I pick up the purple turnip and slice off the scraggly-rooted bottom so it is stable when I cut it in half. I haven’t bought a rutabaga since the first heatwave in June. But the autumn chill compels me to buy this hybrid cabbage-turnip that I use only for soup. The ritual of peeling and slicing embodies Portuguese traditions passed down from one generation of women to the next. Like my great-grandmothers I make red kidney bean, chickpea, and cannellini bean soups with kale, spinach or savoy cabbage, adding a cup of ditalini, mini-elbows, egg pastina or rice.
I remove the thin, crackly skin of a tennis-ball-sized onion, a vegetable that draws on my emotions, spewing tears from my eyes before I’ve even cut it. Did my great-grandmother, exiled from her village to Lisbon to work as a cook for a wealthy family, cry when chopping onions? Did she think about the man, married, but not to her, who wrote her into an old story of impulse and impossibilities that ended with a child in her womb? The man who fathered four children, never with the same woman, never with his wife. The man who became the poster child of desire and freedom, while his lover became the poster child of shame, displacing my great-grandmother from her village, her family, her friends, the only world she knew. Her disgrace generated a new recipe of surveillance and rigid social restrictions for her daughter, my seamstress grandmother.
I peel the carrots and wonder if my grandmother blushed at their naked state, astonished that her mother and three unofficial aunts peeled off layers of village voices and Catholic chains to lie naked with a man who had nothing to lose? Did she wish she could peel the illegitimacy off her body, her name, her life? Did she long for the two half-brothers and one half-sister who shared the same father but sprouted from four women who remained untouchably single after giving birth? I don’t know how long my grandmother hid her secret from the three daughters she gave birth to. She laid out and cut social straitjackets that laced up tightly, determined to end the stigma of illegitimacy. She stitched her daughters into antiquated patterns, accompanied everywhere by my grandfather. Three daughters who never dared to design a life outside of their parents’ expectations and held their breath as my grandmother pressed them into the wedding gowns she sewed.
I disrobe the garlic of its translucent ivory skin, like the wedding veil my grandmother created, laced with love, duty, and the satisfied success of marrying her third daughter without a taint of trespass, without the secret stain she lived with and that I only heard about in secret whispers from my cousins. A stain that embedded its tarnished core in my parents’ chain of commandments for their own three daughters. No rides from anyone but them in high school. Chaperoned dating in college (in 1975.) No living on campus. But I credit them for supporting education, something my mother, who earned a full music scholarship to Oberlin college, erased from her life. There was no question of living so far away on a college campus, unleashed and unsupervised. Instead she worked at the Singer factory with my grandfather during the day and attended night school to earn her music diploma. I, too, lived at home through college, through two degrees in piano performance. And if I had obeyed their oppressive orders, orders that I bent, broke, cut and threw away, I would have lived at home until I married at the age of thirty-six.
My mother stopped soaking the beans overnight, changing the water several times, and cooking them for an hour before starting the soup. The pressure cooker, her shortcut, cooked the beans in twenty minutes. The can opener is my shortcut, like the shortcut I took to my boyfriend’s dorm room when I was supposed to be in class. The shortcut I took to my own apartment at the age of twenty-six ended the myth of waiting at home for my prince to show up with a ring and a promise. The shortcut I took on a plane to travel with a man I loved reintroduced shame into my parents’ lives, but not mine. Shame slid off my shoulders. The shortcut that moved me into another apartment to live in sin for three years with my now-husband poisoned their recipe of rules with disgrace.
My daughter’s girlfriend is the cook in their home. They requested the recipe for the red kidney bean soup. They ask me the same questions I asked my mother. What size pot? Why are there no amounts on the recipe card? How long does everything simmer? I write down what I can: an onion, a wooden spoonful of olive oil and salt, three celery stalks, half of a purple turnip, a garlic clove, a can of red kidney beans, a bag of spinach, a cup of egg pastina. But I know the real recipe lies in a box of women’s constrained lives, a recipe of intangible ingredients that each generation now has the option to rewrite. It’s a recipe I’m proud to hand down.
I am a writer, traveler and musician. I try to write the music of life in words. My essays have been published in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Rumpus, Parents, Fifty Give or Take and other journals.