Love and Cupcakes

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­I am hungry for one of my grandma’s enormous chocolate cupcakes, so sweet they made me dizzy. During the warm summer months, she stored them in the refrigerator under waxed paper. I would slide one out, take a huge bite, and gaze with intense satisfaction at the imprint made by my teeth as they had penetrated the thick layer of caramel icing. It’s a family joke that had Grandma written down her recipes, they’d all have started the same way: 1 C. lard.

I sat once at her kitchen table, pen in hand, ready to write down the secrets to her cooking, but she was vague. “How much cocoa do you use?” I asked patiently. She waved her hand. “Oh, some, not too much. You’ll know by the way it looks.” It went on like this for a while before I gave up. And now nobody knows exactly how she made any of her signature dishes.

I stare at the crumbling black and white photo of my grandma and me that I keep on my desk, taken when she was in her late 50s and I was about 10. We are standing in her backyard on a blazing hot July day. Grandma is holding a copy of Good Housekeeping, folded in half so she can fan herself. Despite the heat, she is wearing heavy, laced white shoes with chunky heels and sheer stockings. Her legs are thin, but her middle is round and solid. Her hair is mostly white, with a few shots of dark. She is smiling slightly, but she looks tired. She has her arm tightly around me; her hugs were as legendary as her cooking.

The day that photo was taken, she had undoubtedly prepared one of her huge roasted chicken suppers that we ate promptly at noon. Grandma raised the chickens, and I helped her catch and prepare them for cooking, which may be one reason I’m a vegetarian today. My mouth still waters at the thought of her thick homemade noodles, creamy mashed potatoes with salty, golden gravy, and fat lima beans swimming in butter.

I would have stayed the night and woken the next morning to the rich aroma of Grandma’s coffee. My parents did not want me to drink it; everyone knew back then that it stunted your growth and made you jittery, and I was neither naturally tall nor calm. Grandma worked around that rule with a breakfast concoction she called “coffee soup.” She crumbled Saltines into a soup bowl, filled one of her thick blue willow mugs with half a cup of the potent brew, and added fresh cream until it turned a rich, golden brown. She poured that over the saltines and topped it all with a generous layer of white sugar. It was delicious and, technically, I was not drinking coffee.