Just as we were getting ready for our close-up, a last-minute lipstick check revealed that our morning bagels had left us both with poppy seed-speckled teeth. So much for our glamorous celebrity lifestyles!

But that was the least of our problems. Worse was that earlier in the morning we’d discovered the New York City subway lines were down. Six people had been invited and we had no idea if they would all make it on time.

Thankfully, they all arrived without a glitch. They came bearing dishes of food, copies of their recipes, and a palpable nervous energy. But when Taryn arrived she quickly set everyone at ease. In her arms she carried a magnificent tray of noodle pudding, and soon explained it was a dessert from her mother’s repertoire, one the family traditionally brings to every major event. Clearly this was a signature dish that would tell the story of her close-knit family.

At an early age Taryn Brill learned how to cook...thanks to mom, Gail Brill.

GMA Correspondent Taryn Brill says her mother "is the warmest, most caring mother of all."

The camera crew asked us to sit closer than we might have if we weren’t taping this for television. So we huddled on two adjacent couches. With glaring lights, cameras pointed at us, and the boom hanging over our heads, we worried that any natural conversation or spontaneity would be impossible.

But that wasn’t at all what happened. Right from the start we all felt a sudden, surprising, and lovely intimacy. We spoke to each other warmly and openly, as if we were alone in the room with no eyes (or cameras) upon us. And by the end we were all happily amazed by the enormous power of storytelling: how small details reveal deep truths, and how a single tale can illuminate a lifetime.

HERE IS TARYN’S RECIPE:

Taryn says that when she makes this noodle pudding, it evokes memories of all sorts of gatherings, but above all it makes her grateful for her mother, Gail Brill. Taryn is very close to her mother and says, “As an only child, all she ever wanted was siblings. So she had four kids (my dad said 4 was the limit! She wanted 6). She is 110 percent devoted to her husband and kids…no one is more devoted than my mom!”

The ceilings were high. The walls were white. And the Vestry Street Book Group had for one special night transformed into the Vestry Street Recipe Club, a place to talk about food, friendship, families…and our book!

Vestry Street Recipe Club

Here are two of the remarkable stories we overheard:

ANNE’S STORY:

“My grandmother lived in a small town in Wisconsin called Stockbridge, population of about 500. It was largely German American—a farming community. It was where my mother was born and raised. And when my mom was a young adult she was so hungry to leave that small town. She felt very stifled there, and out of place.

Anne's mom (on the right) with Anne's grandmother and aunt, circa 1945.

“So as I grew up, my mom never really wanted to go back much. When she left…she left. We saw my grandmother and other relatives there on occasion, but it wasn’t a place she longed for. But I did long for it. I really adored my grandmother. She was very lively, liked to play practical jokes, and she was a very magical presence in my childhood.

“I also loved the place itself. It’s on a lake, and there were so many traditions in that community that seemed exotic to me: the corn festival in August…the fact that sunflowers grew six feet high…and when I was six I got to drive the tractor. For a girl from the suburbs it was just completely exotic and fanciful.

“By the time I got to college, I realized that if I wanted to visit my grandmother, I was old enough to do so on my own. So in my 20s I started doing that. My mom always found it kind of curious I wanted to go back there, because she couldn’t relate to it and didn’t want to go back there. I found it curious she didn’t. She was bewildered by my attraction, and I was bewildered by her rejection.

“So, in 1992, when and I was around 27 or 28, and soon to be getting married, my mother came to visit me to help plan the wedding. At the time I was living in Chicago, about an hour and a half from my grandmother. I asked my mom if she would drive up with me to see my grandmother. It had been years since my mom had been there. I guess now that I was an adult I perceived the tension my mom felt being back home—a tension that I think is very natural when people go back to their childhood homes.

“I thought it was so great to have three generations of women together even though there was an underlying tension that I wished wasn’t there. But then came this moment where my grandmother made lunch for us. She was making traditional German potato salad. She told my mom to go out to the ditch and pick wild watercress. And I just had this vision of my mom growing up in that farmhouse, where that would have been one of her chores. It was a vivid glimpse into my mother’s childhood that was thrilling to me. And it was a soft moment in an otherwise tense visit.

We had the potato salad for lunch. It felt warm—and it melted away, for me at least, some of the tension.”

PHOEBE’S STORY:

“I grew up in Camden, South Carolina. I married young, and my new brother-in-law was married to a woman from Spain. One year, early in the marriage, we visited Madrid. And it was there my sister-in-law taught me how to make paella.

“She told me that traditionally, paella is made on Sunday afternoons. And that it’s really a rice dish, flavored by onions, sweet bell peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. Then you can add anything you like: chorizo, beef, chicken, and pork. All these ingredients are in relatively small pieces, because most of all it’s about the rice.

“When I eventually got my own paella pan, it represented becoming part of my extended family. But when my marriage ended, I took the paella pan and the recipe.

“So in my single years, between that marriage and the one I’m in now, I would make that dish whenever there was a new love interest in my life. My friends would say, ‘Oh, Phoebe is making paella…I wonder who the new man’s going to be?

“They were right. The last time I made it as a single person was in September, 2003—the night my second husband and I got engaged. The recipe worked it’s magic. Although I still think of my former Spanish in-laws every time I make it.”