by Mary Sauer

Around the same time that I begin making plans for the holidays, I am writing fiction inspired by my family because I don’t have enough information to stick to the facts. My great-aunt Anna Lea Steenburgen won the National Hellman’s Mayonnaise Cooking Contest while living in Virginia Beach in the 1980s. I spend three hours before bed working my way toward the last Google search result associated with her name skipping any links referencing The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Ted Danson, or Michael J. Fox. From a paywalled article by The Virginian Pilot, I learn it was onion bread that won her the grand prize. Hellman’s awarded her with a complete kitchen remodel. I don’t find a picture of the kitchen online, but I find a short description—“tiled, bricked, adorned with copper hanging pots.” In a text conversation with my mother, I ask her if she knows anything about the onion bread. Maybe it’s a family recipe.

—

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan writes about how the act of preserving and passing down family recipes from one generation to the next isn’t happening like it used to. In her article in The Washington Post, she says—not as means of pointing a finger, but as a fact—that families are busy. Mothers are working. Who has the time? She is not placing blame, but I wonder if I have done something wrong. I catalogue what I know: I’ve inherited skills, but in the absence of family recipes, I turn to the internet to get the ingredients right. My daughter can make a roux because I’ve taught her. She’s seen me step back from the eruption of steam when I deglaze the pan. Carrots, onions, and celery should be cut uniformly for mirepoix, but I learned that from food writer Ruth Reichl, not from my grandma.

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I make Italian meatballs, measuring out oregano by the palmful and relying on whatever heels are left in the bottom of the bread bag to hold it all together. I brown them in batches, spreading them out on the bottom of the dutch oven so they crisp up instead of cooking in the steam they create. I learned this from Barbara, my grandmother on my dad’s side, who moved to the Historic Northeast of Kansas City from England in her teens, pregnant with her first child by my Italian-American grandfather, who was a soldier stationed near the village where she lived.

When Barbara immigrated to the United States, she knew her father would never speak to her again. She spoke to her mother on the phone occasionally but never visited home. Barbara taught herself to cook for a Sicilian-American family: cutting the acid of red sauce with a heaping spoonful of white sugar and baking wedding cookies for days leading up to every holiday.

Biscotti has a crunch to it. The dough has more in common with a sweet bread than a cookie, and I might fold in nuts or dried fruit before forming it into a loaf on a cookie sheet. I slice it into flat fingers after it’s cool, flip them onto their sides, and bake them a second time. I remember Barbara as an excellent cook, but she never got the pronunciation or the crunch of Biscotti right. Her lasagna didn’t set up but collapsed on my plate. I imagine she felt oarless. Who would she have turned to when she couldn’t get the recipe right?

—

Great Aunt Anna Lea’s obituary is impossible to gloss over. Having admired her older brothers’ service in World War II, she quit medical school and joined the Navy. In 1974, when she graduated from Naval War College, she was the only woman in her class of 180. She was the first woman promoted to captain in the Navy. She became the first woman invited aboard the annual turnaround of the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston Harbor: acting as the honorary navigator of the oldest commissioned warship still afloat. But these are the things I already know. I resent knowing that anyone with a working knowledge of Google could know these things about her as well.

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Like Tan, I am concerned about lost recipes, but I am more bothered by the estrangement their absence represents. As a child, I watched my dad fry wedges of dark purple eggplant in olive oil until they were crisp on both sides, and I spread thick tomato paste over the double batch of pizza dough stretched thin on the counter. We added Italian sausage, eggplant, and mozzarella cheese before we rolled it into a log of pizza bread. In the years that followed, he became increasingly violent when he wasn’t medicated. He wasn’t medicated most of the time. As a young adult expecting my first child, I changed my number. We only talked two or three times over the thirteen years that followed. I don’t make pizza bread for my family; maybe some recipes need to be forgotten.

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One quarter of young adults will become estranged from their parents, according to a 2023 article published by The Hill, the official newspaper of The White House. Many will heal these relationships with time. This statistic falls flat for me. In my family, the rifts have origins deep in the strata; this isn’t a modern trend. Barbara was practically a child when she became a mother for the first time, and that pregnancy was the catalyst for her estrangement from her parents. I am a mother too, and it isn’t hard for me to imagine what was going on inside her when, years later, she left her four children behind. My father was in early grade school when she disappeared from their lives; she came crashing back into the family when he was in his teens. This familial pattern of estrangement has little to do with the great-grandchildren and their children, but the consequences are ours to keep. I sift through research and longitudinal studies, but I can’t find what I’m looking for. Has no one documented the intensity of the grief when the apple pie baked in a brown paper sack had a very specific taste, but there is no one to call upon your failure to recreate it? When no one wrote the recipes down?

