The Magic of My Grandma’s Kitchen

Amena Brown — The Magic of My Grandma’s Kitchen

There are two reasons I needed to get in my grandma’s kitchen. One, to keep her recipes. Two, to catch a man. When I was a little girl, my grandma’s kitchen was this magical place. And it didn’t matter whether it was your birthday or a holiday or just a regular old Sunday. She’d say, baby, what kind of cake you want? And I’d tell her, grandma, I want chocolate cake. And then I’d run outside to play. I mean, I never actually stayed in the kitchen to see what she was doing in there.

I just figured she’s probably clapping her hands like LeBron James in the middle of a basketball game, all flour and glitter and abracadabra hands. All I know is when I came inside from playing, there was a feast, fried chicken, collard greens, biscuits, and cake. And after the whole meal was over, my grandma would take that leftover fried chicken set it over to the side. She’d take the cake, set it to the side, slice it, wrap each slice individually in wax paper, tape it closed, and then she’d grab an empty shoe box, line it with paper towels, half fried chicken, half chocolate cake, and each family got their own box to go home with. Maybe an hour into your journey in the car, on a bus, in a train, You lift the lid of that box and feel like heaven was singing back to you, which is why as a grown woman, I needed to return to my grandma’s kitchen.

My dating life, it wasn’t going so well. And some of the old Southern women said, maybe it ain’t going well because you can’t cook. And I resent the implication. I could cook. I could make spaghetti and meatloaf. And tuna fish, is tuna fish cooking? I went to my grandma and I said, Grandma, if the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, I’m not gonna get there like this. You need to teach me all the things you know. She clapped her hands like she does when she gets really excited. And then she looked at me real serious. And I knew we were about to get to work. First assignment, collard greens. I’m there in my grandma’s kitchen. We’re hip to hip. There are no written recipes for any of this. So I’m just there in the kitchen with her trying to catch some tips and suggestions and take the best notes I can.

We start with these big collard green leaves on the stem, soak them in salt water. She takes me through each step of the process, how you gotta cut the leaves off the stem and roll them up just right, cut them into one inch pieces so they have that perfect bite. We make my grandma’s amazing collard greens. But now I gotta go back to my first apartment kitchen with its full granite countertops that I was really proud of and try to make these collard greens by myself. So I do, and I put together a little tasting dish, take it back over to my grandma. She tastes it and she says, now baby, I think you got the texture right, but it’s a little salty. I go back over a period of weeks and I try this until finally I hand her that tasting dish.

And when it comes back to me, there are no collard greens left in it. She had no notes for me, which means I have graduated. I can move on to my next dish. I mean, I got a lot to learn. I got to make the mac and cheese and the candy yams, the cabbage and the rutabagas. So we do this over a period of a few months until I finally learn all the dishes. Then I meet a man. Things get serious with him, and so I say it’s time for me to make my grandma’s food for him. I make him this meal, and several months later, he proposed to me. Which means, grandma’s magic, it really does work. My boyfriend becomes my fiance, becomes my husband, we buy our first home, and my mother-in-law gifts me the perfect symbol of a Southern woman’s domesticity, the standing KitchenAid mixer.

It doesn’t matter if you use it. It’s just supposed to sit there on your counter so other people can be jealous of you. But me, I wanted to use mine. So I called my grandma and I said, Grandma, I’m turning 35. This is what I want for my birthday. I want you to come to my house. Let’s break open this KitchenAid mixer. Teach me how to bake your cakes. You taught me how to make everything except your cakes. She says, baby, let me check my schedule. Changes the subject, hangs up the phone. I wait a week. I call back again. Hey, grandma, I just wanted to touch base about this again because my birthday’s coming up, and I thought maybe you could come to my house. We could bake a cake together. She said, now, Mina. That was so long ago, I don’t even know if I remember how to bake those cakes anymore, changes the subject and hangs up the phone again.

I wait one more week. I call her back, Grandma, hey, my birthday’s coming up, like right here, and I thought we could come to an agreement about you coming to my house, baking a cake. She says, Mina, I got to tell you something. Now I know you thought I made those cakes from scratch. But me and I was using a box mix. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the sound of your childhood deflating. But this is what it sounds like because, no, not my grandma. My grandma has no use for a cake mix. My grandma surely gets the eggs directly from the chickens. I mean, surely when my grandma needs flour, she threshes the wheat herself.

