By Monica Comas
Sibling relationships are like taffy. Stretchy and malleable. They take different shapes over the course of your life. My sister, Kristie, and I are taffy through and through.
As children, we were the closest of close. There was bounce to us, a joy and a togetherness that you only find with a beloved sister. Despite being younger than me, Kristie was the bold one, the one in our childhood photos with a mischievous gleam in her eye. I was the timid one, ever cautious. Always overthinking. Siblings often grow up with different characteristics—one extroverted, another introverted—the reasons why fill books. But as you age, the whys become less important as the pull of that taffy…does it spring back, or does it stretch so thin it loses its boing and becomes inert, and eventually tears?
Kristie and I lost our cohesiveness as teenagers. We were snide to one another. We slammed bedroom doors. We were cutting with words. Seemingly always annoyed with the other. Unyielding. No surprise, really. Teenagers are a famously self-centered lot, and the two of us were no different. Kristie was popular and outgoing. I was…moody. We didn’t have much in common anymore. Somewhere after adolescence, we lost all semblance of chummy childhood softness.
But the holidays always seemed to wind us closer. The season’s cheeriness imbues everything with a level of acceptance and understanding that even teenagers can’t resist. Equally important, in retrospect, there was food—cherished dishes that we’d grown up sharing with our mom, grandparents, and uncle. Familiar tastes that brought us back to a time when we were tender and close.
Memories Linger
Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Grandma would march into our house with Grandpa carrying her stuffing—stuffing that was, and I say this without a hint of hyperbole, legendary. Then there was Mom’s pecan tassies. She made them every Christmas for friends she adored. And Patty adored everyone, which meant, come December, our kitchen was a veritable pecan-tassie making factory.
Beyond the holidays, comforting tastes of our childhood found a way to our young palettes, subconsciously plucking deep chords of remembrance. Grandma’s chicken soup soothed us—despite how cliché that sounds, it’s true. Chocolate chip cookie dough frozen into pucks—and eaten that way, as our mother famously preferred—sweetened our bitterness.
So, Kristie and I had these memorable flavors whose company we could share even at our teenage prickliest. I like to think now how our mom must’ve loved seeing the momentary thaw between us.
Thankfully, like most teens, we eventually shed our respective edginess toward one another. We recovered some pliability to our relationship, a bit of that old taffy springiness. We got to an age and started cooking together. I can’t even recall now how we started. This was before Kristie met her future husband, before they had children. And long before I met the man I’d wed. But in this liminal time when we were becoming adults with the precious recall of our childhood selves, somehow, we connected with making food we loved.
Witnessing a Shift
Kristie lived in Chicago, and I, in New York City, so whenever we’d go home to see our mom in Cleveland, we’d take over the kitchen. There we were, planning meals, moving around one another with swing and verve, while Mom sat and watched, laughing along with us while we made decadent heavy appetizers for Christmas, while we assembled my sister’s breakfast casserole. Looking back, it’s clear the bond that was forming between my sister and me.
Mom would always talk about how much she loved us cooking together. Over and over, she’d say this, which was so funny, because Mom never loved cooking like her mother, the doyenne of stuffing. Grandma was the family cook, and Kristie and I always joked that the cooking gene skipped a generation in our family.
But our mother’s delight at watching us…I think about that now. It wasn’t about the meal we were preparing, or the food that would be plated and eaten. I wonder now if what she actually delighted in was our taffy regaining its bounce and strength.
After Mom became sick, heartbreakingly and irreversibly ill, she still reveled in watching us cook together, as Kristie made wedding soup, as I whipped up Ina Garten’s cheese Danishes. As we cooked and baked with our mother’s appetite waning, she never talked about the food we actually made…it was how much she loved watching us cook together. She barely ate anything but there was no mistaking the happy glimmer in her eyes. Maybe because she loved knowing that after she left this earthly plane her daughters would have one another.
And we do.
Today, Kristie and I have so much in common our husbands are bewildered at how much we’re talking on the phone or texting one another. But she’s my person, the one I’ve literally shared my life with. The one I’ve walked through joy, sorrow, and worse holding her hand. The one, despite the 800 miles between our homes, I keep closest. The one I laugh hardest with. And—I just know our mom is loving this—Kristie remains the one I love to cook with.
The Meat and Marrow of It
The food that we revisit, this is the real magic to our taffy spring. Kristie still lives in Chicago, and I still live in New York. Whenever we’re together, it’s in the kitchen where I think we’re our sparkliest. We’ve grown into women who return to the kitchen together to get creative, to tap into a deep vein of connection, to talk about everything, because some of our best conversations have been while we’re cooking. There’s something about having your hands occupied with chopping, measuring, and stirring that unleashes meaningful words, that encourages openness and honesty.
Often, as we did at a recent Thanksgiving at her house when we made Grandma’s stuffing and Mom’s mashed potatoes, what we cook is a journey through time and tastes—memories of dishes that are dear to our family, especially our mom and grandma who are no longer with us. These flavors are tethers to the cheerfulness of past celebrations when we were a childhood twosome. The echoes envelop us and it’s welcome.
But it’s not all nostalgia, because our kitchen connection has become a springboard for new flavors and the minting of fresh memories. We’re menu-planning summer gatherings and holidays together. We’re making the same recipe in our respective kitchens and comparing notes. We’re adding French silk pie to Thanksgiving, serving a spicy cranberry relish, going all in on a shaved Brussels sprouts salad with dried cranberries and a zippy vinaigrette. We’re tossing that same kale salad every time we’re together because it’s our favorite. We’re grilling that side of salmon with the spicy rub and zesty relish that explodes with flavor.
Cherished recipes became touchstones for us, ones that we could tap, recall a memory, and feel ourselves being pulled closer to one another. Now, decades into what I like to think is our good taffy era, cooking with Kristie remains a gift that continually, lovingly, expands.
Meals aren’t simply meals. They’re connective tissue for us. But the thing we had no idea about when we embarked on this so long ago, what we couldn’t possibly have ever known, was that the familiar dishes we started with, they were just the beginning.
So much more deliciousness awaits.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Monica Comas’ upcoming novel, ‘Recipe for Joy‘ (March 24, Lake Union) is a hopeful story about a grieving woman who uses the treasured recipes of her grandma as a roadmap back to family and healing. ‘Recipe for Joy’ grew out of Monica’s lived experience navigating the stillness that followed the loss of her mother. Months after her mother’s passing, Monica began writing longhand, and the pages that first filled a notebook eventually came together like a delicious meal. ‘Recipe for Joy’ is both a tribute to her mother and a reminder that hope lives on in family and food.
Monica Comas was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English from The Ohio State University and a master’s in journalism from New York University. She’s worked as a newspaper reporter, a journalist covering stocks and the economy, and a financial editor. But fiction has always been her true love. Monica lives in New York with her husband, John, and their tiny shih tzu, Poirot. For more information, visit www.monicacomas.com, and follow her on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.
