Anyone who knows me knows there's a moment in every conversation where I bring up my mother's cooking. Not apologetically — I lean into it. I know I'm biased, being her son. But my mom is genuinely an incredible cook.
She's the first person I call when I'm trying something new in the kitchen, before I've even searched a single thing online. She always has the answer I couldn't find. More than that, she has the answer I didn't know I needed.
Growing up, we made pierogi with my grandfather every year — thousands of them, shared with everyone we knew. He was a farmer from Poland who made everything from memory and never wrote a single recipe down. His pierogi had a particular quality because he made his own farmers cheese, and that cheese had a taste you couldn't replicate from a package. It just was what it was, because that's what he knew how to do.
When he passed, my mother kept the tradition alive. She learned to make the filling herself, from watching and from feel, not from a card. The recipes live in her hands more than anywhere else. Some things get preserved in people before they ever get written down.
She mailed me her starter before I even asked. It arrived with a bag of bread flour and a handwritten note — the only recipe she's ever written down for me, I think — and instructions that started with this is Oso, keep him fed. The bag of flour was already familiar to her. The instructions felt like continuity.
The first loaf I made with Oso was not a masterpiece. I had the right flour, a good starter, and instructions I'd read seventeen times. I still managed to over-proof it by forty minutes while I got distracted doing something else. The crumb was decent. The crust crackled when it hit the cooling rack. I made a grilled cheese with it while it was still slightly warm.
For the grilled cheese, I used Sequatchie Cove Coppinger, Gouda Puur Grond, Milton Creamery Prairie Breeze, a little goat cheese, duck fat and butter in the pan. Not a humble sandwich. But the bread was the thing. A sourdough loaf you made yourself, even a first one, even an over-proofed one, has a quality that's genuinely hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it. You can taste that it came from somewhere.
My grandfather never wrote anything down because he didn't need to — the knowledge was in his hands, his timing, his instincts built over decades. My mother carries what she could of that. She passed some of it to me in a jar with a note.
I'm still figuring out what to do with it. Most days that just means keeping Oso fed and making bread. Some of that knowledge is starting to land in my hands too.