No. My grandmother does not need a cake mix. She said, and baby, I don’t even know if they make that mix I used to use anymore. Starts Googling small batch cake mix, North Carolina, because that’s where my grandma’s from. I said, well, grandma, you don’t even remember what it was called? She said, well, baby, they used to call it supermod. And I don’t know if you have Southern grandparents, but when you do, sometimes they say things to you and then the consonants just disappear. at the end of the things they say, and you’re left there to decipher what is being said to you, and she keeps repeating it, and I don’t understand what she’s saying, and she said, baby, you don’t understand me. I said, grandma, I don’t know what you’re talking about. She said, baby, you spell it S‑U-P-E-R-M-O-I-S‑T. Supermod.

And I said, grandma, You think they don’t make Betty Crocker super moist anymore? I said, Grandma, now, I know you don’t watch The Walking Dead, but if you did, you would know that when they go in that one abandoned grocery store to get formula for that one baby, you know what’s still on the aisle, Grandma? Betty Crocker’s super moist. Grandma, did you know you could drive into rural America, pull up to any gas station, and you know what’s going to be sitting there on the aisle, Grandma? Betty Crocker’s Super Moist. They’re never going to stop making it. It’s going to survive the zombie apocalypse, Grandma. Let’s not worry about this. Can you just come to my house and bake a cake? She agrees. We’re back in the kitchen together, hip to hip, I tell her, I want to make a pineapple cake.

I find a from scratch recipe the closest to what I can think her cake would have tasted like. We get in the kitchen together. She starts remembering some things, how you’ve got to gently take your cake layer out of the cake pan, how you got to poke holes in that middle layer so your pineapple sauce will soak through just right. She teaches me how to make an egg white frosting, and we make a really delicious and really ugly cake. The ugly part was a me thing, not a hearth. I don’t know how to frost a cake. Which is why when my grandma turned 85, all of us have to gather together. Her kids, her grandkids, her great-grandkids, we all gather together in a big old beach house. And now I’m the one in the family who cooks all the food that she taught me how to make.

So I slide up to her and I say, Grandma, what kind of cake you want? And she said, now, baby, you know I want a chocolate cake. I want yellow cake with chocolate frosting. And I said, you’re going to get that cake, and that cake is going to be super moist. I get in the kitchen. I’ve cooked all my things. The cake is my last thing to make. And as I’m stirring up this box mix, I’m just thinking, I’m one of the older grandchildren. Maybe she started this cake mix thing for the younger kids. Not for me. I bake that cake and take a little corner off to taste it, and yes, it tastes exactly like my childhood. And she tells me an older woman in the church told her, use the cake mix, but make your frosting from scratch. That’s how you’ll fool them, and she did. The whole family did this.

So after this meal, after we feast, we sit around, soaking her in, asking her all the questions we can think to ask. So I say, Grandma, Who was the deal with the shoebox and the fried chicken and the cake? Why’d you do that? She said, oh, I did that because it’s what my parents did for me during segregation. In case we took a trip somewhere and there wasn’t a safe place to stop, we made food to keep our family safe. She said, I did it for my children during Jim Crow. In case we took a trip and there wasn’t a safe place to stop, I made that food to keep our family safe. She said, I did it for you grandchildren, because I want you to get home safe too. And then I thought, there’s my grandma making magic again, taking injustice, taking a painful history and pouring love in all the places she could get it.

Which is why when it’s time for my cousins to leave, when they say, They got to leave early. They got to head back to work. I mean, I got to keep the tradition going. I got to take that cake, slice it, wrap it in wax paper, tape it closed. I got to hope that cake and wax paper can somehow be a prayer that my cousins will get home safe too. And all these years later, I still got my KitchenAid mixer. I’m still married to that man. We’ve been married for 14 years. My grandma’s 93 years old, and she is still telling us what to do. And I’m always going to be grateful for my grandma, for the magic of her kitchen, and of course, for a small batch, rare to find. little known cake mix called Betty Crocker’s Super Moist.