La Petite Société Gourmet

by: Katherine Church Holland

“Kitty,” my father asked, looking up at me from his fusty old typewriter, the kind that always entrapped my fingers when I tried to use it, “Kitty, what is the French translation for green salad? “Salade verte, Papa,” I sighed, regretting that I had ever told my parents that I had been a French major, albeit for only one short collegiate quarter. “Why?”

“Well, I’m putting together our menu for La Petite Societe Gourmet, and can’t find the words for a plain old green salad.”

“Salade verte should do it, but what else is on the menu? “

“Oh, some of our old favorites – smoked salmon, olives and sherry to start; a cream of watercress soup, fresh fruit for dessert, but a couple of experiments: a sole soufflé with a mousseline sabayon and for the piece de resistance, Boeuf Lucullus a la Brennan et Eglise”

“What’s that?”

“It started out as a beef tenderloin roasted with tiny potatoes and baby carrots, the recipe for Boeuf Lucullus a la Brennan, but I don’t like cooked carrots, so I substituted brussels sprouts and added my name to the recipe,” he replied proudly. Our last name was Church and the French word for a church, eglise, had been sprinkled liberally throughout the house ever since my parents had gone to Paris in 1956.

French words in the Church household, that I could understand, but French food – now that was new. My three sisters and I had been brought up on good, substantial American fare with, since we lived in Seattle, a Pacific Northwest twist. My mother, who was from a German family in the Midwest, was a great cook. Not weiner schnitzel and sauerbraten, but pot roast, poached salmon, boiled tongue, fried - not sautéed - smelt from the Columbia River, oatmeal bread, fabulous meat loaf with piquant (pronounced pee-cant) sauce, and lots of potatoes graced the dining room table. Family meals were raucous and decidedly food-oriented. More than one prospective beau gave up on us after a dinner punctuated with math games (Father used to love to play “stump the boyfriend”) and lots of talk about who had had third helpings and how many olive pits there were on your bread and butter plate - the more the better in both cases.

Ultimately, it was my father who enticed me into the culinary world. Around 1960, when I was 17, he started making wine. Some was fairly good and some was absolutely ghastly. Often, he would warn us before dinner, “I think there’s a little too much sulfur dioxide in this one.” Yuck, argh! His Semillons nearly killed us off. Slowly, however, the wines improved and soon he and his friend and fellow professor, Lloyd Woodburne, founded La Petite Societe Gourmet to explore, with friends, the realm of fine dining.

In my opinion, this endeavor didn’t start on a high note. I quote from the menu dated January 21, 1961, noted as La Premier Séance de La Petite Society Gourmet:

Hors d’oeuvres
Little Franks
Marinated Giblets

Soup
Chiffonade
Sherry

Fish
Filets de Sole au Vin Blanc

Piece de Resistance
Dugag Mahshie with haswa (what’s that?)

After that rocky start, Dad got serious. He subscribed to Gourmet, bought large volumes of cookbooks, and went into winemaking in a big way. He mastered fresh pasta: We swooned over his Capelletti, little pasta hats stuffed with chicken breast, veal and mortadella, served in brodo or in a light, fresh tomato sauce. He experimented with sweetbreads in puff pastry and perfected Boeuf Bourgignonne, Julia Child’s gift to American cooks in the 60s. The menus of the Petite Societe reflect this growing sophistication. The dishes became more complex, the wines a heady mix of Napa Valley vintages, an occasional bottle of French, German or even Italian origin, and a lot of homemade Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs and, my father’s favorite, Gewurztraminer.

By 1965, the menus sounded quite promising, though quirky.


Le Séance de Juillet de la Petite Société Gourmet

Hors d’oeuvres
Champignons El Prado
Pouffs de fromage
Quelque’autres choses (my particular favorite – it means “some other things”)
Xeres

Potage (so much jazzier than “soup”)
Potage Boula Boula (I think someone went to Trader Vic’s that year)
Cote de Soleil Chardonnay 62er

Piece de Resistance
Filet de Boeuf Louis et Armand avec Sauce Perigoudine
Chateauneuf du Paper 59er

These dining extravaganzas often lasted five or more hours. At least one other couple – or more – was invited after being warned that the evening would be long, thoroughly wine-soaked, and filling. Carefully typed menus were presented. My father and Lloyd Woodburne would trade off being Chef du jour and Steward du vin. My mother and Mrs. Woodburne were noted in the menu as Mesdames des Maitres, which wouldn’t go over very well these days, but in the early sixties sounded definitely Continental. In between courses, the party would stroll in the garden or take a walk around the block to allow the food to settle and provide room for - what else? - more food!

