Identity Exploration | Listen

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A Nashville pastry chef experiences the healing power of family recipes

Lokelani Alabanza, pastry 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 handwritten 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.

“I have a ‘farmor’ [grandmother] who I met when I was 9,” she says of her stepfather’s Danish mother, Kirsten. “She would make these desserts. At the time, I was like, what are these weird things?” Amaretti cookies crumbled into a chilled milk-butter soup. Honey cakes. But Alabanza loved learning and exploring—and most of all, the torte, a recipe Kirsten had been given in the 1950s, which Alabanza has carried forward in her own ways.

Yes, it’s foolproof and versatile. But her love for it goes deeper. “That recipe I think has healed a lot of things that I didn’t know were there.” It has been part of her identity exploration, which she discusses more in her forthcoming cookbook, 89 N. Cherry St.: An Ice Cream Saloon Cookbook, including Black and working-class roots in East Palo Alto, California; Filipino and Mexican heritage; and Hawaiian influence. “Our people immigrated there in 1900,” she says of the island that inspired her name.

“Identity is a thing I had questions about. What my place in the world was, how I show up, what I look like to other people,” she says. “Do I see myself in other people and other things?” These days Alabanza helps others connect to their own stories around food. She hosts ice cream socials—imaginative layered storytelling experiences—including collaborations with multiple courses and archival photos of Black Americans enjoying ice cream. Guests are invited to share their own ice cream memories.

“It has such a profound impact be cause it breaks the ice,” she says, “but it also creates that neighborly quality where you connect over something very familiar.”

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