Food for Grief

And then, one of my oldest friends—truly, my best friend, if you rate best friendship by how often and how unjudgmentally the person is there for you, for how many, many years—he and I talked about the death of loved ones, of friends and family, and how it makes us need to nurture ourselves and our loved ones, whether or not this makes rational sense. He laughed and told me that a beloved cousin of his was dying, and that was not why he laughed, but at what he had done when he got home that day from work, after a few days spent going back and forth to the hospital. “I made a pot roast,” he said. “Red wine, and carrots, and onions and garlic—you know. And it tasted so good, that before it was done, I’d eaten all the beef, and just left the sauce.” He laughed again. “Pretty good gravy I made, though.”

We talked about all the friends we had in common who had died, and we remembered the first in our group, an artist, who died from a rare cancer, which it turned out his surgeon father was one of the few specialists in. And even more sadly, oddly, tragically, the same cancer had killed his wife’s mother, when his wife—also our much-loved friend—had been just ten years old.

“Do you remember when Bruce died?” my friend asked, as we talked on the phone, me on my deck in the country evening, he in his kitchen in the midst of the city. “I think you were in Oregon then, and you didn’t come down here.”

I was in Oregon then. I vividly remember hearing that Bruce had died, the first death of someone I knew and loved, and I remember taking to my bed, the conflict being so great inside me I had no other recourse. Whatever had killed Bruce, my body, alarmed, realized for the first time, would kill me too—and I wanted to get out of my body at once. That I couldn’t caused pain, and fatigue, and brought me one of my first pieces of valuable wisdom: that it was terror of death that caused so much of what I found inexplicable in the world around me. Because I had that terror then, through and through, and I could see what it would mean.

Ever after, I couldn’t look at a skyscraper or a monument without thinking, “Terror of death. They wanted to get out of their bodies, those people who made that thing there.” And of course, I wasn’t wrong.

“Do you remember I called you from his house?” my friend said. This would have been the house of my dead friend and his wife Tish. Tish, who I had once been in love with the way you are with someone of your own sex who is so much what you are not—a house I had lived in, too, once a very long time ago. My friend went on: “And I said, ‘Alison is cooking dinner for us all.’”

No, I said. I don’t remember that. I did smile to think of Alison, who had also loved Bruce’s wife, and who I had known since I was ten years old, and still remember as the sunniest child to ever pass through our school. She was, and is, a sunny adult now, with warmth to spare—just sitting with her makes you smile. I smiled then to think of her, but I didn’t remember that Alison had cooked for everyone the night that Bruce died, in the house where we had all lived with Bruce, and with Tish, who is now long dead herself. No, I didn’t remember that small part of the scene.

“Then you don’t remember what you said back?”

No, I said, and had another meditative sip of wine, wondering would come next.

“You said: ‘I wish I was Alison right now.’”

Oh, I said, laughing. Did I say that? That would have been exactly what I thought, what I felt.

And we were both quiet then, thinking about many things that had come and gone, and many things, I think, that would come again…

The Neighbor Meal

Even in the most devoted cook’s life, there comes that inevitable time when, for reasons of anything ranging from the worst tragedies to the simplest ennui, you just can’t focus on fixing a meal. Even for those of us who love to cook, and think of it as a high point of the day—sometimes you just wake up and can’t do it. Or sometimes someone who lives around you wakes up and just can’t do it. Maybe someone broke a limb, or a car broke down, or you’ve just spent a week cooking for a house full of guests. At any of these times, what comes into its own is the Neighbor Meal.

The Neighbor Meal is one of the warmest, best, and simplest ways of connecting yourself in…well, the neighborhood, however you define that. And you can define it a lot of ways. The immediate vicinity. A group of friends. A group joined together by a common interest. Any group, really, that is connected by a thread of community. And the best way of strengthening that thread is to give or exchange food.

We have a lot of Neighbor Meal traditions in the little alpine valley where I live for most of the year. When a woman has a baby, we do a roster so that she gets enough food to feed the rest of her family for a short period while she settles in with the newborn. (My split pea soup—see below—goes over big here, especially with families with kids. And you can freeze it ultra successfully.) When someone is ill, we all go on the alert and bring food. If someone goes to the hospital, we leave food at their home for the remaining family. All of these things.

