This summer, I found myself learning family recipes in Tennessee, recipes that don’t exist in a cookbook, only in memory. At the farm, cooking cannot be sterilised by precise measurements and studied steps, it is almost a sacred communion with the past.

My granny tells me to add “three heaping spoons” of cornmeal to the greased bread pan, but was that “three heaping spoons” for a 1950s Tennessee sharecropper or for me, a consumerism-spoiled, 21st-century teen?

A “heart’s helping of butter” can’t be measured, only felt. Should I put my mind in the body of a farm girl weary from hours of running cattle under the blistering southern sun? In the absence of script to guide me, I press my knuckles into the dough with the firm force of a farmer who is used to kneading tough soil.

“A ‘heart’s helping of butter’ can’t be measured, only felt”

Biscuits and gravy, mac and cheese, cornbread, and collard greens: they sound like a hearty Southern buffet, but for me they are a lineage. These recipes taste like childhood and family communion, like fireflies painting constellations in summer fields and calves stamping in creek beds. They remind me that cooking binds us to our roots, pulling us back to the labour, warmth, and love that made us.

These recipes taste like family history. How was it that a simple squash casserole could bring such tender bliss without really doing anything at all but sitting patiently on the table? Its bubbling cheese and butter sing a beckoning melody. They sing a melody of my granny kneeling on aged knees as sturdy as the old oak she planted on the bluff, to harvest squash in the scorch of a midday garden.

Tunes from the whistling steam of the casserole share how my granny has savoured each day as carefully as she spares her casserole ingredients. In the rare minutes of her youth, away from the cotton fields, she studied, retracing grammar and formulae in her mind; sharecropping could not chain her from becoming valedictorian. Saving seconds like she saves the bruised part of a yellow squash. In the waning days of her adult life, she spared thread and minutes and mercy to raise eight rowdy children, and many more than eight hundred head of cattle. In her years past, she saved dogs and cats and critters who wandered off the road and followed the steam of her kitchen only to find her nurturing embrace. In her years as my granny, she saves her memories to share with me. Each note of music and slow bubble from the dish beckons me to eat it and commune with my family, a showing of my praise to the love of my granny, a praise of her love to me.

“My granny has savoured each day as carefully as she spares her casserole ingredients”

When we joined each other at the table, “I love you” was a redundant sound. It didn’t need to be spoken when a warm grilled pimento cheese sandwich was sat fresh next to a steaming bowl of soup, ready to cure aching muscles after long afternoons of scorching thistles and twining hay bales. “You are so dear” was understood by the blessings and prayers spoken in between each pause during cooking, and again when we joined hands to bless the meal before we dug in.

When I look at the countertop to our cookbook that has no words I know, each yellowing page is a vivid memory, dusted with breadcrumbs, oiled by buttery fingers, stained by togetherness. The “empty” cookbook, I know, is fuller than any volume on a shelf; Its words are too numerous to be contained, its recipes too robust to be limited to 8.5 by 11 inches.

Now, at home, I stand before the iron stovetop alone. But, like clockwork, I find my fingers gripping corn husks like a child clutches a candy bar, and I know that my granny’s influence lives on inside me.

Someday, when my table is eventually lined with young faces and mine is wrinkled by many years passed, through casseroles and gravies and breads, my granny will continue smiling upon all of us.