The Key Ingredient by Susan Wiggs Page A

or rosemary lemonade. Our family photo albums are stuffed with snapshots of me giving pretend demos to a rapt audience of dolls, dogs or grandparents. While other kids were building with Legos, I was practicing my knife skills.
    At the age of nine, I got a digital video camcorder for Christmas. When I learned what that big, cumbersome camera could do, it was as if I’d seen the face of God. Not only could I dream up my own shows and episodes, I could film them and play them back.
    Gran was a really good sport about it all. She let me set the camera on its tripod and play unfortunate selections of background music while I interviewed her.
    â€œI was never homesick,” she said, talking to me—­not the camera. “This place has always felt more like home to me than the big city. You see, I believe some ­people are born in the place they belong. Others have to go looking for it. That was me. I went looking, and I found this place. It’s my heart’s home, and I thank God every day that I’m able to spend my life here.”
    She talked of her life in Boston, and how as a young woman she worked in a restaurant called Durgin-­Park. It was a place that had been in existence for three hundred years. The tourists would come for baked beans and to be sassed by the waitresses. It was there, during the lunch rush, that she met a handsome Vermonter who had come down one summer weekend to see the sights of Boston. She proudly told everyone that yes, she sassed him. At Durgin-­Park, it was expected.
    Less than a year later, she bade her family farewell and boarded a train up to Vermont, which in those days was as distant and untamed as the Wild West, to hear her tell it.
    With the red camera light running and me directing things with zero expertise but an excess of enthusiasm, she created many of the family favorites. Somewhere in my digital archives, there’s footage of her making ice-­cream pie, scalloped potatoes, squash roasted with maple butter and salt, potato and ricotta gnocchi, salads bright with tomatoes just harvested in her legendary summer garden, homemade jam from the berries we picked, crisp pickles preserved without one single drop of vinegar.
    If you ever watch a cooking show, pay close attention to the chef’s hands. The very best chefs on the air handle food with grace and confidence—­and with love. Even in the grainy old digital files of my grandmother, back when my camera skills were rudimentary at best, you can still see this trait. She is absolutely sure of herself in the kitchen, and driven by a mission to care for ­people by feeding them. When preparing a meal, a good chef knows instinctively that love is the key ingredient, no matter what else you add to the dish. In fact, that’s how I came up with the name for the show I produce—­ The Key Ingredient .
    As a student in film school, the last thing I expected was to be the creative force behind a hit cooking show.
    Confession: My real dream was to be the creative force in front of the camera, too. That’s not how events unfolded, but I can’t complain. I did the next best thing. I discovered the talented, charismatic, totally hot chef who was chosen to host the show—­Martin Harlow.
    He was a food-­cart chef in Washington Square Park, just barely scraping by but attracting an avid following of foodies who appreciated his culinary skills and groupies who admired his matinee-­idol looks. I was a film student at New York University’s Tisch School, trying to recover from a shattered heart after walking away from the best man I’d ever known.
    Martin became the topic of my senior project, a short documentary. After it was posted on the internet, the film went viral, and we were offered the opportunity to shoot a pilot with an option for more episodes of a cooking show for a new start-­up network. The day we got the green light, he picked me up and danced me around