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