PART 3 — SALT
For three years I had written a food blog under a name Marcus did not know, posting my grandmothers Cajun and Creole recipes and the stories of the women who taught me to cook. Marcus called it my little hobby. He never once read it.
He did not know it had four hundred thousand followers. He did not know a New York publisher had been calling. And he did not know about the email from Southern Living, asking to feature me on the fall cover, with my grandmothers potato salad as the centerpiece.
I had been too afraid of what his family would say to answer it. That night, after Aunt Lorraine spat my grandmothers recipe into a napkin in front of everyone, I stopped being afraid. I typed one word. Yes.
The potato salad Aunt Lorraine called microwave cooking was about to be on the cover of the most beloved magazine in the South.
Six weeks later the October issue hit every Rouses Market in Lafayette. Aunt Lorraine picked one up at the checkout without even looking at the cover. Then her neighbor called her. Then half the parish called her.
There I was. My grandmothers recipe, her name printed right beside mine, in the magazine Aunt Lorraine had read her whole life.
I did not call to gloat. I did not have to. The whole family had already seen it, and for the first time in five years, nobody at a single gathering said one word about my cooking.
Marcus suddenly wanted to tell everyone his wife was a famous food writer. I let him be proud. But the cookbook came out under my own name the next spring, dedicated to the grandmother who should have stuck to sewing. It sold out in a week.