My part in all these festivities was as sous chef, dishwasher, typist, and absorber, only once as guest. While I can’t say that my father guided my hand in the kitchen, I believe that by osmosis, reading his magazines and inheriting his cookbooks, I have honed my palate and developed a real curiosity into the world of food.

Aunt Lucia

by: Simona Carini

My aunt Lucia never married and loved her five nieces like daughters. I was the favorite. My aunt's main role in my childhood and adolescence was to answer Yes to my requests to compensate, at least in part, for the immutable No I would suffer from my mother. My aunt would knit, sew and cook for me pretty much whatever I fancied.

My aunt Lucia lived all her life in Poggio Catino, a small village in Central Italy, in the house where she and all her siblings, among them my father, were born and grew up. My family lived in Perugia, about 80 miles away, so part of the magic around what my aunt did for me was due to the fact that it did not occur every day.

My father suffered from nostalgia for his native village most of his life and the palliative treatment for his condition consisted of trips to visit it as often as he could during the year, and then of a 3-week long stay in August. I enjoyed the short visits, especially if it was just me and my father staying with my aunt, because then I had her undivided attention and more than usual freedom of movement. The longest stay was more difficult to manage: after the first couple of days, the excitement occasioned by the novelty of the surroundings faded, and since I did not have any friends in Poggio Catino, keeping me occupied was a major concern. By acceding to my requests, my aunt contributed to lighten up the otherwise unbroken boredom of the long and hot summer days.

One thing I liked to do to entertain myself was collecting and shelling pine nuts. Only Mediterranean pines produce pine nuts that are good to eat and I knew where I could find the big umbrella-shaped resinous trees. The shells were covered with a sooty layer that would immediately make my hands dirty, followed closely behind by my clothes. The shelling, carried out by stone-crashing, required a scientific approach: if I dropped the stone too heavily the nut would be squashed and splinters of the shell would end up mixed with the edible part; on the other hand, if I dropped the stone too lightly, the shell would only crack slightly and refuse to give up its tasty content.

When I had what I considered enough pine nuts, I would run back home, show my small treasure to my aunt and propose that we make "croccante." She would caramelize some sugar in a small pan and I would watch fascinated, as the white grains turned into a gold molten mass. When my aunt signaled me, I would toss the pine nuts into the pan, she would give a final quick stir and then pour the mixture onto the marble kitchen counter. The sugar would set immediately and she would cut the croccante in small pieces with a heavy knife. Within minutes I rewarded myself with a piece of the treat I had contributed to create.

When I requested "crema" for my afternoon snack a more advanced planning was necessary, starting the evening before. My aunt would tell me to go to Ottavio and ask him for an egg. Ottavio was my official egg provider. In the late afternoon I would wait for his return from feeding his hens to get one of the fresh eggs he would be carrying in a big old can, fitted with a handle, the bottom padded with straw. He would see me and offer the can to my greedy eyes, so I could pick the egg that I liked best. The egg was still warm and I would run home holding it with both hands, careful not to trip on the stone stairs leading to our house.

Then it was another run with the empty milk bottle to Angela, who had cows. The filled bottle was warm as well, its content freshly milked. The morning after I would get up all excited. We would wait for my mother to go out for her daily shopping to have freedom of movement in the kitchen and then we would make crema. My aunt would direct me and I would follow her instructions, my brows knit in deep concentration. I would beat the whole egg with the sugar until it was white and bubbly, then add the flour and mix thoroughly, then add a long strip of lemon peel, cut really thin. Finally, I would add the milk at room temperature and set the pan on the stove to low heat. I would stir until the surface froth burned off and the crema felt thick. At that point I would turn off the heat and relax in the warmth of my aunt's smile: I had avoided the dreaded curdling.

I would immediately fish out the lemon peel, then pour the still hot crema in my special bowl and carry it to the "dispensa," a walk-in pantry located in the coolest part of the house. The dispensa was a special cabinet of curiosities, the smell inside it a tangled mixture of sweet and sour threads that I liked to follow, Theseus-like, back to their respective origin. My aunt made different kinds of jams, fruit in syrup, and "giardiniera," pickled vegetable medley. She used ancient-looking glass jars to preserve fresh sausages in olive oil. She let grapes dry into raisins and hung tresses of garlic from nails hammered on the edge of the top shelf.

