A la Carte: Grandma’s hands 

By Rachel Hergett EBS COLUMNIST 

Grandma's hands 
Used to hand me piece of candy 
Grandma's hands 
Picked me up each time I fell. 
- Bill Withers, “Grandma’s Hands” 

Bill Withers, when writing about the woman he said he loved above all others, honed in on her hands. And for good reason. In his song, and in my experience, a grandmother’s hands are capable of extreme comfort and strength. Her protection and love emanate through them.  

I spent much of my childhood watching my Japanese grandmother’s hands. Her long slender fingers were constantly in motion, clacking her knitting needles into a blur that seemed slow in comparison to the speed at which she fed her commercial sewing machine or stirred a stove full of pots to feed the family. 

Most fascinating, maybe, was the formation of rice balls. A rice ball is a simple thing. It is, as stated, a ball of rice. And yet it feels like so much more. In the weeks since my grandmother’s death at the end of August, I have considered ways to memorialize her here, to talk about the food of my childhood. A friend had the answer, in the form of simple “funny concave triangles” of rice.  

“I remember how fun it was when she came to our classroom in Cottonwood School and made tempura and showed us how to shape rice into funny concave triangles, just so,” friend and local artist Marla Goodman commented when I posted grandma’s obituary online.  

Rice balls are ubiquitous in our family. I walked into my mom’s house last month, where family had gathered around my grandmother’s bed. “Rice is ready,” my mom said. “I need you to make rice balls.” 

Japanese convenience store staples, rice balls known as onigiri are generally sold in more impressive forms. They are wrapped in seaweed, stuffed with pickled plums or salted salmon, smothered, colored and flavored. They are perfectly shaped by molds that emulate their hand-formed cousins.  

All of this is unnecessary. The rice balls I grew up with were “shio musubi,” simply salted rice. I have since learned that musubi, in the Shinto religion of my grandmother’s Japanese youth, is the power of creation and becoming. It is our connection with the earth, ourselves and each other. It makes sense that I feel connected through the rice.  

To make shio musubi, you wet your hands, salt your wet hands generously, then take a lump of hot rice directly from the rice cooker, shaping it into a triangle shape using the natural curves of cupped hands. The heat and the pressure and the stickiness of the rice hold it all together. Making rice balls always felt like a labor of love. This is hot rice we’re talking about. It hurts, burning your hands as you shape it. Not everyone in my family is willing to endure the pain. But grandma did.  

As a child, long before she taught me how to form the rice balls myself, I would watch from the kitchen table as grandma took the rice into her hands. Later, I would take her hands in mine, normally dry and cracked from their constant use, but now reddened and shiny from the heat of the rice.  

“It not hurt,” she said in her perpetually broken English that I always found endearing. I can attest that it does in fact hurt to make rice balls, but grandma never gave in to the pain. To make rice balls for her family was a testament to the immense love held in grandma’s hands. 

Rachel Hergett is a foodie and cook from Montana. She is arts editor emeritus at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and has written for publications such as Food Network Magazine and Montana Quarterly. Rachel is also the host of the Magic Monday Show on KGLT-FM and teaches at Montana State University.