Recipes for a Perfect Marriage Read Free Page A

that if I invited her, she might not turn up. My mother stridently disapproved of marriage on principle and that she came at all was a revelation in itself. The night before the wedding, she met Dan, and after he had departed to his apartment my mother and I stayed up drinking in my suite in the Plaza.
    “I like him,” she said once we were both tipsy enough to be honest, but not so drunk that we wouldn’t remember. “Although I know it’s not important what I think.”
    I argued briefly before she said, “Bernadine would have approved.”
    I wondered if she was right or if she was just saying it because she sensed some uncertainty.
    “He seems solid,” she added.
    It was a cop-out understatement. The wrong thing to say and the wrong time to say it. While I knew Niamh meant well in that moment, I longed with a fresh grief for my grandmother. It had been ten years since she had died, but my love and need for her still felt so alive. I wanted her to be there, not just so that I could get her approval of Dan but also because it did not feel right for me to be taking this big step without her.
    Niamh seemed to sense that and said, “I miss her, too.”
    Her eyes drowsy with drink, my mother reached across and took my hand.
    “She still loves you,” she said, “and so do I.”
    Niamh was into this afterlife stuff, which I had always believed was nonsense. But the soft tone of her voice led me to do something that I can remember doing only rarely as a child. I lay my head on my mother’s chest and waited there until the strange smell of her perfume and the unfamiliar touch of her blouse on my cheek faded, until everything dissolved but the comfort of being held by her. As Niamh stroked my face, I felt the instinctive care of generations of mothers before her seep through her hands. For a moment, I believed the strong arms of Bernadine were embracing me again.
    I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I sat up I knew, ten years after her death, that I had finally accepted that Bernadine was gone. My grandmother had been such an influence on my life, especially on my love of cooking. As a child, Niamh and I existed on takeaway scraps and whatever she could rustle up out of a tin. I certainly would never have become a food writer without those holidays spent in Bernadine’s kitchen—crumbly homemade bread straight from the oven with jam dribbling over its salty crusts, lamb shanks made impossibly tender from slow stewing, carrots as sweet as apples, and soft potato fluff bursting through skin so soft it hardly needed mashing. The changing consistency of butter as it melted, pastry as it browned, bread rising—the chemistry of cooking seemed like a miracle to me. A thrill would shoot through me when I saw her take down her worn cotton apron from its hook on the kitchen door and determinedly lay out her ingredients on the long pine table, and I longed to join in. Bernadine taught me to cook methodically. It was never a game to her; there was no throwing flour around, and if I dropped an egg or spilled a cup of milk she would lecture me briefly about the sin of wastefulness. But I didn’t mind. My mother had never been interested in cooking, so my grandmother made me the recipient of her skill and experience and I was a devoted student. My grandfather was an intellectual man, a reader, and he influenced my decision to study English literature. But it was Bernadine who had been my true mentor. I never understood or appreciated that as fully as I did the night before I got married and suddenly knew with certainty that my next project would be to adapt my grandmother’s recipes into a traditional Irish cookbook.
    What I still did not feel certain of was my decision to marry Dan the following day. I told myself it was pre-wedding nerves, what everyone experiences. I was afraid if I vocalized them, Niamh would tell me to pull out and I would not have enough conviction to act against her advice. If I pulled out at this