Just taste it

~~
“I’m sure you can’t bake it all away, but you can transform the reality while still accepting the essen tial elements that make it what it is. You can make good smells in the place where you live, smells that are better than sitting around with stress breath and cigarette smoke. Who knows? Who knows how to do anything, but it’s not nothing that I know all my feelings and I have trust in their
changeable nature and I am an expert at making treats out of tribulations.”
~~

I just finished reading Jenny Slate’s book Little Weirds, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt such simultaneously and diametrically opposed feelings about any book before, but I really enjoyed this bit about baking.

I am just as steady as the Capricorn sign I live under, which is why often think I haven’t changed too much over the years. There’s no part of my past that I don’t recognize in myself any longer. This is partly because I always felt much older than my years (and part of THAT is due to being an only child of parents that took me everywhere with them and bestowed me with a much more worldly sense of being than most kids could claim). When I had nothing to do all day but breastfeed a brand-new-to-the-world Rowan on the couch for hours and hours and days on end, I began watching the Great British Bake Off, and it shifted something in me.

I have never been a “maker” or a “doer,” but rather a “consumer” and maybe even a “connoisseur” - or at least an extreme enthusiast. I have long loved sweets more than the average middle-class American, but I had never tried my hand at baking, ever. This was equal parts:
1) total lack of interest -- in being mediocre at something that I could very well go out and buy for $5 or less 2) laziness -- expending effort for such little conceived payoff (when I could, again, just go out and buy it), and:
3) most importantly, fear of gaining weight. I could control what I bought and brought into my house and therefore what I would tempt myself with, but who knows what deviance I would subject my already loathed body to if I took up baking. I assumed if I had an entire cake lying there, that I would just eat the entire thing, and then I’d wind up heavier than I already felt myself to be. And I really didn’t have a healthy understanding of eating until my early 30s.

I have always had an enormous appetite. In 7th grade, I would always order at least 2 Big Macs, but would often go for a 3rd, if my friends and I happened to sit there long enough. My grandmother would routinely make me a heaping plate of 8-15 slices of the most incredible homemade French Toast, and I *WOULD* eat it all, plus cereal and eggs and bacon. I don’t know where it all went, either -- I was a rail, a total string bean, as my mother lovingly referred to me. And yet, the summer between 8th grade and freshman year of high school, I went to study drama and poetry at Cambridge University for the summer and ate my usual insane amount of food daily with absolutely zero self-control, and came back with jeans that no longer fit. My hormones had caught up with me, and I was no longer a rail, but had curves I neither wanted nor liked.

I’ll never forget halfway through freshmen year, a guy I had an extreme crush on grabbing my arm in the hallway and pulling some small amount of flab away from my muscle and saying “Damn, you need to work out!” These things don’t leave you, especially at this most tender time, when you are learning to really look at yourself at the same time as you realize that everyone is really looking back at you.

(That guy, by the way, was flirting with me? Apparently? And he became my first serious boyfriend in high school. After, of course, I told him how much that scene hurt my feelings, and he apologized profusely, totally unaware what devastation he had wrought with that short exchange.)

And so, ages 15-30 were a long slog of figuring out how to approach food, how to not obsess over it, how to accept my body for what it was instead of what every magazine and blog and thin person seemed to scream it *COULD* be. How to listen to my body - did it really want to inhale an extreme amount of food, or would I not feel better if I had whatever I wanted, but just, you know, SOME.

Did I have to eat the world, or could I taste it?

Beginning to bake, for the very first time, with tiny baby Rowan in a bouncer in the kitchen, was epiphanic. I could make something out of my own hands, and enjoy the process. I could get cross-eyed reading recipes for such a long time, and find such great pleasure in finding the idea that sparked my salivary glands, like picking up just the right blossom for your ear in a field of wildflowers. I could, and would, find pleasure in kneading a dough, feeling the consistency and smell and taste of ingredients change depending on what I did to it, me, my own hands, with my own body. To fill my house with smells, and to bring it out of the oven with my eyes wide as saucers and think, I did that.

Baking and motherhood made me feel immediately connected to a lineage that was established long before me, but one I never had access to. It was like all of a sudden walking down a long, candele-lit hallway of outstretched arms, every mother and grandmother and great-grandmother saying “Oh now, look who’s here! Look who learned this secret, look who has gained access to this unique snowflake of pleasure that is now yours and yours alone forever, and yet also reaches back through all of civilization.”

Wrapping up a slice of a gingerbread swirl cake or an apple white cheddar scone for a friend and pressing it into her or his hand in the middle of their hard-won day is a flood of friendship, a flood of offering. A way of saying, “I see you, and I know what could bring you an immediate tidal wave of happiness, and oh, wait! Here it is! Wrapped in tinfoil, just for you.” It is antiquated and romantic and beautiful and I am sad that I deprived myself of decades of learning how to do this for myself and for others, because I was afraid it would widen my already despicable thighs. Having Rowan changed so much of that. I’m proud of my body, now. I’m in awe of what it’s done. I know when to lap in heaping spoonfuls and when just one or two will do, because I trust my body now, and oh, how many years I spent thinking of it as a despicable stranger living in my house, under my roof, skyrocketing the utilities bill and giving nothing in return.

Two dear friends gave me massive cookbooks for my birthday this year, they confessed, partly selfishly, so that I could bestow them with the fruits of my (happy) labor, but they also know intimately the joy that brings me -- that this is all I want - to make things and share them with the ones I love. Just forever trying not to be an only child, I suppose.

“...I guess the trick of the treat is that I left it there for you because I had too much of the troublesome ingredient with me for so long and I needed to make it into something else and give it away. It is too much for one person, isn’t it? And if you eat it, maybe you will know how full of it I felt, but also how much sweetness I have been holding for you, inside of myself, in so many colors and forms.” -Jenny Slate