When mid-afternoon came along I would ask my aunt for my bowl of crema. She would scatter on the pale yellow surface some of her deep purple "amarene sotto spirito" (sour cherries preserved in alcohol) and I would eat my creation while sitting on the front steps of the house, surrounded by pots of hydrangeas, basil and fuchsias, as happy as I could imagine to be. I know that my aunt's happiness in life was seeing me so completely happy.

My father's fixation on escaping to Poggio Catino as often as he could created an unbridgeable rift between him and my mother and she reacted by faulting my aunt: the friction escalated into a family feud. While trying to be a loving daughter as well as an affectionate niece, I was accused of being uncaring and ungrateful by all sides. At age 21 I moved to Milan and the distance between my aunt and me increased four fold. My relationship with food, which had become difficult in the late teen age years, precipitated into bulimia, so when I finally had my own place and could have conducted cooking experiments, I was mostly intent on starving myself. The combination of all these factors prevented me from absorbing my aunt's culinary expertise, which I could have done only by spending untroubled time with her, since, naturally, her recipes were written only in her mind and in her hands.

What I am left with are memories. Her eclairs were legendary, big and perfectly empty inside, ready to be filled with crema. Her pizza filled with chard was to die for, the secret being the addition of a small quantity of lard to make the crust melt in the mouth. She knew how to pick wild herbs, plants with lilting names of strictly local currency: lightly sauteed in olive oil, they were the tastiest greens I have ever eaten in my life. In the week or two before Christmas she would make the traditional "amaretti" (using walnuts and hazelnuts instead of almonds) "torzetti" (almond cookies sweetened with honey) and "pan pepato" (a medley of nuts, raisins, candied fruit and chocolate) and divide up her production into equal-size packages to be delivered to her nieces and surviving brothers. She would bake the traditional cake for Easter breakfast (called "pizza di Pasqua") and make a smaller one especially for me, covered with a light egg white icing and colored sprinkles. I would eat it with the fresh ricotta my aunt would get for me, knowing that it was my favorite cheese in the world.

My aunt liked to cook and the fact that most of the time she did it only for herself did not deter her at all. "People tell me: why do you bother? And I say, why not? I cook what I like and then I sit down to the table properly set. I always use a tablecloth and matching napkins." And that is what they found, when they forced open the door after failing to see her around during the day. She had come home late the previous evening and was cooking dinner when my father reached her by phone, worried because of the late hour. At 88, she had spent the day running errands and visiting people. After she finished talking with her brother she sat down to her dinner. She finished it in heaven.

Watch & Learn

by: Annie Wilson

I was not even counter-top height when I began asking my mother if I could help to make dinner. Her typical response was usually along the lines of: “It would help me if you would set the table.” Insisting, I would ask for a different job, one involving something more important than napkin-fork-knife. With an irritated sigh she would then say: “You know how I learned to cook? I learned by watching my mother.”

This remark always bore a lot of truth as I did learn my cooking fundamentals just by watching. I watched until my attention drew me to other things: homework, piano, soccer, the dog, phone calls, sliding down the floor in stocking feet… Reaching this certain age, my mother would check my loud adolescent self with a sharp “Watch! You’ll learn something!” After years of diverting me from the stove, she again wanted my full attention. I did learn, though I never understood my mother’s fierce guardianship of the kitchen; what threat was I to her culinary dominance of the house at seven or even fourteen? However at twenty-two, returning home from college after two years as a line cook, I began to see that this protection was merely insecurity at recognizing that her own daughter could take her place at the stove.

My mother is a Virgo: organized, methodical, testy. My grandma was an Aires: fiery, passionate, all-encompassing, and possibly a little unkempt as a cook. Being born among the fire signs myself, I know something about this passionate messiness in the kitchen. Mom always used to say “You have to clean as you cook,” and I do, although where my mother’s drawers and cupboards are a tribute to Martha Stewart orderliness, organization, and labeling, mine might need some work. I remember grandma’s cupboards being the same way: a little messy, mish-mash of pantry items, and utensils you didn’t know did what. When grandma died, I was just returning from college and back into my parents’ home – a home where I was pointedly not allowed to cook. However, I was allowed to pack and store my grandmother’s kitchen things for my future apartment. Among this odd array of bundt pans, aspic molds, and dishes, are the cookbooks.

