After Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen by Leonora Carrington

My childhood kitchen inhabits a liminal space frozen in time as though within the frame of a black and white photograph. The whiteness of its spacious marble counters and central table contrasted with the dark stove top surmounted by a cast iron oven. I would follow my mom and nanny in that magical space presiding over our taste buds, intrigued by the way egg whites would rise in foam, and flour and eggs created the elastic dough I’d beg for. My grandmother would stealthily appear in her wheelchair, like a High Priestess, controlling the amount of herbs and spices. She often demonstrated her legerdemain to ensure they’d follow the original recipe. An aura of secrecy surrounded each of her gestures. I see myself as an elf, eager to learn and emulate. I marveled at watching cubed meat come out the grinder like wrinkled vermicelli and helped stuff bowels for sausages. My rite of passage was at seven when I skinned a rabbit with my nanny, Mariam. She incised the animal at the waist, then we sat face to face while she urged me to pull the skin as though removing a sock. The body glistened out of its shell.

My mother kept an illustrated recipe book with impeccable penmanship. She used a dip pen and wrote titles in red Gothic characters. When we tried to make sense of her legacy, we realized that she listed ingredients without disclosing the modus operandi. Was it only meant for initiates? The last section displayed dinner menus for every occasion. Lastly, she recorded homemade beauty recipes using natural ingredients such as eggs, honey, olive oil, coconut oil, rose water, starch, and to our dismay, the thick buffalo milk cream we used to fight over. I never thought at that time that I’d study pharmacy, but whenever I was manipulating vials and mortars, preparing unctuous unguents, filling cachets, rolling pills, and molding suppositories and ovules, I recalled the black and white images of my space of predilection. I later felt a strong connection with Sor Juana, the Mexican prodigy nun who was relegated to the kitchen, away from her books. With a scientific lens and sensory pleasure, she watched the evaporation, steeping, grinding, and thickening of sauces. The alchemical transmutation of food I unconsciously observed was the base of her study of the laws of physics and chemistry. I recently learned she had written a recipe book.