TW Review by Lorraine Berry
How a Culinary Novel Seduced a Cooking-Averse Reviewer
The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry, Gallery Books, 2011, 272 pp., $23.00 hardcover.
I am not a “foodie.” Descriptions of luscious meals, watching a TV chef spin dross into gold, poring over cookbooks looking for just the right thing to make for guests—none of this resonates with me.
In fact, I have never learned to cook. As a child, I rebelled against a mother who insisted that cooking skills were essential for a good wife and mother.
“What will you do when you’re married?” she would ask, and I’d look up from whatever book I was reading to tell her, “I’m going to have a maid.” (How obnoxious I was!)
As a single adult, I lived on canned soup, pasta, and takeout—and gravitated toward men with the cooking skills I lacked. My first husband was a former chef who chased me from the kitchen when I tried to cook. My current partner taught himself to cook after his divorce and discovered he loved making meals—a love I appreciate but have long failed to understand. There’s no thrill for me in chopping onions and garlic and trying to stir them into deliciousness.
So, when I was asked to review Jael McHenry’s The Kitchen Daughter, a book in which cooking plays a central part in the plot, I almost deferred. What could such a book possibly have to say to me?
Plenty, it turns out.
Taste, Don’t Tell
Anyone with taste buds can appreciate the food-linked sensory descriptions that abound in The Kitchen Daughter. They’re a perfect example of the mantrawe writing teachers say to our students over and over: “Show. Don’t tell.”
Here’s the narrator, Ginny, describing her housecleaner, Gert, whose parents fled Romania for Cuba during the Holocaust:
Gert has a voice like the poppy seed filling of hamantaschen, inky and sweet, but it’s her Cuban pastries I really remember. Even now, remembering, the taste of her coconut turnovers fills my mouth. Creamy, paper white filling. Rich yellow pastry falling apart in flakes.
This description vividly conveys Gert’s personality: gruff as the gritty poppyseed hamantaschen and generous as the creamy-rich filling of her Cuban pastries. It also sets up the role Gert will play in the story, as a nurturing figure who connects Ginny with a foreign world.
McHenry describes anxious days as being spent "at a simmer." Anger is the sensation of "peppercorns in a mortar and pestle, grinding around in a circle until they finally yield and crack." While some may see this type of writing as precious, it’s part of what makes this book so emotionally resonant for readers. Even those of us who’ve never touched a mortar and pestle know exactly what she means.
In addition to pulling readers in emotionally, the metaphors that link feelings to food serve another key purpose: They help us understand Ginny’s struggle with her own feelings as a person with Asperger’s Syndrome.
Caught in a French Press
In choosing a narrator with Asperger’s, McHenry has set herself a hard task. While people with Asperger’s are generally high functioning compared with others along the autism spectrum, communication is often difficult for them. They struggle with the kinds of social interaction—like smiling, making eye contact, and demonstrating empathy toward another’s feelings—that help us relate to other people.
So, we have a storyteller who struggles with communication trying to convey feelings she has trouble even processing for herself.
As the book opens, Ginny’s parents have just died in a car accident, and her Asperger’s is exacerbating the emotional trauma that she and her sister Amanda are experiencing. While Amanda’s grief is recognizable to those around her, Ginny is closed up. Like others with Asperger’s, she tends to rely on rituals and routines to manage her life. Now, her house—her space—is invaded by mourners, and the post-funeral luncheon is more than she can handle.
An aunt with “yeast-colored shoes” and a “beerlike smell” reaches out to touch her, and she bolts from the crowd:
I feel oven-hot skin, clammy fish-flesh skin, damp chicken-liver skin, they’re all around me. My heart beats faster, the chant matching, get/out/get/out/get.
She ends up in a coat closet, where her Dad’s rain boots “squeak against each other like cheese curds,” comforting herself with thoughts of onions cooking:
I need the idea of the onions, I soothe myself with it. Slowly growing golden. Giving off that scent, the last of the raw bite mixed with the hint of the sweetness to come. I press my forehead down against my knees, crushing the boots between my chest and thighs.
Even just thinking of cooking is a comfort to Ginny, and this description of onions mellowing as they cook—and, by implication, calming her raw emotions—pulls me into her world. Ginny’s Asperger’s makes her shrink from physical and emotional connection with others, but her connection with food is strong and visceral.