Nothing printed or published, just two smallish books, one a spiral journal and one a binder. Broken, wrapped in rubber bands, tattered, stained, sticky with old food crumbles and spatter. It is clear why my mother did not want them. Going through the books is a bit like time-travel. There are recipe cards from friends, clippings from old newspapers, and all kinds of things jotted in odd places. There are clippings of a food column from a bygone newspaper whose titles always began with “The Thing About…” My grandma kept “The Thing About Root Vegetables,” “The Thing About Leftover Turkey,” and “The Thing About The Eggplant.” Clearly, grandma was a fan. There are even repeats of recipes; there must be three or four versions of Green Goddess dressing, or Chicken Divan, the same recipes, but with slight additions or omissions of ingredients, perhaps? I suppose one got lost and had to be reprinted. But the type of cuisine is interesting too, traditional things my mother always adamantly refused to approach: rutabagas, tripe, and Lieb Kuchen, but also the kitchy 1950s cocktail fare no one would consider serving today, such as a rainbow of different Ambrosia Salads. (Anything where sour cream, whipped cream, diced fruit, and Jell-O are combined.) My favorite things are the additions – the handwritten notes to self stating “add a dash of…” or “really good with…” Sometimes, the recipes themselves are handwritten, either in my Grandma’s tell-tale left-handed flourishing script, or someone else’s perfect Catholic-girl cursive. Sometimes I see the script is a bit loose, and I can imagine the author was a dinner guest who had been implored to give up the recipe after too many Sidecars.

There is a popular recipe for something called “Canary Cocktail” among these papers. Popular, because I have found multiple versions of this recipe too, yet, who was the mastermind behind Canary Cocktail? No one knows for certain. The story goes that Canary Cocktail was reserved for those ladies luncheons or meetings when especially boring women were to attend. A few sips of the yellow pastel punch later, and everyone was charming. My mother has never made Canary Cocktail – at least not in the last twenty-five years of my memory.

I do not know how the mother-daughter kitchen politics worked in my grandmother’s house, although my mom tells the story of the day she refused the yearly drudgery of the immensely difficult family tradition of making Lieb Kuchen at Christmas. (A German gingerbread recipe given to friends as gifts, involving mountains of ingredients and hours of time.) My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking, and watching the cook. She must have been at the age when “watching” in the kitchen finally involved a choice: pay attention and learn, or shrug your shoulders and say to yourself “I don’t need to know how to make that.” Clearly on this day, she was seeing the cooking only as swelter and stress rather than a valuable lesson. My grandmother apparently looked at her and said: “You’re never going to do this, are you?” One swift glance at the blanched, chopped almonds, hot oven, and thin veil of flour dust on everything, she gave a quick puff of smoke, and the answer was “No.”

Every year I have thought of tackling the Lieb Kuchen recipe and while I still have not attempted it, I know it will turn out well. Each time I use my Grandma’s kitchen supplies in my own apartment, my own kitchen, I feel my hands are guided. Pie crust is flaky, cookies never burn, meats braise beautifully. When I wash her old mixing bowls and put them on the rack, I chuckle at the red “IDA” in nail polish on the bottom. She is my kitchen blessing, and since my mom never comes over to supervise my own cooking or kitchen tidiness, I like to believe we are safe in our messy cooking.

(Above: Mom & Grandma enjoy a new Schwinn on Christmas - circ. 1947?)

Table Gestures

by: Erin Lott

She was the first woman I knew who didn’t like to cook. Her own mother, my grandmother, cooked. She had her own garden in the backyard with green beans and tomatoes with smooth, glossy flesh, but my mother opened boxes, boiled water, poured milk—the one requisite at any dinner—and called it a meal. My grandmother cooked for eight Catholic children on no money, no college education, and a husband who drank too much. My mother cooked after a divorce also with no money but with an education she earned while she also saved pocket change for pizza in her dorm room, and she asked my brother, my sister and me to fill our bellies with that same hunger to learn.

