Never too old to cook

When you enter your golden years, the cooking load tends to lighten. Children have grown and left and there are probably fewer dinner parties. Once you go to a nursing home or assisted living facility, it is possible you won’t cook at all. If that scenario leaves you feeling dismayed, you should read about a cooking club at a senior living facility in Illinois. The residents named the club Rolling Scones.

The members of the club interviewed for the article are all in their 90s. While they do not cook all of their meals, club members gather weekly in a community kitchen to make dishes ranging from pizza to salad that they take back to their living quarters. Members reminisce about how they used to cook, and they told Today that getting back into the kitchen scratches an itch. “This creative need that I have is being fulfilled,” said Rolling Scones member Nancy Rieck.

Some club members have strong opinions on modern young cooks. “Children today, they have to have a recipe and be told how much to put in,” said Barbara Ensalaco. “But every day, we cook, and we just sprinkled the stuff on top until we felt it had enough, and that was our recipe for cookies, no tablespoons or whatever.”

Maybe Ensalaco was special, because I watched my great grandmother cook and she definitely used “tablespoons or whatever,” but it’s true that things have changed since these women began to cook. If they started in their teens it would have been during or just after World War II, when some foods were rationed and others were not as widely available as they are now in the world of overnight shipping.

Even though these cooking club members aren’t in the kitchen every day, it is nice that they can continue to pursue a passion, even if only part-time. My role model in this regard was my friend’s grandmother who lived to be 106. Up to the age of 99 she still tended a large garden, and she cooked for herself until she was about 104. Now that’s a lifetime of kitchen memories.