The Most Important Ingredient

Over the past few weeks, I have been creating the content for our Kitchen Remedies class. Because I wanted to include a personal excerpt at the opening of each week, a small note or story about my own relationship with that week’s remedy, I found myself leaning into the content, the practice, the ways of being, in ways I did not expect. So, I thought I would share.

It occurs to me, reflecting in this way, that there is a way of being I that have been leaning into for many years, in clinical practice, in hospice, in kitchens at three in the morning when a human or an animal needed something nourishing. It has become a core of how I try to live, work and teach.

The medicine of nourishment is not in the recipe. It is in the act.

The most important ingredient in any kitchen is the person creating the nourishment.  

This is not a poetic flourish. It is a functional truth. The hands that prepare your food, the attention those hands hold while they work, the quality of presence in the room while broth simmers or bread proves or garlic is chopped against a wooden board, all of it is medicine in the literal sense. It either coheres what is already in motion in the body of the person eating, or it disrupts it. There is no neutral.

Unfortunately, we have largely forgotten the truth of this in today’s world, although, for most of human history, it was simply just known. Every household held the small medicines, the broths, the tonics, the aromatic preparations, the ferments, the teas, the way of feeding a sick child or a grieving friend or a woman in her first months of mothering. Those practices were not specialized knowledge. They were the texture of ordinary life, passed forward hand to hand, grandmother to grandchild, friend to friend, season to season.

Over the past few generations, we have outsourced almost all of it. We have outsourced our nourishment to corporations that build food for shelf life rather than nourishment. We have outsourced our small medicines to industries that build pills for symptoms rather than wellbeing. We have outsourced the texture of everyday care to systems that are not really designed to deliver care. The result is a strange kind of poverty, a thinness in the daily acts of feeding and tending that used to make a household a place of medicine. Most of us are now adults who do not know how to make a pot of broth for someone we love, or a remedy for a child's earache, or a tea blend for a friend who is grieving, even though I’m betting that every one of our great-grandmothers could.

I do not point to this to assign blame or as a grievance. I say it because the cost of that loss is greater than we are aware or want to admit socially. And I believe we are at a peak or key moment to retrieve kitchen wisdom, hearth wisdom and to reclaim those deeper connections.

The hearth as sacred nourishment. The kitchen as medicine for the body, mind, and soul.

Here is a memory I would like to share that was one of the first of many that guided this path for me. When my focus of private practice was in hospice and palliative care, I was also learning about holistic nutrition and functional medicine to supplement and nourish the body. One of my clients was a woman in the last weeks of her life.

Chemotherapy had destroyed her sense of smell and taste. She had a cognitive desire to eat but almost no sensory access to it anymore. She wanted to be hungry, to feel satiated. She wanted to feel the magic of family meals from her childhood. So, we started playing a kind of game. I would go to the market and buy all sorts of colorful exotic fruits and vegetables in shades she had not seen before, anything with visual presence. I brought them to her kitchen and create dishes that were not only nourishing but also aesthetically pleasing before they were anything else. In the early weeks she helped prepare ingredients with me. There was so much laughter and so many tears shared in that kitchen. Ooph…

When she became bedridden, she asked for her bed to be moved into the dining room. She wanted to stay near the kitchen so we could continue to create culinary mayhem together. Her words. I laughed. I worked at the counter, and she watched. The aroma of ginger and bone broth and roasted squash filled the room while she lay there, eyes closed sometimes, eyes open and following my hands at others. I came to understand, in the weeks to months we had together, that what was happening in that room was a complete act of feeding even though no food was crossing her lips. The aroma. The colors. The sound of someone moving with care, on her behalf, in her house. The unspoken truth that she was still being attended to, that the kitchen was still tending her, even when the body had stopped being able to receive food in the usual way.

She taught me that food is medicine even when healing does not include survival. That nourishment matters all the way through. That the kitchen can be a place of love at the end of a life as fully as at the beginning of one.

This is what kitchen medicine actually is. It is not a wellness category. It is one of the oldest practices human beings have ever developed for caring for one another, and it works on three registers at once.

The body register is the most familiar. The food carries actual nutrients. The broth carries minerals and amino acids and the building blocks of connective tissue. The herbs carry constituents that act on physiology in ways modern research has confirmed and continues to confirm. That register is real and not in dispute.

The mind register is quieter. The act of slowly preparing a meal regulates a nervous system that has been racing since morning. The bitter notes of a tonic clear a foggy head. The warmth of a broth in winter steadies a person who is fraying. None of this is metaphor. The slowing down is doing measurable work on cortisol, on heart rate variability, on the parasympathetic state in which digestion and repair can actually happen. The aroma of cardamom and clove and ginger reaches the nervous system through the breath before any of it reaches the gut, and the body recognizes warmth and welcome long before the first sip is taken. This is one of the great gifts of the kitchen tradition. The medicine arrives through the senses, and the senses are one of the oldest gateways the body has for healing.

The soul register is the one most often left out, and it is the one I refuse to leave out. Every preparation made with care carries a story, a place, a lineage. A pot of broth carries the people who taught you to make it. A jar of fermented honey garlic carries the beekeeper, the bees, the soil the garlic grew in, the long line of cooks who have been making versions of this preparation for as long as people and bees and garlic have lived together on this earth. When someone receives food made with attention, the soul receives the attention as much as the body receives the food. That is not separable. The body and the soul, in the kitchen sense, were never separate.

If any of this is calling you, the smallest beginning is also the entire teaching. Touch your food. Let your heart prepare your meal. Slow down. Breathe. Notice what changes when you give yourself, or someone you love, the same attention you would give a person you were trying to heal. Your kitchen doesn’t have to be fancy. In fact, you don’t even have to be in the kitchen. The hearth that heals is in your heart and in your hands.

That is the threshold. That is the whole tradition, returning to you, in one small daily act.

If you would like to walk further into this work with me, Kitchen Remedies is open at NESBEM. I will unashamedly announce that. The eight weeks are designed to walk you slowly into a real home apothecary, with stories and lineage and a community of others who are learning alongside you. The full details are on the course page.

But truly this is about more than wanting to point you towards a course, it is about stirring the wisdom in your bones, your heart, your soul. It’s about inspiring reflection on how you can feed and nourish yourself in simple ways that begin with intention.

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Dr. Stephanie Shelburne

Director, The New England School of Bioenergetic Medicine

Author, Taste and Flavor 365 (2nd Edition) and the forthcoming Sacred Metabolism: Tending the Flame of Bone, Breath, and Becoming

Kitchen Remedies, an eight-week short course on the foundational practices of folk kitchen medicine, is open for enrollment at NESBEM. Learn more at HERE

Culinary Mayhem.... sauerkraut for loved ones.