Tombstone Dish

This woman follows recipes
on tombstones,
doesn’t do it for any kind of point, just
makes the food, then eats it
at the grave. I think that this is the opposite
of mourning,
what the dead asked for: bring this thing that
I shaped back
to your lips, taste what I am made of.
Mostly cookies and cakes,
sweetness hereafter. What thing you cooked
for others to enjoy
would be what you chose as your final word?

Kitty Grandma
would’ve chosen stuffed cabbage, her arm posed
above the meat grinder to call my mom,
ask her to taste
the tomato sauce, rendered down from
the bulbous fruits of her own land and hand,
and tell her what it needs.

Glasses Grandma
may have left us her pot roast or cottage ham,
so tender
you needed a spoon, the potatoes and carrots rich
in juices, the sweet and creamy and fleshy all melting
on the tongue, all
of us stewing in the scent
for a too-long afternoon.

I doubt my mother could make
a choice, being
—thin as she is—
entirely composed
of butter. She has her weeknight

mainstays: Johnny
Marzetti, slumgullion, tuna fish wiggle, the names
bearing no hint to what comes from the oven.
Or,
to spite me, endless pasta salads,
the taste for which
was worn away one summer
when she riffed off it endlessly,
and being both impressionable about “carbs”
and sick of macaroni, I grew to despise to this day.
Regardless of how little
there was to go around, she has always measured
the fat for the Christmas cookies
in pounds rather than sticks.
That tells me what her dish would be,
a long story for a small loaf:

Glasses Grandpa’s mom was
a bitter old hag, hated
her daughters-in-law, never missed a chance to make them
feel small, but when
she knew the end was coming, she took them each aside,
gave them the handwritten recipe
for her most prized dish:
Nisua,
a Finnish coffee bread studded in hand-ground cardamom,
double-risen and braided,
burnished with sugar.

After her funeral,
the daughters-in-law got drunk
and shared their fussy
receipts, each
slightly altered, and after baking
up batch after batch,
fueled by whiskey sours
my mom still remembers how to make though she was
only ten then
(pitcher with one can of Minute Maid
lemonade concentrate, use the can
to measure, add one
can of whiskey, then two cans of ginger ale),
they knew,
with tastebuds only liquor
and family can offer, that all of the recipes were off,
not one
rendering the fine, long strands
of risen crumb, the punch
and warmth of the spice, the gloss
of the egg wash, all
wrong.

They laughed,
then spent forty years tweaking,
searching for proportions, trying to bring
this miracle back from oblivion. It wasn’t
til a decade after Glasses Grandma died
that mom and Aunt Jan
found it: the right way, the way they remembered all
their lives,
the two-day rise,
the punching of the dough
yielding to a kneading
the sweet cardamom backdraft
from the loaf rising on a wood stove,
the yeast neat in its plaits, the first bite
what teeth yearn for
risen from the grave.

Like her grandmother, my mom is
petty, delights in slighting those
with nothing better to do
than make life harder, laughs when
dressed down, doesn’t think much
of anyone who thinks
much of themselves.

Unlike her, mom is both
a good cook
and generous.

She’ll, when that time comes,
have us carve the exacting method
in stone, so generations
can share what was supposed to die.