Celeste Snowber: An intuitive scent – the stew of our lives

They cooked with their bodies

an intuitive scent in the fingers

a little of this, a dash of that

they knew just the right amount

a cookbook was not meant for

the mothers of the old country

many worlds are contained

within this old country

oceans of cultures and languages

the dialect they all understood

was the art of cooking for their families

written in the recipe of the heart

passed down from generation to generation.

My mother left this earth too early

till I cared to archive the past

I have been longing for all the flavors

of my childhood in my adult life.

The parts I remember and the

recipes I follow still do not

produce the exact combination of food

every Christmas I make the cheese boureg

and I come closer to the cheese that melts

in my mouth, but I know there is a language

of Armenian cooking I have yet to live into.

Until I eat at my friend’s Armenian family

and the mothers and grandmothers create

the flavors, tastes and textures of my youth –

pine nuts and lamb, beans and tomato

caressed in olive oil, dolma stuffed with

filling that was my childhood revisited.

I have not stopped thinking of those

explosions of beauty bursting inside

my palette since I left their home and I

am now dreaming of every food that was

stuffed in my household growing up –

meatballs, peppers, tomatoes, and grapeleaves

and I know I am lacking because my own children

have not eaten anything stuffed except a bird

Recipes for the life are hidden in the body

the knowing of the cells, whether

they are meals to eat or wisdom to live by

they are stored in the memory and marrow

of mouths and tongues, noses and fingers

and in these remembrance there is

a storehouse of love waiting to be taken

bite by bite into the stew of our lives.