Memories and a Lasting Bond

Growing up I was always in the kitchen with my mama. She cooked dinner for my family every night of the week, and I was the typical daughter who always wanted to help out.  Holidays were very special, because tons of food had to be cooked including deserts.  Baking deserts with my mama was always my favorite thing to do, because it was our mother-daughter time.  I have an older brother and usually we were all together, but when it was time to cook/bake, it was just my mama and I.  Every holiday my family has a big lunch for us all to eat.  One thing that my mama has always made is red velvet cake.  When I was younger I would help her with this cake; however, now that I have grown up, the red velvet cake is my job.  While she is mixing up a casserole or working on another dish for the holiday lunch, I start working on the red velvet cake.  She has passed the torch on to me.  She no longer helps me bake the cake, but we are still spending time with each other.  While we are bustling around the kitchen trying to get everything prepared we talk about everything going on in our lives.  I still live at home with my parents, but I do not spend much time there given all of the schoolwork I have to do.  This time of cooking and baking with my mom represents something very intimate to me.  I have a chance to talk with her and get advice from her. I chose to bake a red velvet cake for my memory food, because it brings back those memories as a child of helping my mother in the kitchen.  While many tend to say that daughters are “daddy’s girls,” I was definitely a “mama’s girl.” I was attached to her hip as a child, and still can be that way sometimes.  This is just one of the many memories that I have with my mama, and I felt that it strongly represented the bond that I share with her.  The bond that I share with my mother reminded me of the bond that is expressed in Allison’s article entitled, “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: Lunchbox as an ideological State Apparatus.”  Allison talks about how the mother puts precious time and planning into making the obentos for her child to take to school, and this time and effort creates a bond between the mother and the child (Allison 85-86).  These Japanese mothers would spend hours working on their child’s obentos to make it a beautiful piece of artwork filled with colorful foods (Allison 84).  While my mama did not put all of this work into cooking, she did reveal cooking as an art form.  She would take a recipe and tweak it to create something a little different, and she always made sure that our plates were colorful.  She always incorporated colorful veggies for us.  My brother never cared for veggies, but she always made us finish our food.  The children in Allison’s article were expected to finish all of the food in their obentos or they were considered being disrespectful (Allison 86).  I can relate to this, because my mama always expected my brother and I to finish what was on our plate.  She would say things like, “How will you grow up to be big and strong if you don’t eat all of your food?” This activity was extremely fun, because it made me realize how important food can be and that there is a deeper meaning in food than just what meets the eye.  Simply baking a red velvet cake overwhelms my brain with memories of the past. 

 Red Velvet Cake Recipe

My mom and me :)