Baking My Mother’s Recipes Keeps Her Near

Baking was solely Mom’s domain, I believed, and cooking for her was mine.

This is Grief at a Distance, a column by Matt Ortile examining his grief over his mother’s death in the Philippines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It began with the KitchenAid stand mixer. Best Buy was having a sale: a Professional 5 Plus bowl-lift model in steel gray for two hundred dollars. My friend Anna sent me the link. idk what I’d make with it though, I texted back. I’m more a cook and less a baker.

She replied, you could become someone who bakes.

We weighed other considerations. Yes, I had the kitchen space and disposable income—what I’d been calling my Dead Mom Money, recently earned by writing about my mother’s death that summer. Also I am grieving, I texted Anna, so I charged the mixer to my Amex. It arrived two days later, on Halloween. I braved the night to buy ingredients for the one recipe I knew.

At Target, there were teenagers wearing Scream masks and KN95s, playing pranks on the beleaguered staff. The candy aisle was decimated. I grabbed whatever Ghirardelli remained—the milk chocolate bars, the semisweet chips. The recipe needed two cups each of flour and rolled oats, but they were sold only in two-pound bags. It seemed wasteful; I live alone, and planned on making only half a batch.

I’ll just have to bake more often, I thought. Either I follow Mom’s recipe perfectly or not at all.

Mom’s cookie recipe is the only one I have. Truthfully, it’s not even hers. It’s actually the infamous Neiman Marcus cookie recipe. The legend goes: A woman lunching at the Neiman Marcus Café loved the cookies so much that she requested the recipe. She was told it would cost her “two fifty.” The bill came back—for two hundred fifty dollars. She was refused a refund and got her revenge by disseminating the cookie recipe for free.

It’s all a myth, according to the Times. But Neiman Marcus did eventually come up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies and, in 1997, posted it on their website. After a decade in email chains, it made its way to Mom in 2008, when we were living in Las Vegas. She loved it because the cookie itself is not too sweet but is made of sweet things.

Making the dough is straightforward. Cream one cup each of butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar; then add two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla. Mix in the dry ingredients: a teaspoon each of baking soda and baking powder, and two cups each of flour and oats, ground in a food processor. Throw in chocolate chips and chopped nuts. (Mom favored walnuts. I prefer pecans.)

Finally, the best part: Grate a bar of milk chocolate into the mix with a microplane. The shavings become almost powder, flavoring the dough like expensive Nesquik. It’s a fun trick, but with all the elbow grease you put in, you’re inevitably left with a brown mess on your hot hands. I’ve learned to chill the chocolate so it doesn’t melt too quickly. Trial and error taught me that, but I think I got the idea from Mom. She used to keep Hershey’s chocolate bars in the freezer.

In Las Vegas, she baked for birthdays, my acceptance into Vassar, and whenever she missed me while I was in New York. She would keep a neat mise en place, everything premeasured in a bowl of its own. Washing up was usually an ordeal. We had a dishwasher but rarely ran it. (“Tataas yung kuryente.”) My stepfather helped by tidying as she went. Dad would put on his apron and rubber gloves ceremoniously, as if scrubbing into his operating room, to clean up her mess, to make her laugh.

In the Philippines, in my birth father’s house, Mom baked during the Christmas holidays. Her confections were for gift-giving and selling. My titas clamored for her coconut macaroons, carrot cakes, butterscotch squares, and food for the gods. Indeed, the blooming aromas conjured heaven: butter melting, walnuts roasting, sugars in Medjool dates crystallizing. When family members texted me their condolences, they remembered most fondly her baking.

On Halloween, I spent a good while just running my hands all over the new KitchenAid and crying. It reminds me so much of hers. Not the one in Las Vegas (a cherry red tilt-head), but the one in Manila, her stalwart bowl-lift model that turned creamy white with age. I still recall where it stood: a meter or so from the kitchen sink, right near the hook where she hung her car keys. She sold the mixer, I think, when we moved to the United States, when we left our birth country and my birth father.

Mom never baked when we first arrived. She rarely made food at all. Exhausted after long days at Pfizer, she turned to twelve-year-old me for sustenance. I had to grow up quickly, teaching myself to salt boiling water until it tasted like the sea, serving her variations on spaghetti until I discovered penne. She encouraged me and my instincts. When my godmother shared her recipe for pesto pasta, Mom bought the ingredients, handed me the groceries, and said, “Go.” It’s still one of my standbys. In my kitchen, I’m never without basil and sun-dried tomatoes.

“Who taught you how to cook?” she’d say.

My desire to reclaim her habits may be a symptom of my fear that my next chapter will have no trace of the woman I love most in the world.

Mom relished the dinners I made for us two—and us three, once Dad joined us in Las Vegas from Manila. As I grew, so did my repertoire, with the help of the Food Network and Trader Joe’s. I was proud that, even at a young age, I could provide for her in my own way. Among friends, Mom liked to say she wasn’t a cook, “but my son is the chef.”

Mom was someone who baked. Baked in the past tense because she fell out of the habit. She transitioned to “healthy eating” after my grandmother died in 2011. Lola was in her early eighties; she lived for a while after her breast cancer diagnosis—fifteen years, I think. Mom only had five years after her own diagnosis and died in 2020, at sixty-one, at home in Manila. Once she lost her mother, Mom began to abstain from sugar. Dairy, red meat, and salt too. Her diet became low-calorie, low-fat, low-flavor. Dad would whisper over the phone that her meals were fibrous but bland. Food for the gods was out of the question. She believed this would help her avoid the same fate as Lola, would delay her genetic inheritance. 

We all mourn our mothers differently. For my part, I have gained fifteen pounds since Mom died. As I write this, I’ve a bowl of cookie dough chilling in the fridge. An overnight rest period solidifies the fats (the dough will hold its shape better) and allows liquid to redistribute throughout the dough (the cookies will have crispier edges and chewier centers). In the absence of a teacher, I learned this bit of science from Bon Appétit.

Mom didn’t teach me how to cream butter and sugar, to temper chocolate, let alone to feed the gods. I can hear her say, “You never asked! ’Di naman kita pipilitin.” Baking was solely her domain, I believed, and cooking for her was mine. It seemed the least I could do. As she cut a path to our American Dream, I was the one to feed her—pastas, salads, paninis. (I didn’t care to learn her recipe for pancit molo or, if she had one, chicken adobo.) I was my mother’s immigrant son, her little chef, providing for her, doing essential work. To me, baking seemed less important, icing on the cake. For cravings, we had Krispy Kreme.

But now, I am becoming someone who bakes. Cakes, scones, soufflés at midnight risen by whipped egg whites and the dread of another day working where I sleep. My beloveds have encouraged my new coping mechanism. Over the holidays, Alanna gifted me an embroidered apron that said “Cheffieu,” the name she gave my culinary alter ego. She and Krutika were forgiving when we made Christmas dinner together, when I couldn’t help but backseat-cook. To humble me, Krutika said, “You’re acting like my mother, not yours.”

I think a lot about how people have their family recipes—my nonna’s this, my abuela’s that. They have stories of sitting at the kitchen table covered in a floral tablecloth, making lumpia, dipping their fingers in water to seal rolls of pork in cornstarch wrappers. Mom and I didn’t have that—no yellowing recipe book bestowed upon me, no pearls of wisdom exchanged while plucking malunggay leaves. What I do have is a story where she once came home from work and she yelled at me for eating a donut. I was a gluttonous teenager who didn’t notice the Post-it on the Krispy Kreme box that said to save the last glazed bun for her. Later, she loved telling this story. When I think of it, I can hear her laughter.

I try to take stock of what my mother has left me, and I am left scrounging. Apart from photos of her, nothing in my home belonged to my mother. Nothing in my wardrobe or my jewelry box is passed down from her. It’s my apartment, my 401(k), my recipes. I appear to be entirely self-made. Not true, of course. But what proof do I have that she made me?

Since the pandemic began, I have yet to visit the Philippines. I was not there when Mom died and have not been back to help Dad sort through her things in their townhouse. He hasn’t touched her side of their walk-in closet, but he’s organized her home office, across the third-floor landing from his. I hope he found her cookbooks and set them aside for me. I don’t expect that the acquisition of her recipe for coconut macaroons will finally fill some emotional void. Actually, I’m not sure what to expect once I go home. A deeper well of grief, perhaps, a confrontation with the inarguable facts that she is not just working upstairs, or at Pilates, or at brunch with friends; that she is not here.

Before Mom died, one of the last things she said to me in person was, “I know I don’t have to worry about you.” I think she meant that I know how to feed myself, to take care of myself whenever she is not here. Who taught me how to cook? She did, in a way. I took care of us both how I could: a dinner waiting at home, report cards with straight As, a half dozen glazed donuts to say sorry whenever I was selfish, and assurance that I could navigate this world without her.

After she and Dad moved back to the Philippines, and as I built my life in the US, it was one of my many motivators: Prove to Mom that you’re in good hands—your own. I’ve secured housing, employment, and a chosen family not only for my benefit, but for her peace of mind. These things have been my constants, my ballasts as I grieve, though they add a strange layer to my mourning. On the surface, not much has changed. I have not yet known Manila without her, have remained in my New York that she’s never seen. I still write at the same cafés, drink at the same bars, and make the same Neiman Marcus cookie whenever I am hit by the craving or the sadness.

Now that she is gone, I am the one who bakes.

In grief, I am told, we grow. We rise to the occasion by filling in the gaps our beloveds have left. If needed, we become breadwinners, caretakers, counsel to those who knew them. For the most part, I have been shielded from the responsibility of loss. Mom ensured a tidy exit; Dad took care of most else. Still, I can feel my molecules shifting, adapting to a world without her. My desire to reclaim her old habits may be a symptom of my fear—fear that my next chapter, this next arrangement of my atoms, will have no trace of the woman I love most in the world.

But even in her absence, she shapes who I am. I’m learning to cope, to summon strength from sources other than her. From Dad and my friends, from my routines and my work, from the Mom in my heart if not Mom herself—which is to say, from myself. Loss has been a guide for me, for many of us, since the start of 2020. It is a difficult thing to fight, perhaps not something one overcomes. The pain still lances through me when I least expect it, in the middle of editorial meetings, at dinner with friends; it is no less lacerating when I do expect it, alone with her photographs and no witness at home.

But to work with that pain, to care for my heart and train it how to endure—perhaps that is the growth in mourning, how one finds new capacities, new contours to one’s self. What else defines our boundaries if not negative space? Even at such a distance, the grief hurts. It may not wane. I take its force as a reminder that I am alive. I have this life my mother gave me, this life I sustain in my own hands. Now that she is gone, I am the one who bakes.

My first weekend with my new KitchenAid, I realized, was Undas. That’s what Filipinos call the two days after Halloween: All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Observance traditionally calls for family reunions at the graves of our dead. We bring gifts, the usual flowers and food. Before I immigrated to the US with Mom, I spent many afternoons with the Ortile clan at the cemetery where my paternal grandfather is buried. It didn’t occur to me then that I’d have to make such pilgrimages for my parents, let alone Mom. Her ashes are now interred with her father’s, at a columbarium near Dad’s and her townhouse. I’ve been to visit before—with her, of course—but I don’t know how to get there by myself. I’ll have to learn.

At Halloween, perhaps my taste buds had more foresight than I did, craved something of Mom’s making. The cookies tasted just as she made them. For a moment, I let myself believe they were sent from her, from some celestial address in the great beyond. It feels that way whenever I bake, whatever I bake, whether it’s clafoutis in the style of an ex-boyfriend or macaroons with pistachios I know she would’ve loved. When I feed myself, I feel her near.

I like to think she’s baking again, making food for the gods.