A Recipe for Comfort
Bowie Henderson makes his grandma’s cookie recipe while his father, Mike Henderson, watches. Nash Henderson holds Zoey MacCartney while she dips her fingers into the cookie dough. Photo by Mike Higdon
How a simple casserole became a keystone of love, loss, and tradition.
We all come to the kitchen via our own path. I personally never dreamed of any greatness as a cook other than being able to make good dishes to eat for family and friends. I like to think I do an OK job of it — better than some, not as well as others. I wouldn’t say I learned from the best, but I learned from the best I had: my mom.
Mom would make the usual dishes: spaghetti with meat sauce, pork chops, steamed broccoli, fried chicken, muffins, zucchini bread, cookies. But there was one recipe, a warm, savory casserole served over rice known as Herb’s Chicken, that became our favorite. It was Mom’s crowning culinary achievement. A family tradition. A keystone.
We requested it on birthdays. She prepared it in advance for camping trips; we reheated it after practice, ate it cold out of Tupperware, scraped it into the trash when a forgotten serving went bad in the back of the fridge.
But it was the zucchini bread, cookies, and holiday treats that drew my son, Bowie, into the kitchen early on. He’d spend afternoons with his cousin at Nani’s house after his nap, mixing batter with her hand over his on the spoon as he snuck licks of the sweet mixture off the side of the bowl, picking the nuts out as they ate their snack sitting on the back porch on a spring afternoon.
She taught him how to make chocolate chip cookies from an old recipe, and the same tricks she showed me: Use equal parts white and brown sugar rather than two-thirds white. The higher ratio of brown sugar makes the cookies just a little more gooey and earthy sweet.
He later perfected that recipe, going further off script, switching from all margarine to a 50/50 split of real butter and Crisco and, later, switching to coconut oil because coconut oil makes baked treats that much better.
Bowie’s cookies come out perfectly every time — even if he and Mom both preferred the raw dough to the end product. Somehow, Bowie never burns them. They never fall flat. Mom amended her own practice to match his and always had dough on hand, frozen in scoops for a quick-draw pan of cookies.
But still, he’d always ask to make cookie dough when we went over on Wednesday after school, even if she had the frozen dough ready, because he enjoyed making it and working with her in her kitchen. They made homemade pizza during weekend sleepovers, when he taught her to stretch the dough as I had taught him.
And then, last year, quite unexpectedly, Mom got sick and was in the hospital, then home on hospice care, all during the week when Bowie was out of town, across the continent in Washington, D.C. on his eighth-grade trip.
When Bowie got home, it was late, and I was sleeping on the couch at my parents’ house. When I came home the next morning to see him, I told him and his brother that Nani was sick, and she wasn’t going to get better, and that Bowie should come back with me to see her.
Even a feast you’ve been preparing for days is consumed in the blink of an eye. Bowie was thrust into this catastrophe of stumbling sadness and hugs that lasted way too long and not long enough, of seeing the strongest people he’d ever known broken and reeling.
But the day had to go on. And calls were made. Relatives and friends came to lend support and strength. We told stories; we looked at pictures. We had moments of panic, laughter, and silence.
Unable to ignore the beautiful spring day, little cousins cavorted in and out of the house as the echoes of their joy blunted the edge of sadness.
And we were hungry, so we found the recipe for Herb’s Chicken, gave the printout to Bowie, and he set to work, with my wife, Danielle, who also was a big influence in his cooking education, providing him support and guidance, prepping chicken for the gathered multitude.
The recipe calls for adding bacon and a roux, searing the chicken, and baking it all for an hour and a half. It takes a lot of pans, time, mess, heat, and consultation with the recipe, which isn’t as precise and clear as necessary. It relies on the cook’s experience, familiarity with the recipe, and knowledge to read between the lines and fill in the gaps. And Bowie made do.
While it was baking, the people from the funeral home came, and we paused the cooking and pot washing to see Mom out while my aunt played hymns on Mom’s old piano.
We all stood or sat in that moment of stunned acceptance about what had happened and gratitude for what we had been given.
And then we were brought back into the moment by the smell of good things to eat, as warm and comforting as chords from a guitar, a hand holding yours, a bedtime story. Bowie finished the Herb’s Chicken. Danielle served up all the sides she had scrounged from the fridge that was full of things Mom had left for us, and everyone was served.
Because it is one of our most basic needs, food provides comfort, especially when more care, love, thought, and joy goes into its preparation than is specifically called for in the recipe. And though Mom never specifically taught Bowie the latter, she did teach him the former. It’s impossible to quantify those intangible ingredients. You know it when you taste it.
And because Mom helped teach Bowie to love cooking, every time he makes Herb’s Chicken, uses those tricks, or figures out how to make a recipe better, he’s back there stirring the batter with Nani, smiling and laughing and stealing licks from the bowl.
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