Cooking is her outlet for expression. It also becomes, in the course of the book, a means by which she stretches to understand what feelings feel like:
So this is what distraught feels like. It feels like a stomachache. It feels like a firm hand wringing out the paltry juice from a Key lime, or a French press squeezing the flavor from coffee grounds. It feels like the air bladder that wine makers use to press the juice from the grapes, which they say is gentle but still presses, presses, presses, until all the liquid has leaked out and pooled. I’ve read about that. It’s easy to imagine.
As I read this paragraph, I marvel at how much McHenry does with it. She catches “distraught” perfectly, using vivid sensory details to connect with my own remembered experience of that feeling: the clench in my belly, the pressure against my chest from both sides, the fullness in my temples and sinuses from pools of tears that need to leak out. At the same time, McHenry shows me how foreign the territory of feelings is to Ginny—as foreign as the territory of cooking always felt to me.
The way McHenry gives readers a bridge to Ginny’s foreign world is part of the magic of The Kitchen Daughter—but only part of it. The other part of the magic is more literal: Cooking is Ginny’s bridge to the world of the dead.
Cooking with Spirits
One of the jolts in the book’s first chapter comes as Ginny takes refuge from the post-funeral crowd in her kitchen, unearths a recipe card, and begins to make her grandmother’s ribollita: Her grandmother appears in the kitchen and talks to her.
Ginny has discovered she can summon the dead with her cooking.
At first, she believes her grief has brought on hallucinations. But Ginny cannot deny the detailed evidence that floods all her senses, confirming her grandmother’s presence: salt-and-pepper hair, familiar knit sweater (“each row of yellow stitches tight and even like corn kernels on the cob”), and, of course, her voice:
She says, ‘Hello, uccellina.’” The name she had for me, Little Bird, from the mouth that spoke it. I am hallucinating the voice I know so well. Low, sharp, familiar. The first time I tasted espresso I thought, This is what Nonna sounded like. This is her. The whole Nonna, solid. Right here, sitting in the kitchen.
Nonna gives her the first of several clues that, over the course of the book, Ginny will assemble into a goulash of meaning—tasty, complex, spicy—to nourish her in her quest for normalcy and her journey through grief.
Pen and Sink
Watching Ginny summon the dead with her cooking, using smells and tastes to bring characters to life and awaken discoveries, I found myself asking: Isn’t that the process we go through in writing?
When I am writing, one of the most acute senses for me to use is my sense of smell. Certain scents—like warm leather—will transport me back to my three-year-old self, sitting in the back of my grandfather’s car. The leather seats are soft and slightly heated against my bare thighs and knee socks. Not only do I feel myself back in the car, I am momentarily back with him, my grandfather, and with my mother and grandmother. My grandfather is dead, but the scent of warm leather brings him back to me.
For me, what this book awakened was a new appreciation of the power of both writing and cooking to conjure—to bring to life both feelings and people, to get us inside each others’ experiences and to help us see how we’re all connected.
I don’t have Asperger’s, but McHenry’s vivid writing brought me inside Ginny’s experience of being unmoored by feelings and social situations. And I hate to cook, but I loved being immersed in Ginny’s sensory-rich world and discovering how much cooking can be like writing: a calming ritual, an alchemy, a way to make order out of the world’s chaos and to bring forth something new.
When I am feeling out of control or anxious, I often choose not to write on the computer, but instead take out a fountain pen and let my hand flow across the paper as I unfurl the tightened feelings and thoughts bunched up in my brain. McHenry conjured up such memories in me from Ginny’s descriptions of her cooking:
I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe. I line an eight-by-eight-inch pan with foil and spread oil into it with my fingers, careful to follow each step, in order. The calm is in the rhythm. Start the oven preheating, with a click and a faint whoosh of blue flame.
Each time my partner puts a meal down in front of me, I know he has done it to nurture us: our relationship, our love, our bodies. Yet, in the past—being perplexed by the appeal of cooking—I have never quite fathomed what would make him say, “I love to cook for you.”
Now, I think I know.
Art Information
- “Farmer’s Market” © Jeff Shelden; used by permission
- “Quail Eggs” © Lois Shelden; used by permission
Lorraine Berry is a contributing writer at Talking Writing.
Her new cooking-related task is to find recipes that she then asks her partner, Rob, to make—which he does, with love.
For more on Lorraine's adventures in the kitchen, see "The Bad Cook Blues" in this issue of TW.
