Free Feeding the Hungry Ghost by Ellen Kanner Page B

Bundt cakes, coconut layer cakes, brownies, sugar cookies, and buttery, ground-almond cookies rolled in a profligate amount of powdered sugar. She called them wedding cookies, but they’re beloved all over, with many iterations — they’re called Mexican wedding cakes, Greek kourabiedes, and ghraybeh across the Middle East. My favorite name for them is liar’s cookies, because as soon as you bite into one, you’re dusted and incriminated. Or worse. I could never manage to eat one without inhaling the powdered sugar and having a coughing fit.
    The rest of the meal, though, was prepared by Cora, my grandparents’ magnificent housekeeper. She was large, elderly, motherly, black, but with the heart and sensibility of a yenta. Cora had a definitive sense of How Things Ought to Be that I can only wonder at. The Friday night family dinner edict may well have come from her.
    She cooked for all of us, including those of us too young to realize what a big honking deal it is to prepare enormous multicourse meals for a horde. Also a big honking deal — exposing little kids to grown-up food. Very grown-up. Archaic, even — I mean, whose idea was beef tongue? Who thought it would be a big seller to a six-year-old? Cooking it with raisins might have lent it sweetness, but it looked like what it was, with all those weird little papillae bumps on it. Don’t get me started.
    If we didn’t love the tongue, there were no McNugget backups. We could eat or not eat what was being served; there were plenty of other things on the table; and well, better luck next Friday — maybe there’d be fried chicken.
    I’m sure there were more than a few meltdowns, maybe from the kids, maybe from their parents. I have a vague but recurring memory of Cora threatening to kill herself if we didn’t eat the mashed potatoes and my grandfather getting up from the table to pour himself a tumbler of scotch.
    Maybe he wasn’t so old, but he had all the accoutrements: false teeth, which he kept in a glass by the bed, hearing aid, thick glasses, and — yecchh — a truss. The precursor to the more macho weight belt, this was a complicated, allegedly flesh-colored, many-strapped thing that mostly resided on a chintz bedroom chair, where its sole purpose seemed to be to scare the bejesus out of me. I gave it a wide berth, never so much as touched it.
    What with the truss and my debacle on the terrazzo, thekitchen became my playroom of choice. I was obsessed by the big, black gas range with a cooktop that lit up witchy rings of blue flame. Marcella and Cora’s knives worked better as bludgeons than as sharp implements, so I couldn’t do too much damage. The two women didn’t mind having me underfoot, but they had dinner to make and went about their business. They didn’t talk about process or recipes; both had experience and instinct. And perhaps in Cora’s case, recipes were her source of power, and she wasn’t about to give that up.
    If they weren’t instructive, they weren’t restrictive, either, especially my grandmother. If six-year-old Ellen wanted to dump a box of raisins in the brownie batter, she was all for it. The kitchen was where I had my first sense of Yes, where I caught a glimpse of the self I still want to be the rest of the time — clever, creative, composed, not tripping up on my own craziness.
    But you can’t stay in the kitchen forever. Cora died, leaving my grandparents stranded and clueless. They hired and fired a series of housekeepers, all of whom were doomed because they weren’t Cora.
    Marcella tried to keep the Friday evenings going, but she and my grandfather were well and properly old by then. The granddaughters were older, too, and suddenly fuggy with teenage girl hormones. We served the food, whisked away the plates (sometimes before people had finished eating), and cleaned up, but we had school and social things and other interests. We had Friday-night dates with boys. Even when we managed to show up at our