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I likely never met Anna Lea, but she was sister to my maternal great-grandmother, Mary Etta, who taught me how to rock the pastry fork back and forth when making crust for custard pie. Who taught me to keep a blue Maxwell’s can in the freezer for bacon grease. A few years after Mary Etta’s death, her daughter, my grandmother Lynda, sold a small box of her handwritten recipes in a garage sale. She said it was accidental, but it seemed to be fueled by a recent disagreement between Lynda and her last living sibling over the few material possessions Mary Etta left behind.

—

My estrangement from my mother and father’s families was gradual playing out well into my adulthood and motherhood. My contact with them was sporadic and unpredictable, but I tried to maintain a relationship as I entered into young adulthood. After my first daughter was born, my husband ran home to get me a few things I needed. Minutes after he left, the phone rang, and I answered with my one-day-old daughter in my arms. My Grandma Barbara was calling me for the first time in two or three years. My father’s mother wasn’t calling to congratulate me but to tell me I should let my father meet his grandchild. It was the first time I realized that being estranged from my dangerous father meant being estranged from grandparents, aunts, and uncles too.

—

After reading Tan’s article, I become obsessively interested in food historians and tracking down physical recipes from either side of my family. I email Suzanne Corbett, food historian, and ask if we can talk about disappearing recipes in family lines. I don’t think she will tell me my great-grandmother’s box of recipes has landed in their archive or that she has the recipe for the onion bread. Instead, I think what I am looking for is a better understanding of what I am hungry for. Is there an acceptable substitute if I can’t get my hands on the real thing?

—

It has been nearly a year since I started this research. My husband is in the driver’s seat navigating the single-lane highway leaving the beach house we’ve rented for a week to return to late fall in the Midwest. Signal drops in and out on my phone, and fragmented texts are arriving out of order. I piece together that Grandma Barbara has died. We haven’t spoken since my brother’s funeral seven years ago—silence became a habit between us—and the finality of our estrangement knocks the wind out of me. What blame do I hold? Should I have found a way to exit the triangulation between her, my dad, and me, to try to establish a single, untangled thread between the two of us before her death? I think of my maternal grandmother, who is also absurdly triangulated with my dad and me. Half a decade ago, she stopped calling me or sending my kids cards on their birthdays. She didn’t offer me an explanation, but I gathered that she sees the two of us as existing on opposing sides. At the time, I was suffering from chronic insomnia so severe I had to quit working. I was directing my limited energy toward meeting the needs of my three young children. I let her have her silence. The disconnection between us could very soon become a severance, with the permanence of death. I wonder if I should find a way to tie us together again before it’s too late.

—

I reach out to Tara in the PR department at Hellman’s. I tell her about my credentials and bylines and ask her about archival records of contest-winning recipes. The Virginian Pilot auto-debits my card again, $19.95 this time. I must have signed up for a promotional period. There is a tracker attached to my email; a notification arrives in my inbox letting me know that Tara has opened it. She doesn’t email me back. I feel embarrassed following up because this is more personal than professional. What do I say? Do I tell her about the smallness of my family these days? Do I confess that I feel jealous of my neighbors, of the cars that spill out of their driveway and into the street every holiday? That I am attempting to pull together something of a family history for my children and myself?

—

Each Christmas, my kids and I dedicate hours of their school break to cookie boxes. This year, we make millionaire bars with eggnog baked into the shortbread foundation. Separating a triple batch of butter cookie dough in two, we flavor one half with matcha and attempt a checkerboard cookie. None of the corners lines up, and they’re no bigger than a half dollar, but we all close our eyes and hum for a second at the first bite. On TikTok, everyone is making chocolate chunk cookies with pistachio cream in the middle, so we do too. A few days before Christmas, my ten-year-old and I start making deliveries. Porch dropping most, but allowing ourselves to be pulled into the warm homes that have become like our second homes. Ignoring the protests of those who couldn’t possibly eat any more sweets, we take some of the boxes to Lawrence, Kansas, to gift to my husband’s family.

On the first Friday of the year, my kitchen is a special kind of chaos: I am making pizza dough from a recipe I printed from a blog. My husband is putting away seven or eight bags of groceries, standard for a weekly trip for a family of six. My four kids are in the midst of an elaborate game of dress-up with the children of our close friends. Someone’s parents are letting themselves in my front door when my Grandma Lynda calls for the first time in five years. I pick up her call because I am off guard, and I think someone may have died. She’s calling to let me know my dad’s wife is sick. He’s having a hard time and hearing from me would mean a lot to him. I snap at her and tell her now is not a good time, but I am not able to say what I want to say in the moment: I haven’t heard from you in five years. Think of all of the birthdays and piano recitals you’ve missed.

In the days that follow, I start making extra curry, using a larger pot for soup, baking twice as many blueberry muffins, and bringing them to the homes of our closest friends. I start to write the best of the recipes down.

Mary Sauer is a writer and mother living in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Managing Editor of Salt Tooth Press. She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has work published or forthcoming in SWWIM, Glassworks Magazine, Cleaver, MER Literary, Arc Poetry, The Washington Post, and Popula.