How do you talk to a recipe?

On Crystal Wilkinson's "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts"

As readers of cookbooks we know a grandmother’s apron strings well. Authors upon authors narrate their smaller selves watching old hands mix dough or sprinkle spices. They tell us of recipes with no measurements and a matriarch’s add until you have enough. This is often an important, unavoidable genesis point for a person’s palate, the way they move through their own kitchen and their own meals. We cannot escape these grandmothers and mothers and aunties and I wouldn’t want us to. (Chalk up any exhaustion with them to bad writing or the pervasive impatience with a woman on a page.) But in her new memoir/cookbook Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Crystal Wilkinson has found a new way for the matriarchs of history’s kitchen to speak.

Wilkinson is a poet from Kentucky, daughter of a long line of Black Appalachian cooks. (People are always surprised that Black people reside in the hills of Appalachia, the book begins.) She was raised primarily by her grandparents on a farm along a creek, where they kept chickens and cows and pigs, where they kept a fruit and vegetable garden that sustained her grandmother’s cooking and canning, where her grandfather was the king of sorghum, boiling it over a live fire after each year’s harvest, causing neighbors to slow down and ask how much. And so she spent much of her childhood in the kitchen with her grandmother, observing first, then learning to cook. I learned how to cook by saying nothing—watching how each ingredient was managed—but so much of the art of cooking lies in the body.

Today, Wilkinson is a mother and grandmother and writer who cooks out of homage, for pleasure, and not by bound duty. Her grandmother (and mother) now gone, she tends to the archive of her lineage: a box of hand-written recipes, many in her grandmother’s perfect cursive. And she keeps the stories they hold. Praisesong brings this archive to life, correcting and counteracting a historical record that has long disregarded the stories of home cooks, of Black women, of Black Appalachia. For Wilkinson, cooking as homage becomes writing as homage, which requires listening as homage.

The book is a memoir and a cookbook both. (Its subtitle is Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks.) It has more recipes (39) than your standard food memoir-with-recipes, where the recipe is often a narrative punctuation at the end of each anecdote. And it has a denser, fuller narrative structure than the growing genre¹ of “cookbooks with personal essays”. This is an active structural choice, not an effect of indecision: Praisesong weaves the recipe form into narrative in a way I haven’t seen another book do.

Recipes appear in various forms throughout the book. There are formal recipes, yes, at the end of each chapter, which have been edited and tested into a shape we’re all familiar with: lush photo, headnote, ingredient list, instruction. Many come directly from Wilkinson’s grandmother; many are Wilkinson’s own adaptation of her family recipes, redirected by her evolving tastes. But inside the chapters themselves, recipes appear—often as the narrator is calling back a memory, or investigating a formative dish—as oral history, as conversation, as conjuring. 

These shape-shifting recipes reflect and remember the history of the recipe, which has long been something passed in conversation, or shown by the example of a pair of hands. Wilkinson is not just uplifting the food of her grandmother and great-grandmother and great-great-great-great grandmother, but reviving and retracing the recipe’s oral tradition. She’s also narrating the role that food plays in her extended family, its essential centrality. In the first chapter, which leads us towards her grandmother’s jam cake and her own “Mess O’ Meatless Greens,” Wilkinson receives a call from her cousin who asks, tell me again how you fix greens without fatback? And she answers:

First you sauté the garlic and onion in vegetable oil in a pot. Then add a pinch of red pepper flakes. Salt. Let the vegetables soften. Wash the dirt from your greens. Slice them longways in ribbons with a butcher knife. Put them in the pot one handful at a time. Cast iron works best. Let them cook down. Sprinkle only a bit of water if they are about to scorch, but sometimes I add vegetable or chicken broth to get them closer to the traditional dish. I like them with some heft in their bite now, not cooked all day.

