The Nashville Food Project’s Blog
Banana Bread for the Pandemic: Remembering a Loved One Lost to Coronavirus
In this time of unbelievable confusion and pain, we cling to the things that bring us comfort, and the most time tested ways of feeling better is to cook and eat a good meal, to bake a loaf of bread. We are reminded of the meals we have shared with the people we love. We ease the sting of separation with delicious memories of dinner parties past. We honor those we have lost by cooking something that they have loved.
by Nick Johnston, Sous Coordinator - St. Luke’s Kitchen
“Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor.” -- Jim Harrison, “Meals of Peace and Restoration”
“This is a hard place. God, it’s a hard place. But it wakes up every morning. No matter what you do to it the night before. It wakes up.” -- Jess Walter, “The Zero”
Photo by Airin Party
I was never very good at reading my grandmother’s handwriting. When I was a kid, her handwritten notes and postcards would arrive in the mail, and I would pass them along to my father to read them out loud. She wrote in a beautiful calligraphy — a dying art of sloping cursive letters that millennials like myself were ill-equipped to decipher. The one or two cursive lessons given in grade school were essentially useless. Some bang-up cursive seemed ineffective in impressing the young ladies of Ms. Lindsay’s 2nd grade class.
These letters from my grandma arrived in the brilliant dawn of the Email Age, when my love letters were more apt to be typed, thank you very much. So while I had trouble decrypting the lovely loops on the bird-themed stationary, I still hungered to hear what Grandma Ruth had to say, and my dad dutifully served as translator. She always wrote something about the weather, or her roses, or the approaching spring, or a visit she was looking forward to. I have a lot of these letters, recipes, and newspaper clippings stowed away.
The most valuable of the antediluvian artifacts my grandma had passed on to me was her recipe for banana bread. This recipe, along with a preserved and perfect loaf, I will perhaps one day submit to the Smithsonian. Its inclusion to the museum might tell Peoples Future a few things about the lives of Peoples Past. I imagine this loaf and recipe included in a large and fascinating exhibit devoted to explaining Life On Earth Before Covid-19. Students will hover about, notate on tablets, wonder about the coffee-stained recipe from a world where humans still shook hands and knew how to operate their own vehicles. They will also most certainly take pause to admire the graceful calligraphy of Grandma Ruth.
For me, now, waiting for a loaf of banana bread to finish in the oven, it is oddly comforting to imagine distant future school children gazing at my grandmother’s recipe. In a time of paralyzing uncertainty, there is comfort in knowing that this too will end, that history will do its thing, that the ache will dull with each generational wave. That the world will exhale this and that, spring will come again and we will rebuild tomorrow into something better. My grandma’s banana bread recipe calls for some seriously ripe bananas, or, in her words, “nearly rotten.” I’m also oddly comforted by easy metaphors and well-worn cliches these days, and it’s nice to think about something so warm, so profoundly simple and good, coming from something so rotten and dark.
In this time of unbelievable confusion and pain, we cling to the things that bring us comfort, and the most time-tested ways of feeling better is to cook and eat a good meal, to bake a loaf of bread. We are reminded of the meals we have shared with the people we love. We ease the sting of separation with delicious memories of dinner parties past. We honor those we have lost by cooking something that they have loved.
In this particular crisis, staying at home is in fact the heroic thing to do. While we are starved for connection in this time of isolation, it is nourishing to prepare the things that have been passed down to us on stained little pieces of paper, torn notebook pages, from our grandparents, our family, our friends. Our minds and bodies are fortified with the recipes of togetherness, and while we all have a little more time on our hands, we can hone these recipes for when we can cook and share them once again. When this is over the world will be hungry.
And for now we stay home. We clean up the backyard a little. We download Duo Lingo and give Italian another shot. We call our families and grieve the passing of our loved ones. We bake banana bread for our roommates. We turn up the John Prine. We rest inside stories of a world still breathing.
There is a letter from my grandmother I have been waiting to open. She passed away on April 2nd after a tragic battle with Covid-19. It has sat on my desk for a few weeks now. I have been waiting to open it for two reasons, the first being sort of morbidly practical, as this hellish virus can live on surfaces for a while. The other is just that it makes me sad still. I will open it soon, but not today.
Today it has been enough just to marvel at the cursive on the front of the envelope. The “J” in “Johnston” is particularly beautiful, two immaculate ovals that swoop bird-like into the o, h, and n, heading north to make the t, finishing off with an gracefully understated o, the n setting sail towards somewhere like the sun.
"Dirty Pages" Community Potluck
“I tell my daughters that when I go, they’ll know the good recipes by the dirty pages.” —Kim McKinney
That’s the quote that launched Dirty Pages, a recipe storytelling project celebrating our most well-loved recipes with their splatters and stains. We know they make good dishes, because they’ve been handed down to family and friends. But they also act as maps -- their scribbles in the margins helping connect us and tell our stories.
“I tell my daughters that when I go, they’ll know the good recipes by the dirty pages. —Kim McKinney”
That’s the quote that launched Dirty Pages, a recipe storytelling project celebrating our well-loved recipes with their splatters and stains. We know they make good dishes, because they’ve been handed down to family and friends. But they also act as maps, their scribbles in the margins helping connect us and tell our stories.
The Dirty Pages project has produced three exhibits. The first exhibit (featured in The New York Times) lives in the permanent collection at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum in New Orleans. The second exhibit, Dirty Pages: 10 Roads to Nashville, was featured at Casa Azafran. Now the third and most recent exhibit hangs at The Nashville Food Project.
