Cooking is an important motif in the text. Ruth learns to cook as a way to care for her father and to try to exert some control over her father’s declining memory. When Ruth first arrives home, she is surprised to find that her mother, who “once made all our meals from scratch” (14), no longer cooks. Annie blames herself for Howard’s Alzheimer’s, thinking that it was “years of cooking in aluminum pots, cooking with canned goods, that led to the dementia” (14). When Ruth moves back home, she quickly grows tired of takeout and finds a new passion for cooking as she reads Alzheimer’s online forums and learns about ingredients that can aid in preventing memory loss. She begins to view food and cooking as something tangible she can do to help her father’s symptoms–“A diet can’t reverse harm that’s already done, I know. But what if it could halt the decline?” (85)–as well as a way to connect with him.

When Ruth makes her first dish, a cobbled-together spaghetti with tomato and almond sauce, she writes about the elation she feels when Howard leaves his study to join her at the table:

Suddenly there is pasta and there is sauce and the semblance of a real meal [.