Blind cook adapts in home kitchen
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. more…
