her family-friendly dishes for Cooking Live and Sara’s Secrets, I was preparing for a future I hadn’t yet begun to imagine.Article continues after advertisement
The house I grew up in was impossibly loud: my mother was loud, my five siblings were loud, the dogs, a series of golden and Labrador retrievers, were loud. First we were in a very small home, the downstairs of a duplex in which our bodies were always on top of one another, sitting in front of the window AC in the living room eating Firecracker Popsicles while our mother cooked yet another meal for the family, and then we were in a much larger, more echoey home, our mother’s yelling reverberating off every wall. My mother treated food television as background fodder, something that was only half paid attention to. I learned from her that while you do the work of the home, you listen to the work of the home. Your life becomes a script you have to follow continuously in order to keep it working.
