Generations of Rice Pudding

“Mom, I want to make this. Can you help me?”  I squinted at the picture on my son’s phone. It was an image of an index card sent to him from my aunt, and on the index card was a hand written recipe for my great-grandmother’s rice pudding.

“I think so,” I replied, hesitant. What was he up to? Rarely does he want anything to do with the kitchen.  “I was just thinking about how we had it at Christmas last year” was his reasoning.  Fair enough.  I agreed, and together we added the supplies to the list for the weekly grocery trip.

That evening, he held true to his word. He’d researched how to make his own double-boiler, he measured and tested temperatures, and whisked away for an hour. My only job became to offer encouragement and conversation, our house filling with sweet smells and laughter. For this moment at least, I was a spectator in the kitchen, and I allowed my self to revel in it.

As I watched him at the stove, I imagined my great-grandmother in her own kitchen. Her life wasn’t an easy one: my own grandmother, now 90, still reminds us that she was raised with no electricity or indoor plumbing. That her mother earned money as a midwife in their local rural community and her father drove a horse and wagon to deliver eggs and milk to the closest town.  That he hung himself when my grandmother was 13, leaving her mother to raise the children and run the farm and earn money, alone. Watching this rice pudding take shape makes this woman who died when I was a baby come to life right in my kitchen.  Did she cook the pudding with the same light heart as my son? Was it just another labor in her life of constant toil? Did she cook it for her children, to comfort them, as her own heart broke with grief and despair?  Did she ever taste it herself, enjoying the sweetness of the cream, the texture of the rice and raisins, her eyes closed as she held it in her mouth, and let herself smile?  Of all my speculation, I like to think the latter.  That the love and hope mixed into this recipe passed to my grandmother, her daughters, their children, and now my son, here in front of me, whisking the rice pudding.