Home Cooking & Good Spirits
Kitchen Community
Multi-generational mixing and stirring has its own special magic.

The Ingredients
Plan ahead to make cooking together a memorably happy experience whether your co-chefs are children or adults.

Be organized:
• Print recipes in advance––perhaps a copy for each cook.
• Have all ingredients ready––utensils, too.
• Charge up your digital camera, or load film, and keep it nearby.
• Have “to-go” boxes so everyone can take dishes home.
• Use visual aids—a related storybook, photos of recipes from magazines, or cookbooks (not too many).
 
Be flexible—If eggs spill or hands get goopy, laugh about it. When things go wrong—and they will—the memory becomes a silly story to tell.

• Choose recipes with enough steps to engage each participant.
• Turn on background music.
• Have beverages and snacks for a celebratory atmosphere.
• Shoot photos of both the messes and successes.
• Laminate recipes with personal annotations.
*Source: Marla Mendelsohn, chef/owner,
Cook-Ease Catering

Every October, at Pattie Provenzano’s roasted red pepper canning party, as many as twenty friends and relatives gather for a ten-hour marathon of cooking, laughter, and conversation. By 10 a.m., two charcoal grills are fired up in the driveway of her Windham, N.H., home. In the garage, long work tables are stacked with big bowls, cutting boards, and sharp knives. On the kitchen stove, huge pots hold water to sterilize the waiting jars. Last year, they canned 210 pounds of peppers in a single day.

“We call it “Henry’s Famous Pepper Party,” says Provenzano, community relations director for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. “Henry was a great home cook and wonderful person who taught me a lot about cooking. Until he passed away, we canned vegetables together every fall. Seven years ago, my husband and I decided to honor Henry by inviting neighbors, friends, friends of friends, and family members to a pepper party. Now everyone looks forward to our fall ritual all year. We set the date in March.” The day begins with mimosas and Bloody Marys and ends with their homemade roasted red pepper appetizer and a potluck supper.

“While we cook, we kibbitz,” says Provenzano. “We talk about sports, family, everything, but mostly we tease and joke around. My husband’s in charge of grilling the peppers. Everyone gets into the messy work of peeling and slicing peppers in the garage. But as the day moves along, there’s also time to talk quietly about personal issues, especially upstairs in the kitchen where a couple of us do the canning. Running up and down the stairs all day, I always notice that everyone’s relaxed, comfortable. Talking comes easily when you prep food together.” When the work is done, the whole crew pitches in to clean up. Everyone goes home with jars of canned peppers for gift-giving and home cooking.

When people mix and stir together in the kitchen, they connect in ways that differ from conversation over meals. Favorite family recipes are handed down along with stories from the past. Neighbors swap news as well as cookies when they bake for the holidays. Artists gather to stir soups and talk shop. Women get to know their future daughters-(or sons-) in-law, fathers teach their kids to be creative, couples get past awkwardness on a first date when they prepare meals or experiment with new, and maybe strange, combinations of ingredients.

Barriers to Communication Tumble Down
“When you cook alone, it can feel isolating,” says Marla Mendelsohn, chef/owner of Cook-Ease Catering in Dallas, Texas. “Cooking with others is an easy way to connect. It is more than just preparing a meal. It’s a feast for the soul. The experience itself is more rewarding because you’re working toward a common goal and then you get to eat it. When you make mistakes, you’ll have stories to tell later. What you’re really doing is creating memories together.” 

Marla is my sister-in-law. On a recent Sunday morning, she convinced my noncooking spouse to put down the crossword puzzle so she could teach us to make fresh pasta from scratch. Bob delighted in cracking eggs, pouring them into the center of a mound of flour, adding oil, and gently mixing the mess, all right on the counter. He kneaded the dough and ran it through the pasta press, a new tool to marvel over. When we ate our Italian feast that evening, he proclaimed it the best fresh pasta he’d ever tasted (which may be true) and now delights in telling everyone how fun and easy it was to make. Cooking together opened a new chapter in our family saga.

