If I told you this was a story about my grandmother and baking, you’d be forgiven for thinking it would be a heartwarming tale of familial warmth, with lots of treacly bits about how I learned something about my purpose in life through the magic of cookie dough.

          If you were picturing a Rockwellian tableau of a little girl on tiptoe pouring a cup of flour into a bowl as a snowy-haired woman looks on, I wouldn’t blame you. I’d understand if you were expecting to hear adorable details about my grandmother. How she’s both wizened and wise. How she comforted me with bowls of homemade chicken soup when I was ill as a child. How the smell of her chocolate chip cookies filled the house every afternoon when I came home from school. Then you’d be prepared for the denouement—how I cast out all of my modern kitchen tools in favor of baking with the newly discovered measuring cup in my heart.

          Kitchen stories are supposed to end happily, with the easy-to-make recipe wrapped in a tidy lesson for the soul. Even in stories in which the chef-protagonist wrestles with kitchen disaster after disaster, he always emerges victorious, the world’s most perfect pizza, roast chicken, or chocolate soufflé in hand. You, the reader and amateur cook, are thereby enticed to embark on his self-same project of finding inner peace while impressing company.

          This is not that story.

          Picture a grandmother. She is wizened, yes, and also wise. She’s also very short. But personality-wise, she is not short at all. She is from southern Italy and at 78, the few stray wisps of hair on her chin have evolved into a full and surprisingly bristly beard. She is not a squishy grandmother. Her Old World love comes in fiery bursts.

          My grandmother has lived in America for 50 years, nearly twice the time she spent in Italy. And yet she still speaks in a verbal strew of her own invention. Not quite English, no longer the rococo Italian that spills over with delectably tubby vowels, this is a personal Esperanto complete with its own grammar and mangled pronunciation of the letter “H.” Having grown up in her house, I am fluent in this non-language, which along with my status as only grandchild makes me the ideal translator of her recipes—according to me, anyway.

For years, I fantasized about my grandmother and I side by side over a hot stove, she transmitting her secret ingredients and special techniques to me, her willing pupil. Perhaps I was genetically programmed to know how to make pasta from scratch! I would soak up generations of earthy Italian cookery, drawing out tablespoons and folklore in equal measurements, and transcribing it all for posterity.

          But mostly I wanted to learn to cook from my grandmother because her recipes exist only in her head. Even though she’s in good health, she’s still one broken hip away from taking my entire culinary history to the grave. For years I’ve lived in fear of her suddenly dropping dead without ever knowing how she makes taralli.

          I’ve never learned how to make my grandmother’s recipes because my grandmother doesn’t want to teach me. To be fair, she also does not want to teach you. She doesn’t want to teach anybody.