The Language of the Kitchen

Some women say “I love you.”

Others cook it.

My grandmother Sarita — though to us she was always Granny Rity — spoke it through food.

Her kitchen always smelled like something was cooking. Something bubbling slowly on the stove. Beans. Cabbage. Soup. Sometimes all three. The kind of kitchen where something was always simmering whether anyone asked for it or not.

It wasn’t fancy. Not even close.

Granny Rity’s house sat quiet and steady like most houses in small Kentucky towns — the kind of place where the screen door never quite shuts softly and the windows stay open in the summer because the breeze is better than any air conditioner.

You could hear the kitchen before you even stepped inside.

The screen door slapping shut behind someone. The slow clink of a spoon against a pot. The sound of the oven heating the room. Church shoes crossing the floor as people drifted in after Sunday service, drawn by the smell of something good waiting on the stove.

The kitchen itself looked like it had been loved hard for decades.

The cabinets were painted years before, the paint worn thin in places where hands had reached for the same handles thousands of times. They carried the soft stain of grease that comes from real cooking — not neglect, but history. Granny Rity ironed her sheets, for Christ’s sake. Her house was spotless. But kitchens that feed people every day carry their stories in the walls.

The floor was simple laminate, the kind that creaks just a little if you step in the wrong place. The sink was plain and deep, usually filled with soaking cookware. The stove was an old coil burner top with a standard oven beneath it — nothing fancy, just reliable.

On the counters sat a rotation of things that never seemed to move far.

A crock of cooking utensils.
A jar of bacon grease.
Salt and pepper shakers that had lived there longer than I had been alive.

Sometimes a bowl of tomatoes in the summer. Sometimes a plate covered in foil waiting for someone to arrive.

The decorations were small and Southern. A chicken figurine here. Something with a rooster painted on it there. A mug or two that didn’t match anything else.

Every surface had something on it.

Bowls. Pots. Pans. A skillet cooling on the stove. A pie waiting on the counter. Something always in progress.

In the afternoon, sunlight would fall through the kitchen window and stretch across the table, catching the steam rising from whatever pot she was tending. Dust floated slowly through the light while Granny Rity moved through the room without ever seeming rushed.

After church on Sundays, the kitchen looked like a small storm had passed through it — every countertop covered with mismatched cookware filled with something made from scratch.

Spaghetti.
Fried chicken.
Chess pie.

Sometimes all three.

And in the middle of it all was Granny Rity, moving calmly through the kitchen like she had done it a thousand times before — stirring a pot, checking the oven, wiping her hands on a dish towel, calling someone “Huzzy” as they walked through the door.

Food said the things she couldn’t.

It was her truest love.

The stroke that ultimately took her happened the way she lived — standing at the stove.

She was stirring beans, I’m pretty sure.

I was twenty-eight when she died.

And now every time I stand in a kitchen, I think about her.

Most of the time when I’m eating, too.

She wasn’t the only one.

My great-grandmother made biscuits and gravy that could silence a room and apple pie that tasted like late summer afternoons. My mother can cook just about anything — truly anything — but her pantry of canned summer gifts from the garden, chili, and meatloaf were staples of my childhood.

She’s also an incredible baker. The kind who can decorate cakes like small works of art.

The three of them made Christmas candy together every year, fried pies every summer, and canned or pickled anything they could.

My mom still does.

Food moved through our family like inheritance.

Not written down. Not formalized. Just absorbed through watching.

I learned early that cooking takes time and you cannot rush it. I learned ingredients matter. That wild blackberries are the only kind worth eating. I learned cooking is a lot like dancing — hit the right step and it becomes a beautiful waltz.

And I learned the most important rule:

You can always add more.
But you can’t take it away.

Where I grew up, kitchens were the center of everything.

In the kitchen, food moves quietly through life’s biggest moments. It shows up on paper plates at funerals. It fills folding tables at church basements. It sits on counters during long summer evenings when the windows are open and the cicadas won’t stop singing.

In places like that, meals are rarely just meals.

They’re how people take care of one another.

For the women in my family, cooking wasn’t just nourishment.

It was communication.

It was scraping together pennies to bake a cake because someone had a bad day. It was showing up with food when someone died. It was knowing you never walk into someone’s house empty-handed.

