My Grandmother Never Wrote Anything Down

My grandmother’s recipe for potato rolls, as dictated to my Aunt Renee in 1994, reads in full: “Potatoes. Flour till it’s right. You know.”

Aunt Renee did not know. Nobody knew. Bea Castellane ran the linen room at a county hospital for thirty-one years, made those rolls every Saturday of her adult life, and died in 2011 with the whole thing in her forearms, leaving behind a family of grown people who had eaten perhaps ten thousand of them and could not agree on whether there was egg.

I should say that I am not sentimental about this woman. She called me “the loud one.” She pinched. She told the ladies at St. Brendan’s that she used a cup of milk, which she did not, because Mrs. Dunleavy’s rolls were not to improve on her watch. People get dewy about grandmothers who cooked by feel, as if they possessed a wisdom too pure for paper. Bea left school after the sixth grade, read slowly, and hated being watched doing it. She also did not want you to have the recipe. Those were her reasons, and they were perfectly ordinary.

I have been a pastry cook for sixteen years. I weigh salt to the tenth of a gram. The winter I turned forty I decided to get those rolls back, and I started with what I had, which was the memory of a ten-year-old on a step stool:

• A dented saucepan of potatoes boiled soft, with the cooking water saved in a jelly jar.

• Two handfuls of this and one of that, thrown without looking.

• Her thumb pressing into the dough, then her fingers pinching my earlobe, hard, and her voice saying, “Like that.”

The potato water I could explain. Starch and a little sugar dissolve out of the potatoes, the yeast gets an easy meal, and the potato starch hangs on to moisture, which is why her rolls were still soft on Tuesday. That took about an hour to work out. The handfuls took four months.

A handful of flour is a measurement of one specific hand. Mine, scooped the way I remember her scooping, weighs 71 grams. Renee’s weighs 58. In the box of Bea’s things my cousin had been storing was a pair of white church gloves, size six, and one night at my counter I laid a glove over my own hand, marked where her fingers ended, and scooped with my fingers curled in to match. It was as stupid as it sounds. It came out to 54 grams, give or take a lot. I have done dumber things for a croissant.

So I had a number, and I was off. Version four was a nice dinner roll that belonged to someone else. Version six used egg, because Aunt Cecile swore by it, and came out cakey and wrong. I called Renee, who said there had never been an egg in that house that wasn’t going to be fried. Renee says lard. Cecile says shortening, and they have not agreed about anything since 1979, so I baked both. Version eleven had lard, and when I opened the oven the smell came out and stood in my kitchen with me. I had to sit on the step stool I keep for the high shelf.

I took a dozen to Renee, feeling very pleased with myself. She chewed for a while and said, “Too sweet.”

I argued. I told her I remembered those rolls. I was ten, she said, and that was the only sweet thing Bea ever let me have, and Bea counted sugar like it was coming out of her pension. I went home and cut it from 70 grams to 30. The rolls tasted plainer and a little salty, like something meant to sit next to ham. I hated them for a day. My memory had been adding sugar for thirty years.

Then I had to write it down, which is what I do now for part of my living, and which turned out to be its own small betrayal. A recipe claims to be instructions, but it’s really a report on what one person did one morning, tidied up to look like a law. Mine says 54 grams and 375 degrees and eighteen minutes. Bea never knew a single one of those numbers. Her oven door was held shut with a fork. She would have looked at my card the way she looked at the hospital’s new linen forms, as evidence that someone had too much time.

The one line I kept from her is the one I can’t convert. It comes at the end of the kneading, and it says: “It should feel like an earlobe. Pinch someone.”

I can’t tell you if these are her rolls. There is no sample to test against. The only reference copy is in the mouths of five aging relatives, and they disagree.

Last Easter I brought version fourteen. Aunt Renee ate two of them standing up and said the crust was wrong, that Bea’s was softer, and she said it the way you’d read out a verdict. Then on her way out she wrapped a third in a paper napkin and put it in her purse, which is the closest thing to a written note my family has ever produced.