Exploring Identity

A Nashville pastry chef experiences the healing power of family recipes

- JENNIFER JUSTUS

Lokelani Alabanza, pas-try chef and founder of Saturated Ice Cream in Nashville, vividly recalls the Betty Crocker cookbook from her grandmother Margaret's kitchen. “It was sort of my first introduction on how to make something right,” she says.

But by age 12 when her grandmother died, the cookbook and any handwrit-ten recipes from a woman who raised her were gone. “I didn't have a thing to hold,” she says. “I always found myself with a little bit of a hole in my heart trying to fill it in with recipes.”

She thinks it led to her obsession with vintage cookbooks and stories from others about family recipes. Then she realized a piece of her past and identity also existed in a Danish apple torte.