84 FEBRUARY 2020
of recipes. I arrived at my first meeting with Sean Brock with a
satchel of notebooks that contained my pie dough recipe, but-
termilk pie recipe, caramel and “church cake” recipes, cast-iron
upside-down cakes, biscuits, and a bag-load of other treasures
that I was ready to find a place to serve. My hand pies were
fundamental in this repertoire, perfect little things that people
came to love, filled with whatever fruit or savory filling that was
in season. Through the notebooks, I had built a solid foundation
of basics that I felt I could do anything with.
Twenty or so years after I started that first notebook, I am back
in my own kitchen, having left the restaurant arena to focus on
my memoir, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, and other cooking
and writing projects. My notebooks have become sacred totems
to me, their scratchings nearly memorized. I can always recall
the color of ink, the doodles in the margins, the color of the
cover, or the lack of a cover if it had fallen off. When I think
about my cornmeal cake recipe, I imagine the notebook it is in,
what kind of ink it was written in, and I can see the recipe in
my mind as soon as the page comes into focus in my memory.
When I read them now, in their collective pages I can see not
just the evolution of my recipes, but the trajectory of my work.
In the beginning, there is the harried young woman desperate
to make a buck from something she believed in, eschewing the
desk job so she could be home with her children, trusting in
herself enough to commit to a craft and having faith in the work
her hands could do. I see her growing in confidence, becoming
a pastry chef with a style and a voice.
I can see how I developed a style of dessert that became my
signature: simple cakes and pies and puddings, with salty crunch
and beautiful buttermilk cream; simple, simple, simple, but
with articulated flavors. All this simplicity was hidden behind
years of practicing French pastry creams, quick lamination
techniques, and gelatin firming ratios. The tricky thing about
simplicity is that you really have to know your shit. There is
nowhere to hide when you partner with simple. I knew I was
never going to be fancy, write formulas that included Versawhip
and emulsifiers, or make fussy garnishes. But, with any luck, I
would be good. Watching a professional emerge from the pages,
I feel a distilled sense of pride and gratitude for the opportuni-
ties presented to me and for myself for showing up for them.
All these years later, my recipes are practically muscle-memory
recipes. I hardly need the notebooks to make them, even though
they are all dutifully cataloged and saved, however sterile and
uninterestingly, on digital files and between acetate sleeves in
clean, white binders. Those live in my office. But the notebooks,
the handwritten words, the soiled and stained covers and torn
pages and faded writing, those are still tucked next to my rolling
pins and knives in my kitchen. There are still more pages to fill.