To celebrate it, we’re hosting a “Dirty Pages” Community Potluck this Sunday, Feb. 16 at 1 p.m. If you’d like to join us, please bring a dish to share that serves about 8-10 people. We’ll have lunch and conversation and a bit of show-and-tell time for those who would like to talk about their recipe.
The event isn’t ticketed, and it’s open to all. Space, though, is limited, so please RSVP here. We hope to see you Sunday!
Also, please stay tuned for an exciting Dirty Pages-themed Simmer dinner next month!
In the meantime, TNFP staff shared their Dirty Pages in a team building meeting recently. Here are a few excerpts:
Julia Reynolds Thompson, Director of Garden Operation
Recipe: The Reynolds Family Eggnog
I chose the Reynolds Eggnog, which is a recipe my family makes every year. My great-grandfather, Edward Reynolds, had grown up in Pembroke, Kentucky, which is just on the other side of the state line. He grew up on a tobacco farm, but he and his brother hated tobacco farming, so they decided to leave Kentucky and go to Dallas. They lived in the YMCA there while they looked for work. They ended up in the clothing business and eventually they owned their own men’s clothing store, which was also passed through the family. I remember growing up playing inside the racks of clothes.
I like this recipe because I feel like it is a thread that connects all the way back to my great-grandfather and his journey from Kentucky to Texas. My family, growing up, felt very Texan. Everyone is from Texas and has been there a long time. But now that I live in Tennessee I like having that trace of story all the way back.
It’s a really simple recipe. It has four ingredients: a dozen eggs, 12 tablespoons of sugar, a pint of bourbon and a quart of whipping cream. We still make it every Christmas.
Bianca Morton, Chef Director
Recipes: My Grandfather’s Yeast Rolls
My grandfather baked something every meal—yeast rolls, fresh-baked breads, cakes, fried pies. I did not inherit that skill.
Every holiday he always brought fresh-baked, melt-in-your-mouth yeast rolls. He brought some for dinner and packaged some in gallon-sized Ziplock bags for each family to take home. We fought over them.
My first Christmas after graduating culinary school, I cooked a big, fancy dinner, my first one trying to impress everybody. Watching him eat, he was so happy and excited, and you could tell he was proud. Here’s the tear-jerker: He had a massive stroke that night. That was the last time I saw him smile. I spent the next two weeks caring for him in the hospital. He couldn’t communicate, but he looked at me and squeezed my hand, and it made me feel invincible, all his love. I’ve been chasing that, and every holiday I’ve been trying to make these rolls. This last Christmas, 18 years since he passed away, my family was like, “I think you got it.”
Tallu Schuyler Quinn, CEO
Recipe: Mama’s Marinara Sauce from Dom DeLuise’s “Eat This...It’ll Make You Feel Better” cookbook
My dad bought me this cookbook by Dom DeLuise. When I was young, maybe 8 or 9, I thought Dom was a chef, but I understand now he was just an actor and maybe not even a good one.
My parents wouldn’t let my brother and me buy a lot of stuff when we were kids, but they would pretty much always say yes if it was a book.
I remember making this marinara sauce with my dad and what a mess we made. When I was growing up, I loved food shows like The Frugal Gourmet, Julia Child and any other food show on the television. I vividly remember an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when he visited a Pittsburgh bakery and learned how to make sourdough pretzels. Later on in life, I loved Food Network shows like Molto Mario, Nigella Lawson and Barefoot Contessa. I am now a mother to children who love watching Mind of a Chef, America’s Test Kitchen, and The Great British Baking Show.
My 7-year-old daughter is strong-willed, capable in the kitchen, and wildly creative. She makes grocery lists every week, begs me to “mise en place,” wants an internship at The Nashville Food Project’s kitchen, and recently made flyers for a pop-up bake shop at our house called “Lulah’s Larder.” In other words, every page is a dirty page in Lulah’s world. The scope of her big ideas overwhelms me, and now I know that’s how my own mom must have felt as she figured out how to give me the space I needed to be me. Maybe still does. I obviously know that Lulah is not me, and she is not mine, but the congruence and similarity of the kitchen obsessions settle over me, and that where I go when I reflect on this dirty page from my past—it connects me to the mystery of my own life; I’m so grateful for that.
Grace Biggs, Director of Food Access
Recipe: Chicken Noodle Soup
This is my mom’s chicken noodle soup and her mom’s, and it’s one of my favorite early memories. The noodles are the main event of this recipe. My mom made the dough from scratch, rolled it out, and cut the noodles dumpling-style. They would be laid out taking up the whole kitchen table, which was most of our kitchen, for hours. My sister and I would sneak dough off the table, and she told me she added the note later to “double the recipe” because of “sneaky fingers.” My grandmother would make it when we were sick and bring it over in Mason jars. I’ve adapted my own version of the original recipe over the years by adding veggies and sometimes even curry, but anytime I make it I feel connected with them.
Elizabeth Langgle-Martin, Community Engagement Manager
Recipe: Wassail
Wassail is something that my family drank every holiday season, and I always remember that we had enough of it to share with other people—that it could be a gift at a time that could be stressful. It was fun for our family to share. We would fill up big Mason jars and give it to teachers and neighbors. And I have funny memories of lugging big, hot sloshing posts of wassail to family gatherings—inching down the road and hoping that it’s not spilling out in the back.
It’s a twist on apple cider, and it’s something a lot of my friends know as our family holiday beverage. My siblings and I still make it in our own spaces.