I have noticed, in the preparation and presentation of the Neighbor Meal, that the person getting the most out of the gift of food is not always the recipient Neighbor. Quite often, it’s me. I’ll never forget the courtesy with which The Indigo Ray, in the hospital for a cancer operation many years ago, received a demented, distracted box of lemon squares. I’d completely forgotten that she didn’t eat white sugar or white flour, in my total freakout that she was in the hospital at all. But she accepted the gift for what it was: a way of soothing myself, while I fooled myself into thinking I was soothing her. And I suppose just the fact that I had brought something and was trying to hide my own upset strengthened the bond, too.

And then there was the year when I went to a friend’s house, where she was slowly dying of a terrible disease. She couldn’t eat solids any longer, she who had loved food as much as I do. I spent two days making three different kinds of soups, liquidizing them carefully, with a necessary obsessiveness: any little bits left unstrained would be a positive danger. The next time I saw her, she could no longer speak, but she wrote out appreciative thanks about the soups, which she claimed to have eaten for a week after I went back to the States. I didn’t believe her. I knew those soups had been pecked at by her distracted husband, and then thrown away. But I loved her even more for the grace that knew I needed to be needed right then, and that the only way I could express my own love was in the kitchen. I loved her all the more for knowing and acknowledging that, and the last time I saw her, the day before she died, she wrote vigorously on her white board again about the soup and how good it was. That was all for me. I had meant to comfort her, but she was comforting me. Although maybe, now I think of it, her comforting of me was a comfort for her, too.

So the tapestry, complex and beautiful, is woven from these loving threads.

I thought of this one night when, tired of myself, tired of my own productions, even (gasp!) my food, I gratefully turned to a hamper that my neighbor across the street brought over on Christmas Day. Homemade tamales. Spinach enchiladas. Spicy Spanish rice. Salsa verde. I heated them all up, tossed what lettuce I had with a diced avocado, minced green onions, walnut oil and a squeeze of lime, and crowded everything on a plate. And it was not just entirely delicious (I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood of Extremely Talented Cooks), it was comforting, too…to think that she had packed that basket and brought it over just when I needed it. I had needed it, and the fact of being a part of that neighborhood web fed me as much as the delicious food on my plate. And I think she liked bringing it, too.

In case you want a simple Neighbor Meal to take to someone, here is my recipe, cadged off a bag of split peas, for:

The Perfect Neighbor Meal Split Pea Soup

• ◊ A pound of split peas
• ◊ 1 cup chopped celery
• ◊ 1 cup chopped onion
• ◊ 1½ cups chopped carrot
• ◊ A bit of dried thyme
• ◊ A bit of red pepper or cayenne powder
• ◊ A bay leaf
• ◊ Salt
• ◊ Pepper

Wash and sort the split peas. Put in a large soup pot with 8 cups of water, celery, onion, carrot, thyme (rubbed between your fingers), red pepper, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, and then simmer for about 45 minutes to an hour, until the peas are tender. Salt. You can mash the peas with a spoon, or blend the soup in a blender or processor, or (what I usually do) just leave them the way they are, since when you reheat the soup, the peas will cook some more and start to dissolve on their own. (It tastes best at this stage, and best of all after you’ve frozen the soup, thawed it, and reheated.) At the last minute, add fresh ground pepper, and serve with grated cheddar or a dollop of sour cream on top.

If you want, you can add a ham hock to the start of the process. But it’s absolutely swell without, and that way you don’t have to inquire if the neighbors at the receiving end eat ham.

There is no child in the world who doesn’t love this soup. Trust me on this one. And it will comfort you to make it almost as much as it will comfort them to eat it. Trust me on that one, too.

On Grief and Twice-Baked Potatoes

There’s this thing about grief: you need to eat what you need to eat when it hits you. But you also need to feed others, if that’s the role you have, and this is a juggling act. In my case, I have a Beloved Vegetarian to feed, and I’m happy to do so–but when grief, or indeed, any other trauma, hits me, I have to go with what nourishes me. Which is, in this order: Blue cheese. Unsalted butter, Sourdough bread. Red meat. And that last is the one that is usually most readily to hand.