This is a recipe, broken free from the strictures of anyone’s style guide but the cook’s own. Early in the book Wilkinson explains that she thinks of recipes the same way she thinks of poems—as aural texts. Presenting them outside the strictures of formal style imbues them with a lived-in humanity. Other dishes appear this way throughout the book, dictated over the phone or described in conversation, true to the cook’s voice. Aunt Lo explains the family’s process for cooking wild greens. Uncle Sherman proffers the secret to blackberry cobbler: don’t overmix the dough. And Wilkinson, our narrator, invites us into her habits, narrating her search for dandelion greens (at Whole Foods they look tame and domesticated), talking us through her yellow cake process the same way she does, aloud, to herself, in the second person. There is something moving about the realism of all this—that this is how a dish actually moves through the world and so many hands. And then, of course, the ghosts appear.

The titular ghosts begin with Grandma Aggy, formerly Aggy of Color, Wilkinson’s fourth-great grandmother born into slavery and then freed by the slaveholder who became her husband. She and all the other greats lovingly haunt Wilkinson’s kitchen, and sometimes they talk. 

I have been thinking a lot about speculative nonfiction, the act of filling in the things you cannot know with what you imagine. It is an imagining based in fact, sometimes based in bone-deep knowing, but it is a fabrication nonetheless, the same way you might take your grandmother’s index card printed with a recipe that tells you only the essentials, and fill the rest in with the bodily knowledge she taught you in person. You might just call it fiction, as Wilkinson does in her introduction, but it’s also more interesting than that. You can either believe that Wilkinson is talking to long-dead women or you can’t. I’m not sure it matters. The result is convincing regardless.

The ghosts speak, and fully. Ma Aggy speaks for a page or two about ashcakes, how to make them and the circumstances under which she did. By the time everyone’s done eating, the moon will be winking at you from the sky. Patsy Riffe, Aggy’s daughter and a successful business woman, languishes in the story of the fall day in 1863, when the news of emancipation arrived as she was preparing short ribs and potatoes for some lodgers. Wilkinson’s grandmother, from the great beyond, narrates a memory of teaching one of her young daughters to bake biscuits, so soon after losing her own mother. I watch her little hands steady on the sifter and her round face as she looks up at me for approval. From a political and family-historical perspective, these monologues² offer meaningfully textured accounts of these women’s lives. But they also represent the logical conclusion of Wilkinson’s treatment of recipes and cooking knowledge as passed-down text. If Wilkinson begins by phoning an aunt about greens and an uncle about cobbler, if she continues by combing her recipe box and memories from lessons passed on by her grandmother, why not keep going? Why not ask the women who taught the women who taught her grandmother? If a food memoir traces the development of a cook—not a künstlerroman but a kochroman—where does that development begin? Not at birth, Wilkinson argues, but centuries before that. Praisesong expands the traditional understanding of how recipes and their attendant knowledge might be passed down, and the channels by which we might learn them. 

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts might be one of the best recent arguments I’ve seen for the inherent narrative quality of recipes. By excavating and annotating and investigating her own family recipes, by listening to them and speaking back to them and offering them to us as a shared document, Wilkinson holds the cook’s document like a diamond, watching all the ways it reflects and refracts a life or a lineage. The story is hidden inside the recipe, whether or not we can see it at first glance. And story is what makes a dish stick in another cook’s mind. I know that this summer when I see rows of blackberries at the market I’ll think of Wilkinson’s blackberry cobbler, of the crust you shouldn’t fuss with, of the image of her grandmother sitting in an old church pew in the backyard cleaning and sorting a basket of just-picked berries.

1. Two good examples of this are Eric Kim’s Korean American and Reem Assil’s Arabiyya; I’ve raved about the latter here. I’ve written more on the relationship between food memoirs and cookbooks here.

2. A term used by Svetlana Alexievich, oral historian and Nobel Winner. Her books are made up of long oral history excerpts, which she calls monologues, meaning that her narrators—her interviewees—speak for themselves, as if upon a stage. This footnote is just an excuse for me to tell you to read, yes, a book about Chernobyl.