Story by Emily Volpert
Photo by Jonathan Schell
Lain Bartnik fondly remembers his childhood visits to his grandparents’ big, purple house in Oklahoma for traditional family dinners.
With the smell of his grandmother’s famous honey-baked ham wafting through the house and a Sicilian cake in the oven, family members bonded whenever they sat down together over a delicious meal.
“It really brought our family closer together,” Bartnik recalls. “It can repair a person’s soul to have dinner around the table and talk about what happened during the day.”
Bartnik is preparing for his role at the upcoming Grant High School Trade Show. His project – selling copies of his family collection of recipes – is all about family.
Over the years, his grandmother, Patricia Bartnik, has made a list of recipes. “It was a loose-leaf notebook of recipes from my mother who is a first-generation Italian,” she says.
For Lain Bartnik, the frequent family dinners were an important part of his upbringing. He says he’s not looking for a good grade. Rather, he wants to see something change in his classmates.
“I would really like to see more families sitting around the dinner table,” says the 16-year-old sophomore who likes cooking, playing video games, and practicing the piano. “Hopefully, my family’s cookbooks will encourage people to do that.”
Bartnik’s distant relatives were immigrants from Sicily. His grandmother has always tried to encourage him to learn how to cook traditional Italian foods. When he lived in Oklahoma, Bartnik and his grandmother spent a lot of time in the kitchen.
“He always liked to help, doing little things in the kitchen and asking a lot of questions,” Patricia Bartnik recalls. “He would get things from the refrigerator and from cabinets to help me prepare for dinner,” she says.
Bartnik’s favorite thing to make with his grandmother was the traditional 2,000-calories-a-slice Sicilian Cassata cake. Bartnik enjoyed helping his grandmother stir the batter and once in the over, the sugary smell of the cake in the oven filled the kitchen. No matter what the recipe, Bartnik felt closest to his grandmother when they were in the kitchen together.
“Cooking is now one of my passions,” Bartnik says. “I bake with my mother and we make cakes, cupcakes, pies, and my grandmother’s great banana bread. It’s such a good time.”
Since moving to Portland three years ago, Bartnik has noticed his friends don’t take family dinners seriously. He recalls recently eating dinner at a friend’s house where they simply sat in front of the TV silently and ate pizza.
“It drove me crazy,” Bartnik says. “I just didn’t understand why they weren’t talking to each other.”
His mission statement for the event is to promote family values. He hopes that families will “turn off the TV, talk about their days, and become close because of it.”
Patricia Bartnik supports his idea completely. “If these recipes can be spread around, hopefully it will bring more families together,” she says. “There’s not enough of that these days.”
