A Father's Day letter by JT · Founder, The HowTo Network
The dish he made that you never thought to ask about
There is a dish my father made that I have never been able to replicate.
Not because the recipe is complicated. It isn't. It's three or four ingredients, a cast iron skillet, and about twenty minutes. I have made it a dozen times. It comes out fine. It comes out edible. It does not come out like his.
I never asked him how he made it. That is the part that stays with me.
Not because I didn't have time. I had time. I had years of time. I sat at that kitchen table more Saturday mornings than I can count, watching him work, and it never once occurred to me to ask him to walk me through it. It was just breakfast. It was just the thing he made. It would always be there.
It is not always there.
This is the story nobody tells you about losing a parent. You expect to miss the big things. The holidays, the phone calls, the specific way they laughed at their own jokes before the punchline. You are ready for those. What you are not ready for is standing at a stove on a Saturday morning, trying to remember whether he started with the butter already in the pan or added it after the heat was up, and realizing you have no idea. You were never paying attention because you thought you had time to pay attention later.
You do not always have time.
I am not writing this to make you sad. I am writing this because there is still time for most of you, and I want you to use it differently than I did.
Call your father this weekend. Not to say happy Father's Day — though say that too — but to ask him about the dish. The specific dish. The one he makes that nobody else makes quite right. Ask him to walk you through it while you have him on the phone. Write it down. Not in a notes app you'll never open again, but somewhere real. A recipe card, a piece of paper, the back of a grocery list if that's what's available.
Ask him where he learned it. Ask him if his mother made something similar or if he figured it out on his own. Ask him what he changes depending on what's in the house. Ask him the question you've been meaning to ask but keep not asking because you think you have more time.
Because here is the thing about food that we don't say enough: recipes are the least of it. The measurements, the temperatures, the ingredient list — that stuff you can reconstruct. What you cannot reconstruct is the way he explains it. The things he takes for granted that he doesn't even think to mention because they are so obvious to him that he has never considered saying them out loud. The small adjustments he makes without thinking. The reason he uses that pan and not the other one. The memory attached to it that he's never told you because you never asked.
That's what gets lost.
My father’s dish was not elaborate. It was not something that would appear on a restaurant menu or win a competition. It was the kind of food that exists because someone was hungry and resourceful and figured something out. The best food usually is.
I make mine now from what I remember, which is incomplete. The texture is close but not exact. The flavor is in the neighborhood but not the address. My kids eat it and think it's fine and have no idea what they're missing, which is not their fault. They have no reference point. The original is gone and I let it go without writing it down.
Don't do what I did.
If your father is still here, go to him this weekend. Sit in his kitchen. Watch him cook the thing he always cooks. Ask questions you've never thought to ask. Take notes like you're a journalist and he's your only source, because in this particular case, he is.
If he's not still here, find someone who remembers. His sister, his old neighbor, the friend who used to come over for dinner. Memory is a collaborative project. Someone else holds pieces of what you're looking for.
And if neither of those options is available to you anymore, then make peace with the approximate version. Season it with what you remember. Cook it in the pan he would have used. Put it on the table on a Saturday morning.
It won't be exactly right. That's okay. It doesn't have to be exactly right to matter.
It just has to be made.