I stand at the stove next to a little boy. My son is six, leaning close to the Mauviel pot. The copper needs a polish, but I’m unconcerned.
“Whisk,” I say, trying to impart a sense of urgency.
The child-sized silicon tool in his hand lazes in the custard.
“Whisk,” I repeat, cupping his knuckles, guiding the movement. My tone lightens. “We don’t want scrambled egg pudding.”
“We’re making chocolate pudding,” he says, eyes wide.
“I know. But if we don’t whisk, the eggs will cook, and guess what?”
He scrunches his nose. “Scrambled egg pudding!”
“Right.”
Thus concludes my cooking lesson. As my son whisks, my gaze shifts from his technique to the custard’s surface, where I watch for slow bubbles to form. The mixture of cocoa and eggs and sweetened condensed milk sloshes, cresting the pot’s lip, dripping down the tarnished side. A stovetop mess doesn’t bother me. When I cook with my son, I focus on what we’re making together, not the minor mishaps along the way. Years of working in restaurant kitchens taught me that even seemingly major issues are often fixable. I once worked for a pastry chef who believed no custard was precious (immersion blender, chinois). But making pudding with my son is precious—precious beyond measure—for both of us.
I like to think I’m over the notion of reparenting, but cooking with my kid makes it clear I’m reparenting myself, or at least validating the adult I’ve become: namely, a recovered perfectionist. I encourage him to flip through cookbooks, understanding that, when we measure out 28 grams of cornstarch, a cloud will rain down on the counter. Albumen will trail when he cracks an egg. Whole spoonfuls of sugar will miss the bowl. There will be unsanctioned spatula licks.
Truthfully, I welcome the cooking chaos. C’mon—we’re making “Creamy Dreamy Chocolate Pudding” on a Saturday afternoon. What’s at stake but having fun and enjoying a treat…once it’s chilled for “at least two hours or up to three days”?
Actually, everything. I know all too well how these moments of connection can misfire and accumulate, amounting to something personality- and life-altering.
I was raised by women who so prided themselves on their cooking that they were territorial about it: the food other people prepared was bland and unappetizing, suspicious in its lack of care. My grandmother attended culinary school in Chicago and sold homemade candies out of her home. My mother inherited that commissariat élan. What was breakfast if not warm pear coffeecake or sugar-capped muffins pocketed with apricot jam?
With cookbooks on the bookshelves, cooking magazines in the mail pile, and Julia Child reruns booming on TV, unsurprisingly, I wanted to take part in the activities where the women in my family were most in control. I learned the twin powers of secrecy—my grandmother didn’t need a recipe for crepes—and perfection. There was a right way to dip a measuring cup into the drum of flour. A right way to, in the days before cookie scoops, nudge a mass of dough into a completely round ball with only a knife and a teaspoon. And I saw the result of anything less than perfection: sheet pans of meringue cookies shucked into the garbage; oven doors slammed; tearful, cursing, self-berating the whole house heard.
Had I not learned, before the onset of my decades-long eating disorder, that food was more than substance, that it was worth revering, that it held sacred pleasures, I might not be in recovery today. Corrupt as it was, food was pleasure. I took cookbooks to my bedroom to copy out recipes in my meticulous print. A dizzying wave of nostalgia bathed my memories of oozing cinnamon sugar pooling on pillowy fruit dumplings in my grandmother’s dining room.
