A Paean to Our Grandmothers

I've been noticing lately a lot of appeals (by commercial interests) to images of our grandmothers. There's "Nonna's [grandmother in Italian] Minestrone Soup," Nonna's Pizza (right down the street from me). There's a TV commercial that includes an image of Yiayia (grandmother in Greek), though I think it says "Yiayia wouldn't approve." And there's the Jewish grandmother (the image is perhaps more common in the Eastern US), known as Bubbe in Yiddish. Whether you call her Nonna, Yiayia, Bubbe, Nanna, Nan, Gran, or some other name, I'm confident that grandmothers are much alike, largely regardless of their ethnicity.

The image of our grandmothers is very evocative. Some of the associations are love, nurturing, a big, soft breast that nearly smothered us when we were hugged.

For many Americans, our grandparents' was the immigrant generation; that might have some negative connotations: conservative, backward, unassimilated, maybe more foreign than American.

But the positive side of it all is that our grandmothers are our tie to our heritage, to the food (and of course more) of the "old country."

It's the food thing that's the most important. If Italian and Greek grandmothers are like my Jewish grandmother, grandmother is synonymous with food, with overabundant cooking and baking. I swear that my grandmother cooked and baked for 26 or 28 hours a day. The house always smelled of cooking and baking. At Thanksgiving, there were both beef and turkey; sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes; pie and cake.

Our grandmothers were great cooks, the custodians of age-old recipes that might or might not have been handed down to later generations. And our mothers, however good they were or are as cooks, simply don't put as much time and effort into cooking and baking as Grandma did.

And food is love. If you didn't eat something when you visited my grandparents', my grandmother would be hurt. Very hurt. (There are lots of jokes that embody that stereotype of the Jewish grandmother.) It would be an affront to her cooking, her hospitality, her grandmotherliness. In my particular case, as I wrote elsewhere, I was very thin, so in addition, getting me to eat something would be one brick in the edifice she wished to build of a beefier me; that was a project of hers.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein