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grown. Snails, vanilla ice cream, minestrone from a can. I come from these things. From the croissants my mother would pull from white paper bags, tear in half, and stuff with Smucker’s grape jelly, from her omelets, oozing with American cheese, from tiny amaretti that came in a red square tin. A babysitter first brought them over, and though there was nothing special that I can remember about that night, those amaretti made an impression. The tins, with their Italian lettering and fleurs-de-lis, made the cookies seem fancy, but really they weren’t. They were just bite-sized buttons of egg whites and sugar, flavored with apricot kernels. I had a vague sense that being grown-up meant appreciating a thing like that, a thing so simple. And while being grown-up was not necessarily something to which I aspired, I enjoyed being a kid who appreciated grown-up things.
    When I was five, my family moved from New York to Ohio, just east of Cleveland, and I brought the empty tin with me. The scent of the cookies clung to it for years. Sometimes I’d lie on my bed beneath the sloped ceiling of our farmhouse, pry open the lid, and inhale. It triggered not so much a memory as an awareness of something I’d forgotten. Eventually, I forgot the tin, too.
    Fifteen years later, I was home from college on winter break. And by “home” I don’t mean that farmhouse where my parents, baby sister, and I had lived; nor, God forbid, the apartment with green shag carpeting my father moved into two years later when my parents split; nor the contemporary suburban home where my mother, sister, and I moved a few years after that; nor any of the houses where my father lived with his new wife and, within a couple of years of their marriage, two new kids.
    This home was in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. My father and his family had settled there before their kids were school age and stayed, and because most of my people lived there, it felt like my home, too. I entered the house through the side door that winter and dropped my bags. I smelled it before I saw it. The toasted nuts, the floral note of the almond extract, the butter. It sat in a fluted tart pan beneath a veil of sliced almonds and sugar.
    A cake.
    My stepmother, Amy, had baked it for later that night. There had been no occasion, just a recipe from the paper she’d wanted to try, which for her is occasion enough. The recipe is as simple as they come: just sugar, butter, eggs, flour, and salt, with a splash each of vanilla and almond extract. It’s a rich cake with a tender crumb, dense and delicate at the same time, humble despite its fluting. From its aroma alone, I knew that it was somehow mine, and when I took a bite, I knew why:
Those cookies. Those amaretto cookies.
    It was a clown car of a cake. My aunt Fran was in there, her coat flapping in the wind, our city street, and a rush of warm air forced up through the subway grates. A block party in Brooklyn where the big kids drank soda, the backseat of a taxi, a playground tire swing, my parents, hand in hand. Amaretto is made from apricot kernels, not almonds, but something about the way that cake looked, how it smelled, how it tasted, how it felt, how
I
felt, home from college with it on my plate—that old sense of being small but grown-up, that new sense of being grown-up but still small—bridged the flavors in my mind.
    That cake was, in many ways, where it all started for me, this awareness that food is more than food. It got me thinking about the kind of baker and cook I wanted to be, made me understand that food had something to tell me, and that it felt good to listen.
    In the nine years between that cake and when I got sick, my food told me a lot. I learned that when you put freshly baked bread and a lump of softened butter on the table, you are taking good care of your people, no matter the rest of the meal. You can serve that still-warm bread with a day-old salad or a plate of apple