When Portsmouth, N.H., residents Michelle Long and Paul Hansen met eight years ago, they decided to cook dinner on one of their first evenings together, even though neither had much experience in the kitchen. They quickly developed a rhythm for working together and a love of fresh fish and produce. Now married for two years, they enjoy cooking dinner together five nights a week.

“We don’t often talk while we each do our tasks,” says Long, a focus group moderator. “Our roles have just evolved. He likes to sauté, I’m the sous chef, and magically we don’t need words to communicate.” Her husband agrees. “It’s very comforting to work beside your best buddy and at the end of such a yummy process you get to eat what you’ve made,” says Hansen, publisher of The Hansen Report on Automotive Electronics. “We come home from work tired and talk a little about the big things while I stack up the ingredients. She’s better at seeing where the dish is going. We slip into the mode of doing the same thing together. It’s like rowing a boat together or almost like a dance.”

Scott Squillace and Shawn Hartman recently completed their dream kitchen in their getaway home, a log house on ten acres in South Berwick, Maine. They designed it specifically for cooking together and involving guests. Friends instantly find it easy to gravitate to the new counter and bar stools in the middle of the room. Before they know it, they all pitch in to help.

“It’s how we socialize and relax, says Squillace, a corporate and international attorney. “Shawn is director of communications for the Massachusetts Democratic State Party. We’re both always on the go. When we cook together, it’s our time to catch up—that’s how we planned our wedding on Labor Day and it has helped define our roles outside the kitchen by discovering what we do well together inside the kitchen. I don’t tell him how to chop garlic. He doesn’t tell me how to grill.”

Grandma and Me
Multi-generational mixing and stirring has its own special magic. Susan Gately of Kittery, Maine, and her five-year-old grandson, Tyler Grogan, began baking together when he was three. When he comes to her house, he wants to know what they’re going to cook.

“It has opened up communication with my grandson in ways I never realized could happen with my own children,” says Gately, a software sales representative who has three grown daughters and five other grandchildren, near and far. “It has opened up learning experiences for both of us. I didn’t think a little boy would want to sift flour but Tyler turned it into making snow, which led to our talking about snowflakes. Rolling out dough was much harder for him than I expected. He didn’t have the patience for it. But that inevitably led us to talking about other things that are difficult. 

“It’s the surprises that baking together unleashes that I most love,” says Gately. “His ability to see wonderment in cooking that I don’t see. ‘Look, Nonnie,’ he’ll say. ‘The dough is turning yellow!’ Or when he saw the flour puff up in the air like a cloud. It loosens me up to see things from a child’s point of view.”

Marla Mendelsohn tells the story of a grandfather who brought his three grandsons, ages 13, 10, and 8, to her popular multi-generation cooking class. His wife, who worked in the cooking studio where Marla taught, signed them up. “Unlike parents, who tend to be nervous when their kids hold knives and want everything to go faster, neater, and cleaner, grandparents tend to step back,” she says. “They let the children do things by themselves. It’s their one-on-one time without the child’s parents interfering.” Especially before the holidays, many of the children come from blended families, and their grandparents, or great-aunts and uncles, see the class as a way to reinforce their own family heritage and pass along favorite recipes. For this grandfather and his grandsons, the class took on new meaning when his wife passed away. It was a way to stay connected to a woman they all loved.

When Marla herself was three years old, she often slept over at her grandparents’ house. “Grandma and I would create a restaurant for Grandpa. They had construction paper so I could make menus and I’d bring him a pad so he could write the ‘order’ that Grandma and I prepared together. My grandmother didn’t particularly like to cook but this was something we loved doing together.”

Share Your Food Traditions
Do you have grandma’s handwritten recipe cards, with or without food stains? Photos of you cooking with your favorite people? A homemade menu, sketches, or crayon drawings of the kitchen in upheaval? Keepsakes like these help make cooking memories sweeter, and add flavor to a family cookbook you can hand down from one generation to the next.