"Italian Grandma Hands"

Noodling on the low-grade burn tolerance that's passed on from family kitchen to family kitchen — from mother to mother.

One recent morning, I made my family pancakes and bacon. While they ate, I began cleaning up — I wasn’t hungry myself just yet, and a kitchen mess, in particular, makes me feel downright impatient until it’s tended to.

As part of the process, I blotted the piping grease from its pan with only a paper towel to insulate my hand, and plucked away each of the little pancake dots still adorning the griddle surface sans any protection at all. “I can do that, or we can wait until things cool off,” my husband gently reminded me. But I was already too deep into the process to stop. (And, to be fully honest, I simply didn’t want to.)

I do this almost daily — initiate the clean-up phase as soon as the cooking is done, laws of physics and biology be damned. I pick up during the process as well — a longtime practitioner of cleaning as I go. That said, I’m not fully ridiculous when it comes to handling still-hot items on a still-hot stove. I’ll pop on an oven mitt for the parts that require me to move heat-conducting metal — gripping the handle of a cast iron pan as I put it in the sink for washing; lifting the grate upon which everything warmed so that I can spray and wipe away sauce and oil splatters.

I’m not nearly as heat-resistant as my ancestors, after all.

I can still recall childhood pasta dinners at my grandparents’ homes, my best friend’s home, all of the homes where I was held and fed as I grew… and how the meal wasn’t ready until an older woman’s hand had plucked a strand of spaghetti directly from a boiling pot of water and placed it right into her own mouth to test its doneness. I imagine it must have hurt, but I can’t even recall any of them flinching as I think back.

“Italian grandma hands” in action.

Of course, this isn’t just an Italian phenomenon. I’ve seen aunties and other women elders of all races, from all corners of the world — including my own Eastern European blood — dip their delicate, aged fingers into their cauldrons, magically avoiding injury as they plucked, say, an especially plump gnocchi from amid the angry, dancing bubbles to make sure it was ready for the next phase of meal preparation. To ensure that we were not only fed, but fed right.

However, I use tongs for this process; I blow on the shells and elbows and strings of linguini I’m tending to before eating to see if I’ve achieved a perfect al dente. And I’ve always thought of this as... not a deficiency, or a weakness, but certainly a skill that I lack, and something I’ve gently mocked myself for over the years.

But what I found myself wondering, as I loaded up the dishwasher that post-pancake morning, was… To what extent have moments like my mother-elders’ spaghetti testing served as a model, in absolute miniature, of strength in tough moments, as a tiny, fleeting example of the occasional need for discomfort in service of caring for others...

And to what extend have I learned that some measure of pain is a valid cost for expediency in a mother’s duties… or rather, that I must suffer, even if just a little, tiny bit, in order to ensure that others to have what they need — or just want — as soon as possible? That the hurt of excessive heat is preferable to the unease of not getting the thing done right, and right now? That even when I’m being directly told that it can all wait, the impulse to keep going is so deeply embedded within me that I feel organically pulled to do so anyway?

That it’s all just… a part of cooking — mothering — properly? Little hurts and burns and forever pressing onward?

Some food for thought.