The Taste of What’s Gone

The instructions are right there nestled in the collection of recipe cards my mom gave me years ago.

It’s written down clear as day with ingredients, baking times, and a note about sticky cakes and how to avoid them.

I’ve even tried to make them a time or two. I follow the instructions, buy the same kind of marshmallow fluff she used, grab the same name-brand butter, and use the Dutch-processed cocoa she swore by. But they never come out the same.

The whoopie pies my mother made were small miracles: perfectly domed chocolate cakes, rich but not too sweet, sandwiched around a soft white filling with just the right balance of fluff and structure. Mine come out flat. Dry. Cracked across the top like old soil. It’s not just that they don’t taste the same, it’s that each time I fail, I’m reminded just how many years it’s been since I’ve had a whoopie pie made by my mom. How many years its been since I’ve seen my mom.

She died in 2021, but I lost her long before that. She was sick for almost fifteen years with a brain disease that eroded her slowly and unpredictably. 

It made her sharp in places she wasn’t before. More blunt, more critical, less patient. We fought a lot during those years. Especially when she came to visit me after I had my first baby and then my second. She would arrive with an open-ended return ticket and weeks would sometimes turn to months. A blessing, for sure. But also, at times, a burden.

 It always started the same: She’d arrive and rearrange my entire kitchen in a hurricane of helpfulness that often included throwing out what she deemed “useless” and “out of date” and replacing it with groceries she’d buy us on her shopping trips into town. She’d insist on doing the laundry, reorganizing the pantry, and cleaning out the fridge. Always from a place I love, I know now, but also always with commentary. Nothing was ever quite right and it always felt that I was somehow, not quite enough. Or sometimes too much. We couldn’t maneuver through the tiny spaces I seemed to live in without bouncing off each other and lashing out.

But then she would bake.

The kitchen would fill with the scent of cocoa powder and sugar and she’d go quiet. She was focused, precise, and most definitely in her element behind a batter bowl. She knew how to do this. Baking was her love language even when her words failed her. 

Whoopie pies were her signature, the sweet truce she offered after a particularly nasty falling out or the gift she left in my freezer when she went back home. 

Even when we were at odds I could always accept a whoopie pie. 

And when she handed one to me, still warm, wax paper stuck lightly to the bottom, it was the closest she’d come to saying I see you. I love you. I’m proud of you.

Food carries more than taste. It carries memory. Emotion. Inheritance. My mother couldn’t always say how she felt. But she baked it. She stirred it into soups, rolled it into pie crusts, and spooned it generously into Tupperware that found its way to my freezer pending her eventual departure back to her own life.

Her cooking was survival training. Her baking was grace.

I’ve come to believe that food is a kind of haunting. It stays behind long after the person is gone.

The smell of melted chocolate still feels like her walking into my kitchen. The sound of an electric mixer whirring brings back the image of her at my counter, one hip leaned against the edge, cracking jokes and cracking eggs. My kids never got to know her well, not really and definitely not enough, but I still try to give them a piece of her when I bake.

I just wish I could get the whoopie pies right.

I wish I could hold that recipe and conjure her fully, like magic. 

But maybe that’s not how it works.

Maybe the recipe is just a map and the terrain it describes is full of ghosts. Or maybe the real missing ingredient is her. A woman who could be as hard as rock salt and just as necessary. A woman who, even half-lost to disease, still showed up with a need to show she cared in the best way she knew how--through her food..

I keep trying. Every few months, I haul out the card and try again. I sift and stir. I chill the batter. I whisper little apologies, little thank-yous, to the air.

Maybe someday I’ll get it right.

Or maybe the trying is the closest I’ll ever get.

Maybe the trying is its own kind of love…and if that’s the case, through the sticky whoopie pies and the rock-hard pie crusts I keep stumbling through, I hope she feels the love from my side of the divide. I hope she knows I remember her and her gifts and her love and that I’m still trying.