Sometimes food said the things no one knew how to say out loud.

Love.
Grief.
Comfort.
Pride.

Granny Rity had a word she called everyone.

“Huzzy.”

Friends were huzzies. Family were huzzies. Strangers might become huzzies if they stayed long enough at the table. Her tombstone reads “Ya Huzzy” on the back while engraved with cooking utensils.

It was her language of affection.

The same way food was.

When people ask me why I started Nourish Society, the answer isn’t complicated.

It’s because I am them.

I struggle sometimes to articulate certain things. But feeding people has always made sense to me. It’s how I bring joy into the world.

A meal can say things words sometimes cannot.

I’m thinking about you.
You matter.
Sit down and stay awhile.

That’s the language I grew up hearing.

If Granny Rity were here today, I think she’d be proud of me.

She’d probably say the food looks good. She might think some of it is a little fancy. She might not understand some of the ingredients.

But she’d try it anyway.

Just to soothe my feelings and my ego.

And then she’d probably ask the only question that really mattered.

“Are you feeding people enough, Huzzy?”

The women in my family may not have called it legacy.

They probably would have just called it supper.

But every time something bubbles on my stove — beans, soup, sauce, something slow and patient — I think about her standing there, spoon in hand, stirring a pot and feeding the people she loved the only way she knew how.

Because some women don’t say “I love you.”

They cook it.

And if you listen closely, the kitchen will always tell you who taught them how.

In Memory of my grandmother, Sarita Rice, and her kitchen.

- Audrey Middleton, 2026

The Cost of Vanilla

I have paid hundreds of dollars for vanilla beans.

Ordered them when the market was high. Winced at the invoice. Used them anyway.

I’ve split them down the center with the back of a knife and scraped those tiny black seeds into pastry cream, buttercream, ice cream. I’ve sent out vanilla desserts that cost more per plate than the man who made modern vanilla production possible ever earned in a year.

That should make us pause.

Because the story of vanilla is not soft. It is not basic. It is not neutral.

In 1841, on the island of Réunion — a French colony at the time — a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius solved a problem that had frustrated botanists and plantation owners for centuries.

Vanilla is native to Mexico. The Totonac people cultivated it long before Europe ever tasted it. It was folded into cacao by the Aztecs. It belonged to knowledge systems that already existed.

When colonizers carried the orchid across oceans, they brought the vine — but not the tiny Melipona bee that pollinated it.

So outside of Mexico, the plant would grow. It would bloom. And then nothing.

No pods.
No profit.

For three hundred years, educated men with resources tried to fix it.

And then a child looked closely.

Inside the vanilla flower is a thin membrane — the rostellum — separating the male and female parts. Edmond used a small stick and his thumb to lift it and press the pollen together by hand.

The flower fruited.

That simple. That precise.

And that changed agriculture around the world.

Vanilla production spread through Réunion and later Madagascar, where most of the world’s vanilla is still grown today — pollinated by hand using the same technique a twelve-year-old enslaved boy developed.

France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Edmond was freed. He did not receive wealth. He did not build generational security from his discovery. He later worked as a cook. He died in poverty at fifty-one.

The industry he made possible became worth billions.

His name almost disappeared.

This is why knowing the history matters.

Because vanilla is not the only ingredient built on Black innovation and labor.

Black people have been revolutionary in agriculture — not just as laborers, but as growers, seed keepers, irrigation builders, rice cultivators, cattle handlers, fermentation experts, and cooks.

In the American South, enslaved West Africans brought deep agricultural knowledge with them — especially in rice cultivation. The rice fields of the Carolinas were not accidental. They were engineered using techniques from West Africa. Okra, black-eyed peas, sorghum, sesame (benne), watermelon — these are not side notes. They are foundations.

Southern cuisine — the food often marketed as “heritage” or “comfort” — was shaped in kitchens where enslaved women cooked for households while preserving their own foodways at the margins. Barbecue traditions. One-pot stews. Greens slow-cooked with smoked meat. Biscuits and gravies. Preservation techniques. Spice layering. Resourcefulness under constraint.

American cuisine does not exist without Black hands.

Agriculture in the Americas does not exist without forced Black labor.

The techniques became tradition.
The tradition became culture.
The culture became profit.

And too often, the names were lost.

Vanilla followed that same pattern.

