Transcript
Julia Louis-Dreyfus (0:02)
Lemonade. This is a favorite poem of mine. It's called Flash Frozen. Here it is. My mother grew up in a homemade world. Her mother stitched sunbonnets one stitch at a time for five little girls carried pears, beans to tomato, squash in her apron from the garden to the kitchen where steaming Mason jars with wide open mouths stood at the ready to receive. Jars lined the cool basement shelves like picture books, wild with color, waiting for another season. A huge gray pot, quiet on the stove, made soup for the week. In winter, root vegetables bounced, softened in water fragrant with the earth. Clarence Birdseye, born in Brooklyn, practiced taxidermy before joining the Department of Agriculture as a naturalist posted in the Arctic. There he learned a thing or two, watching the Inuit make holes in the ice, drop lines and bring up a fish frozen straight through in the blink of an eye. Clarence brought that thought home in a system that packed food into waxed cardboard cartons, Flash frozen, nearly fresh. My mother's freezer was as big as a car. Thursdays were poker night. She could whip up a meal in 20 minutes once she unwrapped the box. How about that? So that was actually written by my mom, Judy Bowles. And good God Almighty, I do love that poem. The grandmother who stitched the sunbonnets and carried pears and beans and tomato and squash from her garden to her kitchen was my mom's Grandma Bessie, my great grandmother. She was the original farm to table chef. Well, I mean, I guess everybody who didn't have a staff and a cook, which is most people, was a farm to table chef not so long ago. My mom and my sisters and I all hold Great Grandma Bessie in a kind of magical, sainted place. We all really wanna be a little bit more like Grandma Bessie, especially in the kitchen. I'm very lucky because my little sister Lauren lives in Los Angeles. And whenever we get together, which is very often making food, delicious food, is at the center of what is always a joyful time. She is a baker. I mean, a crazy great baker of amazing breads and muffins and bagels. And we are both obsessed with baking desserts. And I make things out of the food, food that I grow in my garden, like tomato sauce and pickles and jams and marmalades. And it's all pretty goddamn good, if I do say so myself. The thing that my mom catches really so beautifully in that poem is the physical tactile contact with the ingredients that make meals so delicious. And the melancholy in it is the loss of that contact. Of course, the poem is about A lot more, too. Family, caring, nourishment and other kinds of loss. You know, I've been thinking a lot about how as we speed forward and technology dominates more and more of our day to day lives, we touch the things that matter less and less. I mean, think about it. We don't hold the newspaper, we look at it on a screen. We don't put pen to paper very often. We don't rest the stereo needle carefully in the groove of a, of a cherished record album. We're a step back, it seems, from touching things that matter. I mean, life is easier. Yeah, sure, but even when we go to a beautiful place now, we immediately stick a phone between us and the sunset. God, you know, I mean, there's a loss there too. So maybe that's why. Cooking beautiful, healthy, yummy meals with my sister and her family, made with vegetables and hand picked fruit right out of the garden, or stuff that's carefully chosen at a farmer's market, and spending hours together, you know, working out the menu and working with our hands and our hearts means so, so much to me.