Blind cook adapts in home kitchen

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Enid O’Leary feels her way to the bedroom of her apartment and returns to the dining room table lugging a 6-inch-thick cookbook written in Braille.

She begins to read a recipe, but instead of fluttering over the dots, her fingers bump slowly, laboriously, over each letter. Although she can write with a stylus, O’Leary never developed the fluency of someone who is born blind.

“I would starve to death before I was able to find something to eat in here,” she jokes.

At 67, O’Leary has been blind for nearly four decades, but she has never let it keep her from accomplishing whatever she wanted in the kitchen.

To set the oven temperature, O’Leary traces tactile raised dots with her fingertips. To avoid sprinkling cayenne in a dish that calls for cumin, she labels the spices with Braille tags and alphabetizes them. O’Leary has developed an ear for when water is about to boil, and she can sense when meat is rare or well-done by listening to the cadence of splattering juices in a frying pan.

O’Leary lacks a sense of smell, making a timer an essential kitchen tool. But her other senses have become so keen that when her children were young she could always tell who had their hand in the cookie tin.

“I knew which one it was because they were different heights and had different coordination, so they lifted the lid differently, and I could hear that,” she says.

Daughter Susanna Ford laughs when asked about getting caught.

“It’s really irritating when you can’t snitch the cookies from the blind lady,” she says with a laugh. “Her hearing is annoyingly profound.”

For several decades O’Leary relied on a cassette tape recorder to store her recipes. Whenever she needed a new recipe, she would phone a friend and ask her to read the recipe to her. She would repeat each line into the recorder. Eventually she amassed a collection of tried-and-true recipes she could always rely on.

“I’ve been blind for 36 years, and you’d be amazed at the new things they have now,” O’Leary says. “But a lot of things are just common sense. If you can’t do it the way you used to, you’ve got to figure out a different way to do it. It may take longer, but you can do it.”

Today stores and Web sites offer adaptive tools, such as Braille timers and talking clocks. Still the blind cook’s kitchen looks much like any other kitchen.

“Around the home there isn’t much in terms of equipment (that changes),” says Nancy Johnson, a rehabilitation specialist for the blind and visually impaired with the Kansas Department of Social Rehabilitation Services and a former co-worker of O’Leary’s. “We need the tactile indicators, but it’s more about technique than anything else.”

Growing up, Ford learned to cook from her mother.

“She does very well in the kitchen. She did a good part of the cooking, but everyone in the house cooked. There weren’t girls’ jobs and boys’ jobs. There were just jobs. I learned how to cook and mow the lawn. I always appreciated that.”

In the early `70s, O’Leary and Dellenbaugh divorced. To support her family, she earned a master’s in social rehabilitation services. Her thesis was a cookbook on cassette tape for people who are visually impaired. She worked as a rehabilitation specialist with various social service agencies for 14 years. Her career took her to Miami; Waco, Texas; and Topeka. She married two more times.

In 1999 O’Leary retired and eventually had another surgery to ease persistent back pain from the accident. Her heart stopped twice in recovery. During her rehabilitation, family, friends and church members encouraged her to compile a cookbook, this time on compact disc, so she did. The CD, which she finished editing last fall, contains 1,100 recipes. Designed for blind or sighted cooks, the recipes can be viewed in large print.

O’Leary also spent hours standardizing the recipe formats and removing abbreviations such as “Tbs.” for tablespoons to make it smoother for someone listening to the recipe information on a screen reading program.

With her kitchen mostly packed up in cardboard boxes, O’Leary makes one last Snickers cheesecake, a favorite recipe from the CD.

She scoops the filling ingredients into a measuring cup and pours them into the cookie crumb crust using her hands to feel if the filling is evenly distributed.

“As you can see,” she says, “I have to get my hands in there. A sighted person would use a spatula.”

Many people who meet O’Leary are surprised a blind person can cook.

“Then there’s always the question: `Would you rather be deaf or blind?’” says Samantha Ford, O’Leary’s 22-year-old granddaughter. “Most people say deaf because most of us can’t imagine not seeing. ... But she’s always been able to cope and get past it.”

In the last year O’Leary’s balance has deteriorated, so she parceled out the contents of her apartment for a move to an assisted living facility in Topeka, where meals will be prepared for her.

She has given away most of her dishes, appliances and cooking utensils to two of her grandchildren who will marry this summer, but she hung on to her double spatula, a few coffee mugs, a couple of place settings and some Tupperware containers.

“There’s no sense cutting off the possibility of ever cooking again,” she says.

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