Somewhere along the way, “vanilla” became an insult. A word for plain. For boring.

But there is nothing boring about a crop that blooms for one day and must be pollinated by hand within hours. There is nothing simple about months-long curing processes that develop more than 200 flavor compounds inside one wrinkled pod.

Imitation vanilla — the cheap kind that fills grocery shelves — is mostly synthetic vanillin. One note pretending to be two hundred.

There’s a quote often credited to Oscar Wilde, though its origin is uncertain:

“Imitation is the highest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

The world imitated what Edmond Albius unlocked.

It just didn’t honor him.

I ask a question a lot in my kitchen.

When I’m sourcing.
When I’m cooking.
When I’m standing over a pot scraping seeds from a vanilla bean that cost more than it probably should.

Who made it?

Not who plated it.
Who figured it out.
Who did the work.
Who changed the course of something and never got to benefit from it.

Vanilla is not basic.

It is delicate. It is demanding. It is labor.

And it tastes the way it does because a twelve-year-old enslaved boy paid attention to a flower.

Edmond Albius.

Know who made it.

 - Audrey Middleton, 2025

This piece is rooted in historical research on Edmond Albius and the agricultural foundations of American cuisine. If you’d like to learn more, these are powerful places to start:

• Smithsonian Magazine – “The Slave Who Revolutionized the Vanilla Industry

• Atlas Obscura – “The 12-Year-Old Slave Who Changed the Vanilla Industry”
  Jessica B. Harris – High on the Hog

Who Made It: A Kitchen Truth

“Who made it?”

Most of what I know about care, I learned in kitchens.

Not the Hallmark kind. The kind earned at six in the morning when your feet already hurt, the coffee tastes like regret, and the only thing keeping the place standing is the people who showed up anyway.

I’m a white woman who came up in kitchens built, staffed, and held together by immigrants. Mexican. Puerto Rican. Cuban. Often whole families, sometimes spanning generations. Mothers beside daughters. Cousins breaking each other in. Skills passed down the old way—watch me do it, now you do it, no one’s writing this shit down.

That matters to say out loud.

Because I got to leave at the end of the night. I got to move through the world with a kind of ease that wasn’t available to everyone standing next to me. I was shaped by people whose lives were heavier than mine, whose days often started long before ours did—and that shaped how I cook, how I lead, how I pay attention.

A lot of them didn’t start their day with us.

They came in after factory shifts. After cleaning office buildings. After overnight work that never makes it into anyone’s glossy story about food culture. Then they tied on an apron and went straight into prep—stocks, sauces, proteins, veg—everything that actually makes a restaurant run but never makes it onto a menu description.

And they didn’t complain.

They showed up. Every time. Consistent as hell. Quiet about it. Careful with the work. If they said it was done, it was done right. That kind of trust is rare in kitchens. It’s gold. And I learned to recognize it because of them.

Sunday brunch was our shared penance. Early mornings after Saturday night chaos. The air still thick. The ice machine humming like a witness. And there they were—steady, locked in, already moving. I never worried about prep. I worried about everything else.

That reliability? That’s love. Kitchens just don’t call it that.

La banda was everything.

The prep kitchen had a heartbeat. A speaker hidden where it wasn’t supposed to be. Music loud enough to keep you moving but not so loud you missed a call. Spanish flying fast—half of it affectionate, half of it absolutely not. I learned my curse words the proper way—late, incorrectly, and with a lot of laughter when I screwed them up.

If they teased you, you were in. If they went quiet, it was time to focus. You learned the rhythm or you got out of the way.

There was a phrase I still say to this day.

When something landed just right—when a dish came back clean, when a guest complimented the food, when you could feel that quiet satisfaction move through the kitchen—someone would grin and say, “Who made it?”

Not loud. Not bragging.

A humble flex. A shared understanding. Pride without ego. A reminder that the work mattered, and the hands behind it mattered too.

After service, there were Modelos. Not craft bullshit. Just cold beer and decompression. There was food shared like currency—barbacoa made from deer meat brought in because someone thought of you. Supermercado borrego eaten together because it tasted like home and the night had already taken enough from everyone.

Food wasn’t precious.
It was personal.

