Bài đọc 2
When my grandmother died three years ago, she left me a small notebook with a faded green cover. Inside, in her careful handwriting, were more than sixty recipes she had collected over fifty years: dishes from her childhood in the countryside, things she had learned from neighbours, and a few she had clearly invented herself.
At first I could not bring myself to open it. Cooking had always been something she did for me, not something I did for myself. I lived on takeaways and ready meals, and my kitchen was mostly used for making coffee.
About a year later, on a rainy weekend when I was feeling particularly low, I opened the notebook and decided to try the simplest recipe I could find: a chicken and ginger soup she used to make whenever anyone in the family was ill. It was a disaster. I had no idea what "a good handful" of anything meant, and the instructions often stopped halfway with a note like "cook until it smells right". The soup was too salty and the chicken was tough.
But I kept trying. I phoned my mother and my aunts, who remembered watching her cook and could explain what she meant. Slowly I learned that "smells right" meant the moment when the ginger stops smelling sharp and starts smelling sweet. By the fourth attempt, the soup tasted almost exactly as I remembered.
Over the past two years I have cooked my way through about forty of the recipes. Some I have changed, using less fat or adding vegetables she would never have used. A few were complete failures that I will not try again. But the notebook has given me much more than a set of recipes. Cooking her dishes has kept me in touch with my aunts, who now come round once a month to eat and tell stories about her. It has also taught me patience, something my grandmother had plenty of and I had very little.
I have started typing up the recipes, adding my own notes so that the next generation will not have to guess what "a good handful" means. My niece, who is eight, has already asked to learn the soup.