National Cooking Day
Meditations on nature, family, connection, and how we are united by food. Featuring pieces by Bhikshuni Weisbrot, Roy Cheng Tsung, Scudder Parker, and Liz Ahl.
TRANSCRIPT
September 25 was National Cooking Day. It’s 10 years old this year. Its purpose: to encourage people to step away from fast food, try new recipes, and enjoy the fun of making homemade meals.
Bhikshuni Weisbrot said that this poem came about during a night foray through her garden to a neighbor’s oven. “Night Baking.”
It comes upon you
like a seizure to see heat rise
from berries thickened with sugar,
to taste the spoon coated purple.
It comes upon you in the garden
as you balance small glass cups
brinked with cream
carefully between houses.
I have been warned of this –
night baking replacing sleep in summer,
as I find myself walking past the guardian cats,
skimmed by branches holding rain
and dare not look up to see the moon.
The neighbor’s oven is hot.
There is time to do this and no more,
four servings to bake and chill over night.
No dreams as sweet as these will come in sleep.
No disappointment as kind by day.
These are for you, my dear friends.
Taste, taste my bold victories,
my sublime failures.
From Passager’s 2012 Poetry Contest issue, Bhikshuni Weisbrot’s “Night Baking.”
Not everyone has the luxury of stealing fresh-baked sweets from the kitchen. In his book Beyond Lowu Bridge, Roy Cheng Tsung writes about the Great Famine in China between 1958 and 1962.
We all watched food disappear from shops, and witnessed friends and neighbors suffer from malnutrition. Every day, my mother felt my neck and forehead with her fingers to see if there were any swollen spots from malnutrition. Meat became hard to find and unaffordable for many city dwellers. Then fruit dwindled down to small piles of wormy and rotten apples. Grain, which had already been rationed several years prior to the famine, was now even more limited in supply. Rice was so scarce that we had to cook porridge with what little we were able to buy. Sometimes we scraped the bottom of the pot for charred rice. “It actually tastes like guo ba,” my father joked, referring to the baked rice patties in sizzling rice soup. But the burnt rice tasted bitter.
…My mother would line up for groceries for hours, rain or shine, and all of her shopping was done on foot. The image of my short, petite mother carrying a twenty-pound sack of flour on her slender shoulders will linger in my memory forever. I can still see her, a middle-aged woman slightly bent under the weight while trudging miles through the snow.
An excerpt from Roy Cheng Tsung’s book Beyond Lowu Bridge.
Scudder Parker remembers his mother through a painting in his kitchen. He said, “Her daily creativity is always with me in the garden, when I am writing, and when I am canning!” Here’s Scudder’s poem “My Mother’s Art.”
Above our sink, sixty-one tidy quarts
of tomato sauce march across a painting
titled “Parker Products 1943.”
They parade right through the column labeled “pints,”
slip under orange matting on the right,
seem to continue well beyond our sight.
There are twenty-six quarts of string beans,
twenty-five of apple sauce; blueberries from
burned-over Mount Sunapee.
Raspberry jam in jars of every size and shape,
line up like creatures for the Ark –
awkward with each other, but orderly.
Hours of picking, chopping, cooking down.
The containers are filled up just below the lip,
the orange gasket for the seal, the lid clamped down half-tight.
Billows of steam in a sweaty summer kitchen
by the lake. Time pauses for a year or more
in the jars that seal overnight.
It’s evening. My mother gets her paper,
brushes, paint. Her legs are swollen.
Seventeen pints of shell beans and corn:
she needs to tally up their beauty.
My father is off learning how to win the war.
I am days away from being born.
Scudder Parker’s “My Mother’s Art” from Passager’s 2019 Poetry Contest issue.
We’ll end with Liz Ahl’s poem “Stock.” Here’s what one of our summer interns, Anli Tamarabuchi, said about it:
“It’s about the intimacy of cooking with her partner. The language in “Stock” is evocative of the senses, but it also evokes the spirit of the poet’s relationship and how Liz and her partner bring different temperaments to cooking. I enjoy cooking for others, so the voice in the poem resonated with me.”
The work I do – the easy routine
of roasting a chicken or turkey –
a little dry brine, a cut-up lemon and onion
in the cavity, a little butter, a little pepper;
sage or thyme, depending on the season.
The work you do – the careful
picking of the bones, the stripping
of the carcasses of what I cooked for us –
you can pull a whole other meal
from what I left behind
in the crude haste of my carving –
Then all night, those clean bones,
the vegetable scraps and water,
left on slow simmer – the emerging scent
not only of the rich stock, but an infusion
of your patient care, a reminder
of your skilled fingers, your focus,
your way of loving and attending
to the world, to me, to us –
In bed, next to the strange, yet familiar
miracle of your body, I sleep, breathing in
the scent and also the spirit of you,
dreaming a marrow-richness
down into my own, old bones, deep within
my body, which you heal and love,
sometimes in extravagant flashes,
other times low and slow, simmering,
always a cup I am grateful to lift to my lips.
From Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest issue, Liz Ahl’s poem “Stock.”
To buy Roy Cheng Tsung’s book Beyond Lowu Bridge, or to subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.
For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Johnny, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
