As a kid, I used to spend summer vacation at my grandmother’s house. She lived alone in a narrow rowhouse filled with old furniture, Marlboro cigarette smoke and frogs. She adored frogs – she had a brass frog-shaped plate around her doorbell, a concrete frog fountain in her backyard, and a shiny chrome diving frog hood ornament on her 1985 Volkswagen Quantum.
My great-great-grandfather, Frank G. Carpenter, and his daughter Frances (my grandmother’s mother), were geographers and authors who published over 50 books between them. Naturally, everything in my grandmother’s house had a story attached to it as well: the silver tray, once belonging to Benjamin Henry Harrison, most often used to bring tea to Eleanor Roosevelt, the Indian sapphire necklace bought for two halves of a hundred dollar bill, the living room sofa that used to be in the lobby of some grand hotel that closed long before I was born.
It was a great place for a kid with a hyper-active imagination to grow up in. I could be a happy dolphin or a ponderous manta ray, swimming slowly back and forth in a giant bathtub and, at night, I was an spy, creeping softly and silently down the hallway so as not to awaken the terrible clawfooted furniture. The basement was full of ancient things from far away in place, like Russian palakh boxes delicately decorated with fierce heroes astride elegant horses, or far away in time – Great-Aunt Laura’s fish plates of lovely etched green glass, just perfect for peering through on a sunny day.
Behind her house was a good-sized garden and we grew vegetables during those summer vacations together: Tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and pole beans. We had a deal typical of grandparents and grandchildren – I was responsible for watering and picking the vegetables when they were ready and, in return, she bought me stuff. Which, in fourth grade, seemed like the real benefit but now pales in comparison to the many hours I spent with her in the kitchen, perched on a rickety white stepstool next to the stove.
My grandmother didn’t so much cook as create food. She never told me any details of a recipe – just the ingredients (usually they were measured in terms of “some”, “a little” or “a lot.”) Combined with a little of this and some of that, those ordinary vegetables, grown with little more than the distracted attention of a ten-year-old turned into the soups of summer – delicate, cooling cucumber-dill or thick, rich gazpacho. The beans were transformed into salty, summer heaven with a little bacon, salt and pepper and the zucchini – well, to be honest, we just couldn’t keep the bugs off the zucchini.
Last year, I started my own garden in the backyard of the house we rent. I was mainly curious to see if 1. I could get anything to grow in the backyard and 2. if I could keep anything growing. The cucumbers did great, the eggplant did OK and the tomatoes were a real learning experience (overwatering will cause all the leaves to fall off and leave the fruits exposed for squirrels and birds to pick off… grrrr).
This year, I expanded the garden repertoire to include herbs – 2 types of basil, mint, oregano, thyme, and dill in addition to Lemon Boy and Roma tomatoes, Sweet Gypsy and Purple Beauty peppers, a line of bush beans, and a very ambitious vine cucumber. From a neighbor, I adopted two watermelon and two cantaloupe seedlings that have since sprouted into healthy vines just discovering the vertical excitement of our stockade fence.
Last weekend, I made a grand harvest of the herbs, turning the mint into a Moroccan-style mint tea and the basil into pesto. My boyfriend happened to mention to his mom that I was making mint tea, she asked him for the recipe and he asked me to send it to her.
Of course, I haven’t sent it yet because I have no precise idea what it is. The steps are easy:
Moroccan Mint Tea
- Bring some water to a boil
- Turn it off, throw in 6 green tea bags, and let them steep a while
- Take them out, bring the water to a boil again
- Turn it off again, throw in a good handful of crushed mint leaves and let them steep a while
- Strain the leaves, chill (or not – your preference), and enjoy!.
But how much mint? How many leaves? I have no idea. And how long? Hard to say, the mint steeped while I made a strawberry-rhubarb pie and pesto – add that to the above: “Steep for the amount of time necessary to assemble and bake a strawberry-rhubarb pie and make pesto.”
And now I understand why my grandmother would look at me in exasperation when I badgered her for the precise details to her pecan pie recipe. Perhaps just like Michelangelo would sigh wearily at overeager assistants demanding to know what brushes he used on the Sistine Chapel or Beethoven would shrug his shoulders apologetically when asked what pen he used to write the 9th Symphony.
Creativity doesn’t require a particular brush, a pen or exact quantity of mint. Hugh MacLeod sums it up really well in his book Ignore Everybody this way:
“Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.”
My grandmother’s kitchen was a tiny space dominated by an old stove. She had drawers and cabinets full of strange things like clay Rumertopf pots and double-sided melon ballers. But it was obvious what she used most to make her magic: her favorite paring knife had a wood handle, well darkened and rubbed smooth from use, her favorite saute pan was always bright and shiny.
Will my trusty EOS 5D look like that after 20 years? I doubt it but I hope so.
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