In an era punctuated with persistent loss, our culinary rituals are a scrumptious bridge
It stood on my kitchen bookshelf, Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook: From Hemingway, South Carolina, to Harlem, with its ashen purple spine and gold lettering that twinkled in the November light. In what felt like a taunt, the book’s presence made me reconsider a takeout Thanksgiving on the couch. Since 2021, I’ve lost both parents, which has consumed both my heart and my usual cooking mind, dampening my desire to reach for the familiar.
The cookbook, a portal to my childhood and one of my mom’s favorites from her massive cookbook collection, had a traditional recipe I knew I had to try: golden brown macaroni and cheese. I’m a Black Southern woman and cook with roots in Georgia and Alabama, so making mac and cheese was not something I needed formal instruction to execute or master. But in the past few years, the way I’ve made my mac with a béchamel-based roux and too many fancy cheeses I can’t pronounce was no longer satisfying.