When I got married and left town, videos came back to me from the kitchen. Dancing in front of the ice machine. Lady Gaga, because they knew I loved her. No irony. No performance. Just joy sent back across miles from people who didn’t owe me anything—but gave it anyway.

That moment still wrecks me.

Because it holds the truth people miss when they talk about kitchens like they’re just workplaces. Those hours mattered. Those people mattered. The care was real, even if no one ever wrote it down.

I think about them all the time.

When I season food by feel instead of measurement. When I trust someone’s hands before I trust their resume. When I build a prep list that assumes people deserve clarity and respect. When I try—imperfectly—to lead with the same steadiness I was shown.

This is a love letter.

To the people I stood beside for thousands of hours. To the ones who fed strangers after already giving their bodies to other jobs. To la banda—the music, the shit‑talking, the shared exhaustion, the unspoken loyalty that taught me what community actually looks like.

And because I love them, I need to be absolutely clear about this:

I do not support ICE.

Not now. Not ever. Not with cosmetic reforms or softer language. ICE, as it exists, should be abolished.

You don’t get to build entire industries on immigrant labor and then terrorize the same people who keep the lights on. You don’t get to enjoy the food, the service, the comfort, and pretend the cost is invisible. You don’t get to call fear “order” and expect people not to notice.

I’ve worked next to people living with constant anxiety. People who flinched at sirens. People who did everything right and still never felt safe. People who held kitchens together while being treated as disposable.

I can say this clearly because of where I stand.

This isn’t politics to me. It’s memory. It’s responsibility. It’s the awareness that I benefited from systems that harmed the very people who shaped me.

Immigrant kitchens are built on care, pride, humor, and showing up when your tank is already empty. They are places of dignity and community, even when the world outside refuses to see them that way.

Food was how we took care of each other.

I carry that with me.
Every day, guey.

This is one chef’s perspective.
From the prep table. From the pass. From the ice machine that saw more truth than most people ever will.

Audrey Middleton, 2026

The Journey to Nourish Society

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the feeling that my life is shifting again — not in a loud, dramatic way, but in that quiet way you only notice when you finally stop long enough to breathe. For so many years, my world revolved around a kitchen… the heat, the motion, the yes-chef rhythm that used to feel like home.

Food has always been my first language. I learned it in the rows of my grandfather’s garden, in the way my mom stood over stoves and stirred pots, in summers that smelled like tomatoes and sweat and the kind of love that didn’t need to be explained. Those moments shaped me long before “yes chef” ever did. And somewhere along the way, feeding people became the way I tried to heal myself too.

But kitchens don’t always give back what you pour into them.

There were days I felt myself disappearing — long hours, no boundaries, the weight of expectation pressed deep into my shoulders, settling in my neck. Burnout doesn’t arrive like a storm; it’s more like a slow leak. You notice the puddle only when you’re already standing in it. And I stood in it for a long time.

This past year forced me to get quiet. Sobriety made me honest. Strength training gave me structure. Nutrition gave me clarity. Recovery — in all its forms — handed me back pieces of myself I didn’t realize I had lost. I started listening to my body instead of ignoring its signals. I started choosing myself in ways that felt foreign at first.

In that stillness, something opened.

I realized I wasn’t done with food. I was done with losing myself to it. What I wanted — what I needed — was a slower, more intentional way to live inside the thing I love. A way that didn’t require sacrificing my peace or my health. A way that honored the girl who used to sit on the porch snapping green beans with her mom, believing that food was meant to bring people together, not break them down.

That’s where this next chapter begins.

Nourish Society grew out of that quiet clarity — a blend of everything I’ve lived: professional kitchens, recovery, wellness, the simple truth that food can be medicine when you let it be. Meal prepping isn’t just convenience to me. It’s care. It’s choosing tomorrow before tomorrow asks too much of you. It’s making nourishment accessible, simple, grounded in real ingredients and real life.

I’m stepping out of the traditional industry not because I’m walking away from food, but because I’m finally choosing to walk with it differently. More intentionally. More gently. More in line with the woman I am becoming.

So this is me — journaling my way into a new chapter, trusting that the same hands that have fed others for years can now build something healing, sustainable, and deeply human.

If you’re here, thank you.
There’s a place for you at my table, always.
And I hope you find something here that makes you pause, breathe, and feel just a little more like yourself.

— Audrey Middleton, 2025