A Good Cook

There were two times when I saw my mom with a tight ponytail. In the morning, when she first put her hair up, and when she cooked.

"A good cook always keeps their hair away from the food," she told me before we would ever start cooking. I always pretended to reach back and tighten my own ponytail, even though my hair was nowhere near long enough.

She was constantly saying "A good cook always—" whenever I offered to help her in the kitchen. They were always little things that she did out of habit, and now that I'm older, I find myself doing the same tricks out of habit as well. Sometimes I swear I can hear her voice in my ear telling me that a good cook always does that.

"A good cook always washes their hands before getting started." So she would turn on the faucet and grab a step stool for me, and we would wash our hands together, splash each other a bit, and laugh. Whenever I splashed mom, she would always laugh and say that being cleaner wouldn't hurt, and then she would splash me in return.

Once we got past the hand washing, the magic would start. Mom would put some water on the stove to boil while she told me to pick out the vegetables I liked and to wash them. When I was in the middle of washing vegetables, she would usually reach over my shoulder, grab a vegetable for herself and start helping me out.

Then she started cutting the vegetables while I watched her. When it comes to cutting vegetables, I like cutting fast and furious. Mom wasn't the same. Her cuts were slow, but decisive and sharp enough that I always thought she could have cut quickly if she wanted to, she just wanted to make sure every last piece was done properly.

At some point in the middle of her cutting, she would pause to put noodles in the water and then ask me to stir for her while she finished cutting. I was happy to oblige in any task that helped my mom in some way.

After the noodles were done, mom mostly took over, though she still tried to keep me involved. While I scrubbed the counter clean, she would drain the noodles and heat up a frying pan. I can remember stopping in my counter scrubbing just to stare in amazement as she took handfuls of raw ingredients and made them into something that was making my stomach rumble. Sometimes she asked me to throw in the vegetables for her, and sometimes she did it herself. I never understood the pattern.

Then she would spoon the food on to three plates and ask me to carry them out to the table for her. I always walked as carefully as I could manage so I wouldn't spill any food. I always had to make a second trip for the third plate though, while mom carried out the silverware and the drinks.

After we were done eating, mom would turn to me and say, "A good cook always cleans their kitchen." That was the point where Al would laugh at me, his small consolation for not being old enough to be in the kitchen himself.

Maybe it sounds weird, but doing dishes with mom was a blast. She always sang while she scrubbed, and if I tried to get away with being quiet, she would nudge me until I started singing with her. And if that didn't work, she would flick water in my face, which always turned into a full-out splash war.

A year later, Al earned the privilege of being old enough to help in the kitchen, and meanwhile I graduated from helper to apprentice. Mom had always been throwing various bits of advice at me, but now she wanted me to repeat them back to her so she knew I had heard. Things like "Put the tomatoes in last," "Always taste test your food," and "Wash the mushrooms gently but firmly."

Which was part of why I had such a shock when Al and I started training under Izumi. I thought that being an apprentice meant sweating and running around and repeating things while still having the time of your life. Of course, she didn't teach us like mom had.

I learned a lot about cooking from mom. She had said that a year after I had started learning to cook , I would get to cook a dish on my own while she watched over my shoulder to make sure I didn't get hurt.

But I never got that far. I was only halfway through my apprenticeship when mom died. Al never got to graduate from being more than just a helper. I felt like I had robbed him of something, just because I had been born a year earlier and gotten to learn earlier because of it. He didn't even try to cook for years afterward.

After mom's death had numbed a little in my mind, I tried my hand at cooking again. I could hear echoes of her voice in everything I did in the kitchen, but whenever I turned to look, she was never there. And when I finally finished the food, it wasn't the same as her. It was lacking something, and she wasn't there to tell me what it was. Even when I copied recipes exactly, they weren't the same. They didn't have a bit of mom in them. It was more depressing to try and mimic her food than to not have it at all.

Thankfully, before I had a chance to try and figure out what to do, we started training under Izumi, and she took care of the meals for us.

Her cooking was much different from mom's. There was still love and dedication in her work, but not the slow preciseness I had gotten used to. I found myself wandering into the kitchen out of habit, and whenever I did so, Izumi would drag me over and have me help. There were no gentle questions of if I would help her out, I was commanded and I either did something or dealt with the consequences.

It was from her that I learned to cut vegetables like mad. She also taught me how to take any piece of raw animal, and skin it, cut it, and clean it until it was something edible. I even learned how to make food from squirrels, which always made me scratch my head in wonderment.

She added a lot to my cooking knowledge (and Al's, at that), but even after a few years with her, my cooking still resembled mom's the most closely. And even with memories of my teacher yelling in my ear while I cooked, I still remembered mom smiling and telling me that a good cook always sniffs their spices instead of going by names alone.

"You wouldn't never speak to a person just because they had a name you didn't like, would you, Edward? Spices are like people. Each one has their strengths and weaknesses just like any other person, and some will do better in one situation than in another."

I remember asking her that if spices were like people, what sort of spices were we? She said that I was cinnamon and she was a clove.

When Al and I started travelling on the road, I decided to try my hand at cooking again. After all, we needed it. Al told me that he thought I should stop when he found me sobbing on front of the stove with mushrooms clutched to my chest. I yelled something at him about how I just wanted it to taste like her cooking, and I didn't understand why I couldn't manage that. Al said we should start eating out.

