AP English Language — Style — Writing Drill 1

The following is a draft of a student personal essay about learning to cook from her grandmother, written for a college application. [1] My grandmother taught me how to make her lamb stew when I was twelve years old. [2] She did not use a recipe. [3] She used her hands, her nose, and what she called "the sense of the thing." [4] I spent the next six years trying to figure out what that meant. [5] The first time I made the stew alone, I followed every step I could remember. [6] I browned the lamb. [7] I added the onions and the garlic. [8] I put in the tomatoes and the spices. [9] The stew I produced was correct in every measurable way and wrong in every way that mattered. [10] My grandmother tasted it, set down her spoon, and said, "You made it the way you read it." [11] What she meant, I eventually understood, was that I had been executing rather than cooking. [12] There is a difference. [13] Executing means following a sequence. [14] Cooking means paying attention — to how the onions smell as they soften, to the color of the oil around the spices, to whether the liquid is reducing too fast or too slow. [15] Cooking is the decision you make when something unexpected happens and you don't have a recipe to consult. [16] I thought about this a lot in the two years after my grandmother passed away. [17] I cooked her stew many times. [18] Each time, it got closer to hers and further from my first attempt. [19] I don't think I will ever make it the way she made it. [20] I am not sure I am supposed to. [21] What I learned in that kitchen was not a recipe. [22] It was a way of being present with something difficult and uncertain and refusing to stop until it became what it was supposed to be. [23] I have tried to bring that disposition with me into every room I enter.