When I was growing up, on Easter Sunday after the thrilling opportunity to wear a hat in church (which my brother was not allowed but I and my sister were), we would drive to Grandma Ramsey’s house where she would inexplicably have the basted ham already in the oven even though she left church at the same time we did. I and my favorite cousin Tina would play dress up in Grandma’s old dresses and shoes while my mother and her sisters and their husbands sat in the basement kitchen smoking and exchanging news —my grandmother had two kitchens, the sweet luxury of an additional room devoted to something as mysterious as cooking. When it came time to line up for the buffet, my mother would instruct me to take a little of everything, including the greasy lima beans, because my grandmother had worked so hard. I never understood that reasoning, as my mother had not worked as hard on her meal the night before, and even then I had to take a little of everything. Thus plated, I would take my place with my youngest cousins at the kids’ table, full well aware that I would never be old enough in our large family to sit at the adult table—with our family’s robust hearts and lack of debilitating disease, vacancies were rare.

At home on any ordinary Friday night, my brother set the table, I cleared, and my mother did the dishes. My sister, still in her highchair, was expected, at best, to leave a mess. Dinner always began with grace and often found my mother prodding each of us with silly questions and jokes while I held my nose to gulp down my milk (something I still cannot drink today) and my brother cleaned his plate. Homework always came next—more important than anything else in the house, anything that weekend—and my mother stood ironing while watching Dallas, allowing herself her simple impracticality only if she was being industrious.

And in the fall, in that basement kitchen, my grandmother and aunt canned beans, tomatoes, peas, carrots, beets—the whole weight of her backyard garden. As usual, my mother made herself absent on these days to go places I still don’t even know, but I loved to ride Grandma’s stationary bicycle that she set up at the far end of the kitchen counter. In her old church dresses and slingbacks, I had to wrestle to keep from getting myself tangled in the wheel, but I would look up to watch while my aunt and she moved in silence, each of them knowing exactly what the other was doing—boiling water, measuring the headspace between the jar rim and the hot liquid, fitting the two-piece metal lids, listening for that familiar “ping” when the jars were cool, and writing the contents and date on the jar in a Sharpie marker. They moved through the kitchen, wiping the sweat from the backs of their necks, and I peddled and peddled, keeping time on the steady bike. Sometime after they finished and were sharing a cigarette at the kitchen table, my mother would arrive, all vigor and celerity. She would take a puff or two, direct me to change back into my clothes, and we would head off to the car empty handed.

Now my mother in her almost retirement will open a can of Campbell’s Chunky split pea and ham soup, warm it in the microwave, and slather margarine on potato rolls from Hy-Vee. She takes her dinner to the couch and folds her legs under her as she reads another chapter in a book. She will take a spoonful of soup when she remembers, but often the soup is only lukewarm by the time she turns her full attention to it. The book, however, is generally finished in one sitting. Now that my brother, sister, and I all live across the country, she finds she has time to eat as she does what she loves best.

On Sundays now my mother takes dinner to my grandmother who lives alone in her small apartment with her cramped, decaying kitchen and no basement or upstairs—in fact, no stairs to speak of. They sit on these early evenings over the table with jarred Prego spaghetti sauce and overdone pasta on their plates. Sometimes when she is feeling generous, my mother will rifle through the vegetables in the crisper and make a salad of iceberg lettuce and hothouse tomatoes. At 93, my grandmother knows what is being laid between them.

Fried Egg Sandwich

by: Kristy Regan

“Roasted salmon in a fennel cream sauce,” I say, beginning to recite the menu from the latest dinner party I’ve given. My mother ooh’s and ahh’s over each course. If I’m talking about making carnitas she tells me what an adventurous cook I am. Yet when visiting her in Iowa last Thanksgiving my mother frowned as I threw more salt into the mashed potatoes. “What do you have against salt?” I ask defiantly. “Well, it’s bad for your blood pressure” she says uncertainly. She thinks I’m a better cook now than she is, but her Midwest roots ground her in thinking, “That’s not the way I do it, it’s not the way my mother did it.” Neither of us challenge each other further, instead there’s a lull in our conversation before it changes to another seemingly safer topic. I later think about the sodium laden convenience foods lining her pantry shelves and think that maybe it all evens out. No salt in your potatoes, more than enough in your canned chicken stock. While we differ on our seasonings, menus and methods, we meet in our love of food, whether it entails, eating, cooking, recounting a lovely meal, feeding others, or seeking out the perfect chocolate truffle. My mother was also fond of great “hole in the wall” spots. We always got our fried chicken from a little takeout place in San Lorenzo and when she took me to her favorite burrito place in Hayward I felt like she let me see part of herself I wasn’t privy to before. She once told me a story of when she was a waitress in college. The owner of the restaurant would give her a plate of food at the end of the evening and sit and watch her eat, just to admire her appreciation. In her telling of the story, I sensed her approval of both herself and the owner.

