It Smells Like Thanksgiving

I came downstairs yesterday and the house was filled with the subtle smells of my roommates crock-pot dinner. We had planned on celebrating St. Patrick's Day with corned beef and cabbage, but decided to put it on hold until after Spring Break. And in retrospect, it seems like a fantastic "Welcome Home" meal! I was paying bills all afternoon, and after a few hours of simmering the meat, Roommate mentioned the distinctly pungent smell of onions. Never mind, I cried happily. "It smells like Thanksgiving!"

It does?

I wondered if I had heard skepticism in her voice. Corned beef smells like Thanksgiving? It didn't occur to me until later that I had so closely associated the smell of onions with Thanksgiving because my mother hates onions and will only stand to cook with them once a year (or at least not more often than two or three times a year). They are cooked with the celery in her excellent stuffing, of which I could eat an entire pan. It is the best thing in the world to wake up on that cook November morning and smell the onions on the stove. It is the saddest thing in the world to realize that the dressing has been completely eaten. No more until Christmas.

I love onions. I think they add to most dishes and am especially fond of the bite of a red onion, whether on a burger or in a salad. My mother refused to allow onions in the house and in her food. I remember many a dish being sent back because the cooks forgot to keep the onions out of her order. But my Papa always had lovely red or Vidalia onions during the summer when we would go over for Sunday night dinner and he had grilled burgers and steaks. I always said Papa made the the best burgers - but maybe it was the onions. And the fact that he was Papa.

Now that I have moved out and cook for myself like a big girl, onions have made a fairly routine appearance in my meals. I cannot keep away from the tangy sweetness of a sauteed yellow onion. But these distinctive veggies have also been one of the ingredients that ultimately poses a fascinating question for me: how familiar are we with our food, and with the process of cooking our food?

I love watching shows like 'Top Chef' just to see how people who know how to cook actually do cook. I get a sense of how they think about food; is it a necessity, everybody has to eat three times a day. Or is it an art form, something that can look, smell and taste good while offering us nutrition. Sometimes I realize that the chefs on Top Chef aren't thinking about the average person when they cook, much like their counterparts on 'Project Runway' don't design for the average woman. But I digress. They think about food as a whole package, and the cooking has as much to do with it as the eating.

My question, how well do we know our food, has to do with the fact that we spend so little time actually cooking for ourselves. Well, maybe that wouldn't be quite as true for the few of you who actually read this blog. But for the wider portion of America, are we losing the art of cooking? Have we somehow forgotten the difference between purple, white, and yellow onions? Between a real Heirloom tomato and what they call 'slicing tomatoes' at Walmart? Will anything do on your burger? Or do we just want to eat?

Okay, the question really wasn't formed by my introspective thoughts on onions. I have been watching Anthony Bourdain's 'No Reservations' on Netflix and he posed a similar but different question in an episode I watched a couple of weeks ago. But here's where the onions play into the conversation. My mother knew she hated onions because of a long history with them. She's learned of the few places where she can stomach them (pardon the pun) through experience. Most of that took place in her own kitchen. As I learned how to cook in her kitchen, she was gracious to allow onions in every once in a while. She let me try different things, make messes (and clean them up), and try the results. Sometimes they were good, sometimes they were pretty miserable. But I can cook. Sometimes I can succeed with a baking attempt. But I can cook, I can think about how flavors and ingredients go together, and I have a sense of what makes food into a good meal.

I'm still learning how to do this, no doubt about it, but the more I do cook, the more I have to think about what I eat and why I am eating it, the more I wonder if we're a culture somewhere between just eating anything because of necessity and eating nothing new just because we don't know how to cook and make it fantastic? I love comfort food, and I believe that God has made us to experience flavors to comfort as well as to delight and to experience. Memory is so tied up in place, sound, smell, touch, and taste that we can't expect not to have an emotional reaction to certain foods. But on the other hand, are we willing to eat as much for nutrition as we are for the creative, beautiful process of cooking?

The long and short of my ramblings is that onions, though they are associated with Thanksgiving, really don't belong just there. They belong in my kitchen, in my food, they taste good in my mouth and, silly as it may sound, they make me remember my grandfather, they make me remember Thanksgiving and learning how to cook at my mother's elbow. Just don't tell her that, okay?