Cason Smith Smith 1

Professor Blanchard

English 1102

8 September 2019

Cooked With Love

Throughout many cultures, food and recipes are passed down generation by generation;

and while some may argue that the typical American is “uncultured,” I see it as a gateway to

discover infinite possibilities wether it is cooking the food or just simply eating it. Though I

embrace every culture, the one that has stuck with me is Italian with my favorite dish to prepare:

chicken gnocchi. Through this dish I have been able to experience a culture other than that of the

typical American. I have not necessarily explored the culture of the food, but the cultural

experience of learning to cook from my mother.

As seen in nearly every culture, learning to cook is a family experience and as for me, I

learned to cook chicken gnocchi from my mother who is neither Italian nor a professional cook;

this never stopped us from trying our hardest to accomplish even the most difficult of dishes.

Even boiling water would make me feel as if I were a professional chef in my young age. I

would picture myself behind a tall kitchen island with granite countertops reciting the

instructions in my head to a make believe audience while looking into a make believe camera.

As a child, even the simplest cooking tasks my mother would give me seemed to be the most

exciting things in the universe.

One of the first things I ever learned to cook was good old ramen. After my father passed

and we were living off of one income, I began to know this “dish” all too well. Seeing how I was

ignorant at the time, I would complain relentlessly about how we “Just had ramen last night,”

but I was certain that I was going to be the one to cook it. Wether I wanted to choke it down or
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not, I would sashay into the kitchen with the mindset of a master chef ready to prepare the best

damn ramen they had ever tasted. Once finished, I would carefully walk it to our tiny dining

room table while accidentally leaving a trail of ramen juice in my path.

No matter the circumstance, I would never go hungry and through the years I would learn

to cook more and more dishes with the patient guidance of my mother. She taught me how to

chop, how to stir, and even to tell when the pancakes need flipping by looking for the browning

around the edges and the bubbles on top. It seems like the simplest of lessons created the

foundation for everything I know about cooking.

Each day I could look forward to hopping off of the bus, running down our long, gravel

driveway, up the rickety brick steps and through the front door to help my mother cook dinner

for us and my brother. Though I did not see cooking as an art or a passion, I was having nothing

but care-free fun hanging out in the kitchen, laughing, and having the occasional flour fights.

Unfortunately, as I began to grow older and be more involved with school, I was unable

to make time to cook with my mother how I used to. Though I did not realize it at the time, the

hours we spent in the kitchen together made us closer and that had ended without me even

realizing it.

Several years later, I came home and asked what we were eating for dinner and what she

told me was something I had never heard of before; I began to get excited.

“We are having chicken gnocchi,”she said, “I found it on Pinterest.”

I had no idea what chicken gnocchi was, I just knew that I was starving and ready to eat

it. But then she asked me something that I had not heard her ask in quite a while.

“Wanna help me cook it?”

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I then grew more and more excited. It had been so long since I had even the slightest

bonding time with my mother. I was smiling so bright on the inside but I, being a teenager, was

never going to let her know just how jittery I was.

I responded in a dull tone, “Sure.”

I walked into my room, threw down by book bag and ran into the kitchen. I feared that if

I had taken my time she would have started without me, but when I looked she was still waiting

on me to start chopping the vegetables. As I began to chop, everything she had taught me all

them years ago came back to me as if I had hopped onto a bike that I had not ridden in years.

The bonding time I got from cooking with her seemed almost more important than the

dish itself. I did not seem to care if I was chopping the carrots wrong, charring the chicken, or

even crying from the smelly onions, I was just happy to once again spend time with my mother.