Making pizza tonight. Sometimes I use the no-knead pizza dough recipe, but lately I’ve been using the convent’s recipe that I’ve had for 40+ years now. I think I’ve mentioned I used to cook for a convent once upon a time, about a decade after I’d lost all enthusiasm for a cloistered life (puberty hit, and that was the end of my religious vocational aspiration); cooking for the Sisters of Mercy was the closest I’d ever get to becoming a nun. The convent was their motherhouse in Burlington, Vermont, long gone now, although I imagine, many of the nun’s spirits still linger there, flesh and bone wrapped in shrouds, resting in simple pine boxes among tall pines and evergreens in the verdant glade behind what remains of their former home. And there you have it, food stirs up memories, and before you know it, those memories become the stories we share.
