PERSONAL ESSAY: Three cheers for cheese braid

Originally written for a food writing class.

Like many typical Old South families operate, mealtimes serve as my family’s personal excuse to live, act and eat like we’re the faces of Food Network. My father has always considered himself to be something of an Iron Chef – he’s completely self-taught, but certainly tried and true. This is the environment in which I grew up, and boy am I grateful for that.

My paternal grandparents taught me how to cook more than my dad did. He held a job for much of my childhood that included traveling overseas, so we spent every Wednesday night at grandma and grandpa’s, where the dinner menu often included hamburger steak from the farm’s cows that my siblings and I named, vegetables picked from the backyard, mashed potatoes with entirely too much butter and sweet cast iron skillet cornbread. It was food cooked the right way; a true definition of a culinary experience.

The holidays, however, included a certain level of majesty that can only be described with my great-grandmother’s cream cheese braid recipe. Affectionately referred to (and without choice) as “Grandmother,” the 4-foot-10 Catholic woman was a beast in the kitchen, cooking everything from pork chops to casseroles to pancakes and so much more, but the cheese braid was a delicacy saved only for the holiday season, and if pastries were drugs, this was pure heroin. She kept the recipe, its origins unknown, on a 3-by-5 index card in the gold mine that was her green tin recipe box. She had written the recipe, probably before my parents were born, in her signature delicate calligraphy, using the softest pencil she could find. It would take more than 20-20 vision to decipher it – one had to know her to know her cooking.

After begging for quite literally his entire life, Grandmother gifted my dad the note card last year. He wouldn’t even let me hold the card, much less snap a photo of it on my phone, because he “waited 42 years to get the recipe, so now I will too.” We left her house shortly after scarfing down two slices of cheese braid that she had made earlier that day – a rare occurrence for her, as cheese braids were for the holidays only. My dad swung through Publix on our way home from her house, not a half-mile from our own, to grab the ingredients on her card. We held all the power now. We were making our own.

The recipe called for one day of prep and one day of baking, so our weekend plans were set. Thank God for unlimited cell phone plans, though, because I am sure my father called my Grandmother nearly 30 times during the baking process. Every tiny detail had to be confirmed by the master herself.

“What shade of tan should the dough be?”

“Should the glaze be an Elmer’s glue consistency or more like a pan sauce?”

“Do we braid the dough like a French braid or traditional?”

“How long should our knife cuts be – an actual inch or a generous inch?”

The end result was magical.

We rushed over to Grandmother’s at the end of the weekend, a Pyrex dish stuffed with our cheese braid. She sat at her breakfast table, staring out the window at the lilies that grew in her backyard, as she chewed. Her plate sat on a little doily, her fork likely older than my dad and me combined. She smiled – we did it.

We had no idea that would be the last cheese braid we made her.

Grandmother passed away in the summer of 2019 from lung cancer. She was 96 years old, but she baked, worshipped the Lord, helped others and loved us until the very end. Even at her bedside, once she made it to the point where she couldn’t stand any longer, she held my hand and teased my dad as if it were any other day. It was one of the hardest goodbyes I’ve ever had to say.

But, she lives on in so many ways. My dad graciously allowed me to be his sous chef this Thanksgiving, and the two of us were responsible for cooking everything – and I mean everything. Our extended family was permitted to bring a gallon of Milo’s tea or pack of napkins to the house, but not one single deviled egg or dinner roll would pass our front door if it wasn’t bought by us.

“Why have someone else do something when you can do it right the first time?” my dad asked me on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. I had come home early from college to live in our kitchen and shoulder the hefty task of taking on Thanksgiving with Dad alone. I wholeheartedly agreed with his assessment, however. We were masters. We’ve got it under control.

The one dish that shook our arrogance was the cheese braid. It was the first holiday season without Grandmother, and her death was still an unhealed gash in our hearts. But, to omit it would be disrespectful to her, and no one never disrespected Grandmother. So, we pressed on. I took care of the prep day, carefully kneading the dough using our industrial-looking KitchenAid mixer and my own two hands. I watched for the specific shade of tan, measured my dough portions like she had instructed earlier that year, and laid it on our dining room table to rest until the next day. My dad took over the process at that point, spreading the exact amount of cream cheese mixture, finding the perfect consistency of the glaze, carving generous inch-sized hatches into the braid and baking it until it was just nearly cooked through. Our family practically ravaged it after the main feast – my four pies never stood a chance to Grandmother.

As we sat in our respective food comas that night, my dad and I discussed the resounding success that was Thanksgiving 2019. The holiday was my dad and grandma’s favorite, and her passing years earlier had cast a shadow over us until this year. And despite the loss of her mom, my beautiful Grandmother, my dad and I had set out to reclaim the holiday and celebrate like those women did for so many years. While we chalked the week up to a resounding success, one thing stuck out in our post-dinner assessment. The cheese braid was not quite like Grandmother made it. We retraced our steps, going over her note card’s instructions in painstaking detail. The mystery variable was not quite solved until Christmastime, when we made it again, and realized we did not use fresh enough yeast in the first batch. But, to this day, I’d like to think that what was missing was Grandmother herself. Not a single person could ever cook like her. She was a master, and we will forever be apprentices.

I’m comfortable with that.