Burnt offerings

My mother did a lot of things well, but one of my favorite things she did for me was teach me to cook. Not just how to cook, but to cook at all. For most of my childhood my mother worked full-time as a teacher, yet there was a home-cooked meal on the table every night and it wasn’t boxed macaroni and cheese. I was blessed to be born into a family of women who cooked from scratch, real food made from real ingredients.

So when I got married, I was full of confidence that I had this thing nailed down. I knew Ben would have preferences that I would need to adjust to, but in my mind I probably thought more along the lines of him adjusting to the way I cooked since I was obviously so good at it. Turns out both things happened. And it has all worked out as evidenced by the fact that I still put a little sugar in the homemade spaghetti sauce (it cuts the acid) and I will always and forever use his sister’s recipe for split pea soup and his mother’s recipe for peanut butter cookies. Compromise in marriage is a beautiful thing.

When we married, Ben had been a single man in the Navy for a few years, and he knew how to cook a few things. A friend had taught him how to make sourdough bread, which he was very proud of. Also banana bread and biscuits. Both of us had to learn the mystery of biscuits since we grew up Yankees (don’t tell). His advantage was that he had a friend walk him through it.

Shortly after our nuptials we were living in Asheville, North Carolina, near our friends Tom and Karen, who miraculously have stuck with us all these years. Everyone needs friends like Tom and Karen. They hauled in a mobile home and set it up on their property for us to live in. They’ve always opened their home to us on short notice. They’ve been there for every moment of our lives, good and bad. To date they have smoked over 150 pounds of pork butt for our daughters’ weddings. If we ever do anything that we deem “family only,” our kids know that includes Tom and Karen. That’s the kind of friends you want.

We were living in the trailer on their property (the one that grew mushrooms in the shag carpet behind the couch) and Ben asked me one day to make biscuits. He told me the recipe was in the front of his big Bible, the one that was bound together with a Strong’s concordance and has been used for decades as a booster seat at the table. So being the good wife I desperately wanted to be, I set out on my first biscuit adventure.

If you live in the South, you know biscuits do not ever come out of a can. I was a biscuit newbie, but I was determined.

I read through the recipe, which was right there on a page in the Bible with the sourdough and banana bread recipes. I thought, “How hard can this be? I know how to cook and bake.” No problem.

So I measured and mixed, cut in and folded a few times, then cut out biscuits with a glass (that’s what Yankees do because they don’t have Great-Granny’s old, banged-up biscuit cutter), and laid the biscuits out on a baking sheet.

Checked the recipe—450°. Slid the tray in the oven, set the timer, and joined Ben outside to play with a litter of puppies in the yard.

Now listen, in my defense, please remember I had never made biscuits before. This was new culinary territory and I was a nervous new bride wanting to prove myself and trying not to ask my husband how to cook something. Also, there may have been an issue of too many recipes on one page, but we’ll get there in a minute.

Eventually we got bored of playing with the puppies and Ben asked, “Are those biscuits ready yet?” to which I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Well, the timer hasn’t gone off but I’ll go check.”

Enter smoke-filled trailer. Panic. Grab potholders and remove tray of burnt biscuits from the oven. Cough a little and stare in stunned silence at the one thing my husband has asked me to make that is now a black, inedible disaster.

Ben joined me in the kitchen, opened a few windows, and in his own special way asked, “What did you do?” (He has since become a champion of compassion. Back then, not so much.)

Crying, I answered, “I followed the recipe. It said 450° for an hour.”

Incredulous, he said, “An hour? No, it’s like 10 minutes or something. Here, look …” and he opened his Bible to the page with all the recipes. And there it was: 450° for 10-12 minutes, RIGHT NEXT TO WHERE IT SAID ONE HOUR FOR THE BANANA BREAD. How was I supposed to know what temperature went with which time?Yankee here. Perhaps someone could have used a dividing line to separate the two recipes. Just a suggestion.

So there we were, staring at a pan of black biscuits. And when I say black, I mean they were (to use a good old King James word) throughly burnt. Solid black like hockey pucks. Whenever this story is told, Ben always insists he tried to eat one, but we all know that is not true because he still has all of his teeth.

What he did do, however, was take a few out to the old apple tree and set them in the crooks of the branches, and he and Tom threw throwing knives at them. One knife may have broken a tip off during this activity. At least they had a good time.

This story came up yesterday when I excitedly got Tom and Karen’s homemade brats out of the freezer for dinner. They raised a few hogs last year and gave us some things to try—pork chops, sausage, bacon—and we were so excited for these brats. I thawed them and parboiled them, then just before dinnertime I lit the grill. I’d made homemade slaw and had sauerkraut heating on the stove. We were giddy with anticipation.

Ben was finishing up some work while I put the brats on the grill, which wasn’t quite hot enough, but I knew it would heat up eventually. I stood in front of it for a while so I could turn the brats at the perfect intervals, but after a few minutes, I just knew the grill wasn’t going to heat up with me standing there. You know, a watched pot and all.

Sometimes in life we make one little decision that has disastrous results. Hindsight being what it is, we are filled with regret and desperately wish we could go back and change that one little thing that seemed so inconsequential at the time.

I went back in the house and sat down with my phone to work on a piece I was writing about my mother—maybe you’ll get that sometime in the future even though Mother’s Day has passed. In what felt like just a minute but was in reality probably ten, I jumped up and ran outside.

To paraphrase another good old King James phrase, where pork fat did abound, flames did much more abound. My grill was an inferno. I looked around for Dante, but no, these were flames of my own making. I had the sense to turn off the gas bottle before I raised the lid and gave the fire more oxygen, and there they were, our precious brats, black as night and a quarter of the size they started out.

One of the things I’ve learned about trauma is that it is stored in the body, even more than in the mind. Decades after a traumatic experience, when a similar one happens, your body remembers what it did and how it reacted the first time, and it repeats the experience as if it is happening right now. That is exactly what happened standing at the grill. The flashback was very real. My shoulders dropped and I felt a physical constriction in my chest of shame and horror. I was once again a new bride with limited experience cooking, trying so hard to please my husband and feeling sick that I’d ruined something he was looking forward to. It physically felt like the exact same experience.

But here’s the difference: 39 years later, Ben is full of compassion and empathy and has the resources to take me out for dinner. And I have learned to be compassionate with myself so I got over it much quicker than the biscuit escapade, which beat me down for days. We can laugh about it now instead of it being a catastrophic event (though I’m still mad we didn’t get to eat those brats) and I know not to walk away from the grill.

This did not start out to be a story about trauma, but I am learning to notice in every situation how my brain and body react. Our bodies have stories to tell, and I am sharing mine so that, in case this ever happens to you, you know you’re not the only one.

Bon appétit!