My Mama, The Slowness and I
How lockdown cooking taught me a lesson about time, purpose, and the people I love
By Daniela Bologna
Graphic by Jas Calcitas
I’ve always been aware of the care and tenderness that goes into preparing a meal, but I don’t think I had fully comprehended it until this year. I never quite understood it when, as a child in Spain, my mother would prop up a little stool for me in the kitchen to talk to her as she cooked, not minding if she had to repeat what she had said various times for me to hear her over the sounds of stove-top sizzling. I never quite understood it while I watched her, absorbing the performative quality; the grating and the stirring, fingers gingerly dancing across cutting boards. Nor did I understand it when I performed other little rituals like setting the table. Always the same order: cutlery first (“No Daniela, not those! Those are for special occasions only!” she’d scream to me), then glasses, then plates. I would dive in and out of the kitchen, dangerously harpooning my mother’s path as I dotted backwards and forwards, stacks of precious cargo in my arms. Nor did I understand it when my mother would finally set down a plate of steaming food in front of me and make a joke in reference to the novel Like Water For Chocolate, wiping her hands on her apron. “If it tastes off, don’t say anything,” she’d say. “It’s probably just what I was feeling like today.” My mother always believed you can taste the emotions of the cook in their food, the same way the characters can taste Tita’s emotions in Like Water For Chocolate.
Even then, however, I still don’t think I fully understood the role of care in the kitchen. I lacked something crucial to fully make sense of it: an awareness of the scarcity and sacredness of time. It is only when time is a currency, and one you have all-too-many shortages of, that you really begin to make sense of the significance of stretching that time for things that might not necessarily require such devotion. To carve out time, and then use even more than what you had set aside. To make something from scratch and by hand, when there are store-bought alternatives you buy every other week. The realization that to care so much while cooking is really just to care so much about someone else.
This continued on for the majority of my life. I always admired and was thankful for my mother’s cooking and her commitment to taking care of our family, but that was all. In college, my relationship with food and how it interacts with my relationship with time was not one that I could pay much mind to. Quite simply, I viewed cooking as a means to an end. I acknowledged it as a necessary process and even enjoyed it at times, but it was never anything beyond that. Preparing couscous in the morning to take to class, or simmering tofu to add to coconut rice and kidney beans, or even baking box mixes of banana bread on the weekend with my roommate when we could find a quiet moment. Carrying out the act of cooking was to step closer to the finished product, so everything I did, I carried out in anticipation of it and not for the sake of it.
And then... and then. After so many years spent living apart, I found myself under the same roof as my mother once again. In Mexico City, of all places. A city I had never lived in growing up, but only heard of fondly from my family. It all felt so surprising that my mind kept almost convincing me living with her was a foreign, new experience but I never listened to it. Being with my mother in Mexico tasted too familiar on my tongue, slipping into old habits and rituals like the way in which I set the table. Always childlike, never childish.
We no longer own the little stool I used to sit on, having lost it in one of our moves in the past. Maybe from Spain to England, where I spent my adolescence? Or was it when my mother moved from England to return to Mexico, her homeland? I wonder if I would even fit on it today. As a child, I remember having ample room on it for me to sit and for my legs to dangle, but then again, a lot of childhood memories look so different when you see them again today. Everything is so much bigger when you’re a kid.
On the other hand, I did find myself with something so sought after, something I otherwise don’t normally possess: time. My mother found the same. The pandemic thrust us suddenly into a perplexing new world where time shared together was simply not running out. As someone who had only viewed cooking as a means to an end, I could allow myself, for the first point in my life, to take time out of my day to do it. I could really indulge in the slowness of cooking, a side to it I had never been able to experience before. Cooking itself was starting to become an activity entirely separate in its worth and purpose to eating. I knew about the intimacy of sharing a meal, but I was not aware first-hand of how that intimacy begins with the preparation of it.
Rituals even took on a different feeling. Challah bread every Friday was no longer just a tradition carried out mechanically. The street vendors who bike down our road, selling banana-leafed tamales or milky coffee at the same hour every day, punctuating what would otherwise be a timeless period as days bled into each other.
But at what point precisely did cooking become something more? At what point did I become aware it was slowly reframing anything I do to come from a place of care? I remember clumsily trying to navigate spending more time with my mother in the kitchen. We ignored the piles of her cookbook collections in favor of more familiar recipes. The lekaj cake my great-grandmother would make, with the adaptions my grandmother perfected, each bite bursting with touches of orange and honey and spices along with her gratitude. The pasta e fagioli soup my late grandpa used to love having his daughter-in-law make for him, aromatic spoonfuls of longing encased in beans. The latkes I grew up eating, each crispy mouthful leaving an aftertaste tinged with nostalgia. In sharing this time, cooking together would each day have less and less to do with the final product and more to do with how we could bond over it. Just small moments of nothing but my mama, the slowness, and I.
One November evening we tried to follow my friend’s recipe for pie crust but couldn’t. All the labor we had put into it should have felt in vain, but it did not. Even if that labor bore no fruit, it somehow does not feel like a loss. For the first time, the purpose of cooking had completely shifted in me. I finally understood the care and tenderness that goes into it.
Even from afar, we could give each other the gift of time in this way. Coming together as a family with my sister in England and my grandparents in Spain and baking lekaj in unison over Zoom. To share space in spite of distance, disproving the notion that togetherness can only be geographical. Until the day we can all cook together again, I am grateful I have my mother to stand beside and hug tightly as she dices garlic, unrushed and unfaltering.