A Year of Cooking With My Mother

I’ve eaten her food my whole life. This pandemic made me realize how much I didn’t know about her process.

Let the record show that I make a terrible roommate. I can still hear my mother’s voice as she encountered the sink full of dishes, the counter spilling over with spices and syrups: “I can’t live like this!” About nine months ago, I moved back home to Atlanta to write a cookbook with my mother, Jean. A couch-surfing freeloader, I was only supposed to be there for a couple of months to work on the kimchi chapter, a selection of heirloom recipes I would never have been able to develop over the phone from New York, where I live now. But as each month passed, I found more and more excuses to stay. By cooking with Jean in such a structured, quotidian way, I was able to stop time, a compelling state for an anxious mind like mine. I could finally slow down and ask her questions about the foods we ate when I was growing up. What I didn’t know was that I was entering a master class in Korean home cooking.