Though she made the stray comment about “aren’t they getting fed at home?”, my mom never turned away a neighborhood kid from getting a snack at our house. She never minded an extra child at the dinner table even though we were underprivileged enough to receive free lunches at school. My childhood food was not exciting, the potatoes bland, the vegetables frozen. But on the weekend my mom was often at peace in the kitchen, stirring a pot of chili or chicken soup on the stove, deep frying donuts for a Sunday morning treat or making spinach jello, an unconventional favorite. My siblings and I quickly picked up the cooking habit, with our specialty being cinnamon rolls made from Bisquick, butter and cinnamon sugar oozing over doughy edges. After school we masterminded horrible instant pudding concoctions in repeated attempts to honor and win over our mother.

But she was tough to win over. With four kids and a divorce by the age of thirty my mother was physically, financially and emotionally overwhelmed. When she came home from work she didn’t always have much to give: the house too dirty, our faces too eager, hands too clingy, our needs too complex.

If she had been in a later generation I believe she would have been a writer, a cook or an artist. She has a gypsy spirit, loves the idea of travel and moving, finding the next great place. I imagine her in Wyoming with the wide open sky and a cowboy lover. She would have been able to do that without us and I wonder if she would have had children in this make believe life. I once asked her about her stance on abortion and she fiercely said she would never have made that decision. I wonder if her ferocity comes from a place of love or also of hardship. Maybe she never knew that her choices following the first one, to have children, would be so difficult.
Many nights after work she would need to escape from us and we would make our own dinner, frozen Swanson fried chicken with corn and a tiny square of chocolate cake, Kraft mac and cheese, or cereal or sandwiches. But when she was home and cooking, it was her way of offering love.

Now, as a post-retirement part-time job, my mom cooks at a fraternity house. Even though she was a human resources director before she retired she says cooking is the hardest job she’s had. Why do it, people ask, why work so hard when you don’t need to? For the challenge she says, to see if I can. I wonder if she wants the challenge or if she’s just grown so used to struggle that she doesn’t feel quite the same without it. But I realize, as with love, our reasons for cooking are complicated, not always easy to decipher.

She cooks for 30 young men. She experiments, sees what they love, what they won’t touch. Sometimes they will ask for their favorites, and she gladly makes them. They don’t want anything fancy, something fried, canned or boiled usually reminds them of what they had at home, reminds them of their own moms.

She says sometimes a boy will come in late and hasn’t had dinner. She’s still in the kitchen cleaning up and she’ll fry him an egg and add it to a sandwich. They’re always appreciative of her kindness. I understand their gratitude and I often imagine myself as the lone boy sitting with the cook, eating the egg sandwich at the end of the day. As the dry toast brushes the roof of my mouth and the creamy yolk melts on my tongue, I think, this is enough, just to be here.

Assignment: Portrait

On Day One of this class, you wrote a brief portrait of a person who, early in your life, influenced your views on food.

Well, here’s your chance to extend that portrait, or to write a new one.

Please keep in mind “The Queen of Mold” by Ruth Reichl, “My Education in Cooking” by Judy Rodgers, and “Bread Winner” by Susan Choi. These essays gained much of their life from vivid images and concrete details. Your portrait essay can do the same.

If you’re stumped for an idea, consider the following possibilities:

1. Imagine you are at a tribute dinner for your portrait subject. Tell a single story about that person.

2. Imagine you are writing to your grandchildren, telling them about your food person and his or her influence on you.

3. Imagine you’re at a funeral for your portrait subject. You have only two minutes to say something. What can you say that will be suitable and memorable? What story can you tell that will best illustrate a key aspect of the person’s character, and do it so well that the people in attendance will nod with recognition?

HINT: Don’t say “My grandmother taught me that food was important” and leave it at that. Instead, tell and show (or just show) her influence on you. Be specific. Write a scene or tell a story. Define your character through what he or she says and does. Write with nouns and verbs. And keep in mind what Anne Lamott once suggested: Don’t try to fill a large picture frame. Instead, fill a one-inch-square picture frame.