I’ve always stared at the hands of people who cook, hoping I could learn from that. Unfortunately, I often miss what’s actually happening to the ingredients.

Alan–the cookbooks you read now are different than the ones I peered at in early childhood. The ones I was looking at were produced in the 1950′s and early 1960′s, and the persona they were trying to project to the reader was of the “typical” American middle class housewife–white, semi-affluent, educated, pretty and slender.

That woman didn’t exactly really exist, mind you–she was an illusion or an ideal that was held up for women to aspire to.

I’ve seen pictures of my mother from that time, and for all that she was “a career girl” (yes, back then, that was what single working women were called), and she wore the uniform of a working woman, including the stilleto-heeled pumps and the beautifully manicured long nails painted crimson (always with lipstick to match), I don’t think it suited her personality much. For one thing, “caucasian” she might technically be, but she had inherited the dark skin and bone structure of her Cherokee mother, and so she never fit that ideal.

Cookbooks today are more likely to have photographs of the chef/author’s hands demonstrating the dishes. There is more of a sense of personality present, and a desire for realism. I think that comes from us growing up watching cooks on television, so we want to see the “real thing” at work.

If you can find some of the old cookbooks from the 1950′s, I suggest you have a look at them. I was born in 1965–but those cookbooks were still a strong part of my life–they were still used by members of my family, so I grew up with them, and the images from them speak very strongly to me. Also, growing up as I did in West Virginia, a highly conservative (some would probably rightly say, backwards) state, the vast social changes that happened in the 1960′s really didn’t hit us until the 1970′s. So, much of society when I was growing up was still very steeped in 1950′s sensibilities.

Shirley–those are my hands up in the illustration–what do they tell you?

I look at them and see strength and sturdiness–my hands, like most of the rest of me, are shaped like my father’s hands. None of my knife scars are visible in that picture, being as my hands are pale anyway, the silvery lines have faded. There are burn scars on my forearms, though, again, they are not visible to the camera.

What is visible is the swelling on the top of my forearms–the results of carpal tunnel syndrome. That comes of being both a writer and a cook–repeated motions have caused various sorts of ailments in my forearms, wrists and hands. It usually bugs me most in the winter, and in the spring, when I work in the garden, it gets better.

I always have to check under my nails, not only for cooking bits, but garden bits, once spring comes!

You can take the woman off the farm, or the hillbilly from the mountains, but she will carry the farm and hills with her in her heart–and likely, under her nails, too.