My Grandfather's Recipe Book Had Poems in the Margins
He cooked for sixty years. He wrote in the margins for forty.
My grandfather's recipe book was a ledger, the kind with a brown cover and a string closure, and it was the most-used object in the house. Sixty years of dal and roti and pickle and sweet, each page stained with the evidence of the dish it described.
I inherited it when he died, along with his watch and a box of tools I still don't know how to use. The recipe book went on a shelf, and for three years it sat there unopened, because I could not look at his handwriting without missing him.
When I finally opened it I found the poems.
They were in the margins, in pencil, in the spaces between the ingredients and the method. Tiny, cramped, almost illegible poems about the food he was cooking and the people he was cooking it for. A poem about the smell of cardamom that was really a poem about my grandmother. A poem about the weight of a dough that was really about the weight of a son. A poem about the way steam rises off a pot that was really about the way grief rises off a life.
He never called them poems. He called them 'notes'. But they are poems. They are the kind of poem a man writes when he has spent his life feeding people and has run out of words for it.
I read them all, page by page, margin by margin. Some of them are dated. Some of them are just there, in the space between 'add the salt' and 'stir until it thickens', a small perfect thing about the way the light came through the kitchen window on a Tuesday.
I cook from the book now. The recipes work. The poems work better.
He never showed them to anyone. They were for himself, the way the cooking was for us. He wrote in the margins because the margins were where the real thing lived, the thing the recipe could not hold.
I keep the book on the counter now, not the shelf. The stains on the pages are the same stains I make. His poems are in the margins. Mine are starting to be.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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