So we started eating out every day. Every day there was a new chef and a new style of cooking to try out. For the first few months, I ate only because Al told me I needed to, but then I started discovering that there was good food out there besides mom's and Izumi's. I started trying to mimic a few recipes I had eaten, or if I felt like it, sometimes I just asked if I could have the recipe. It was easy to cook when the food was something I had never seen mom make before. I still heard her voice in my head, but I learned to shove it away while I cooked so I wouldn't get upset.

My cooking started to evolve yet again. I learned how to cook fast and easy foods that only took three minutes, and I learned other foods that took an entire day of simmering. One chef even took me into the back and let me and Al see how a profession kitchen. I learned from that how to bounce quickly from one task to another, being able to cook three foods at once and let none of them burn.

I got comfortable enough with cooking again that I forgot how I had once had such deep emotional issues with it. While Al and I were staying at an inn, the innkeeper asked if I would be willing to watch the stew for a bit while she went to go take care of her baby. I leapt up and agreed, forgetting that stew was one of mom's foods and not one of the ones I had eaten in a restaurant.

"Uh, you'd better let me do that, Brother," Al said as he put a hand on my shoulder. "You always end up burning the food." Thankfully he had remembered and saved me before I had a chance to get embarrassed by getting emotional in public.

And so began the second biggest lie of my life. (The first, of course, being the lie I would tell about how I lost my arm and leg.) If anyone would ask me to cook, Al would hold me back, and if Al wasn't there, I would purposefully burn whatever food it was in order to strengthen the belief that I was a horrible cook.

I hid away my cooking like most people hide away a secret lover. When I got a chance to be alone with a stove, I would lock the door and close the blinds. Being able to cook when no one but Al would see me only added to the fun.

It took years of cooking other recipes, but I finally worked myself back up to attempting one of mom's recipes. It still fell short, but I had learned to accept that and move on. I no longer fell into an emotional heap over the fact that I couldn't make mom's dishes taste exactly like she could.

Once he was able to taste food again, Al started trying to cook on his own, but he struggled with the food. I eventually taught him mom's tricks myself, but it wasn't the same, even though his cooking got to be excellent. He never had the joy in scrubbing dishes that I did, he never caught himself accidentally muttering a sentence he had repeated a million times. But I had hardened myself over the years, and I hid from him how much that depressed me.

I had gotten to the point where cooking—even mom's recipes—was fun again. I stopped hiding my skill from people and laughed at the fact that they were all so surprised I could cook. I was confident in my ability, and when I heard mom's voice in the kitchen, it was a faint whisper that I would remember with a smile before moving on.

And then I met a girl that made it all come tumbling down. I probably would have fallen in love with her if I didn't have my own girl waiting for me back home.

The first thing I noticed about her was her height. She was six years younger than Al (Which would make her seven years younger than me, I suppose) and she was exactly as tall as me! But somehow, that didn't get in the way. She started out as Al's friend, and before I knew it, I was hanging around her just as frequently.

She refused to cook for months. Outright refused to my face. I wasn't going to take that for an answer, not when I had taken the time to make her my friend and I loved cooking so much. So I kept pushing her. I even bought groceries for her that I thought she would find useful. And then finally she agreed to cook.

The first thing she did was to tie her brown hair in a ponytail. When she glanced back over at me, she laughed and said, "A good cook always keeps their hair out of the food, right?"

I watched her cut her vegetables with slow, deliberate strokes. Like she could have cut fast, but she was more concerned about doing it right. I watched her dance around the kitchen, wiping up spills the second after she had spilled them, and giggling when a tomato squirted her in the face. She was so happy and at ease in the kitchen, even if it was her first time cooking something more than leftovers from her mom. I watched her slide the vegetables into her stir-fry with a knife, and how she made sure to add the tomatoes last, even if it was her first time cooking with tomatoes and she hadn't been told of how easily they shrivel up unless you add them last.

And when she had finally finished the food, she wiped her hands on her shirt and ate a little for herself, then said I could have the rest. I was almost scared of what it would taste like.

I could taste it in the first bite. It was my missing ingredient. The taste that was missing whenever I tried to cook mom's recipes. I took another bite. And another. Before I knew it, I was shoveling food in my mouth. When one plate of food ran out, I took another until the frying pan was clean. And then I put my plate in the sink and curled up in a ball on the sofa and tried to hide my tears from her as repressed memories started flooding through my mind.

As soon as I was done, she said that a good cook always keeps her kitchen clean, and then she started washing the dishes. I ran out of the room, wondering why it was so damn hard to control myself around her.

As with many others before her, my cooking style changed with a new friend. My cutting slowed down a little, my mom's advice in my ear got loud again. I made sure to always tighten my ponytail before I started cooking. My style went back to being a little closer to my mom's style, though I still kept a lot of the other tricks I had learned.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not exactly sure what to make of that girl, like when I have to plead and beg with her for a whole day before she agrees to cook. Other times I feel like I know exactly who she is, like when she'll sit and talk with Al about cooking for hours on end. But the one thing that's been echoing in my mind ever since I saw her cook was a piece of advice about cooking that mom had never said in the kitchen. Instead, she had whispered it in my ear when she was slipping in and out of fevered dreams while she was sick.

"A good cook always remembers that any dish can be saved, no matter how badly it's been ruined."

Sometimes I don't know whether it's the clove saving the cinnamon, or the cinnamon saving the clove.

Author's Note: Meh. I felt like this story was somewhat pointless, though I started seeing more of a point towards the end, I guess. There's so many double meanings in there that I find it hilarious, lol. That crazy muse.