So, when someone dies–and in the most recent case (though goodness knows, we’ve seen a lot of death around here the last few years), the someone was my father, after a traumatic week of his being constantly, conscientiously, and painfully attended by the medical profession–I really really really needed some red meat. And some wine. Together. Yes. In a vegetarian household.

You may know the way I serve myself here. A big salad (on this particular night, a garlic/sherry vinegar/walnut oil dressing mixed with diced avocado, diced tomato, one scallion, torn basil and marjoram, roasted pine nuts, and grated Parmesan, tossed with greens), accompanied by a seared piece of rib steak topped with a garlic clove mashed into a tablespoon of butter. Well, that was for me. The Bereaved. Also accompanied by a honking big portion–indeed, a half-bottle portion–of beefy red wine.

But for the loved one. No matter how carried away I get by my own grief, or even my own worries, I still constantly consider the meals of my Beloved. And this was no exception. So this is what I did:

Twice Baked Potatoes to Be Served to One’s Vegetarian Loved One on the Eve of One’s Father’s Death:

Shove three potatoes into a toaster oven at 450°, after they have been scrubbed and pricked with forks to keep them from exploding.

Make the salad dressing, add the greens on top of crossed salad implements to be tossed at the last minute.

Sit down for an hour or so while the taters cook and have a few glasses of red wine. Speak freely about the Loved Dead.

When the potatoes are done (and they are done and stay done for a long time in the oven, so don’t fuss too much about timing here), take them out of the oven, split them, and scrape out the potato insides. Mash these with a mashed garlic clove, some sliced mild onions of any kind (scallions, onion tops, chives…shallots…whatever you have), some chopped herbs (parsley? cilantro? whatever’s in the fridge), some butter, some milk or cream or both, whatever you have, salt and pepper…and then pile these mashed insides back into the potato shells. Sprinkle with paprika, or, better yet, smoked Spanish paprika. Ten minutes before dinner, put back in a 350° oven to reheat. Stick under a broiler if you want browning on the top.

In the meantime, if you are a worried carnivore, broil your steak.

Then serve your Vegetarian Beloved with salad and potato, and yourself with steak and salad.

Glasses of wine for both of you, at will.

Most important of all: turn off the phones and computers.

Eat in silence, appreciating the flavors, and each other, and the fact that you’re both alive.

And then sleep well before heading out for the funeral, and all that entails.

Bon appétit.

Skirt Steak

When I was a little girl, there were certain foods that meant festivity to me, and that I still crave when feeling a bit battered by life. Inari sushi, rice balls wrapped in fried tofu skins, is one—ever since the day Teruyo, the kind woman who cleaned our house, brought the five-year-old me a box as a surprise. Soy-sauce-baked chicken, as made with the frequency you would expect from a harassed mother of a large and greedy family, which I always thought was a heritage dish from her Asian past, until I discovered it in James Beard’s American Cookery as one of the quick ’n’ easy dishes that newlywed wives of the Fifties turned to in a similar pinch.

But most of the dishes, I find when I think about them, were my father’s. In true Fifties husband fashion, he only cooked on Sundays and holidays, so his cuisine had an unfair advantage over my harassed mother’s. (Now that she’s not forced to cook, her cooking has changed completely, being innovative and delicious, another clear and compelling reason why no one should ever be forced to do things for duty that they could do, if everyone would just relax, for pleasure.) I still remember his raisin sauce for ham, his wilted lettuce salad (heavy on the bacon and green onions), his sage-seasoned turkey stuffing, and, of course, his navy bean soup—made the day after the feast with the remnants of the ham. Then there was his Yorkshire pudding, which rose higher than any Yorkshire pudding I have seen since (except that of my brother Peter, who seems to have inherited the knack—see his recipe p. 224).

What I remember most, though, and have always craved, is his way of cooking skirt steak. This is a cut from the meaty part of the cow’s diaphragm, kind of looking like a pleated accordion—the pieces are long and thin and marbled with membrane holding it together. For the longest time between my childhood, when this was the dish most requested for birthdays in our house, and my adulthood, you couldn’t find a piece of skirt steak at a meat counter anywhere. Out of fashion, I guess. I don’t know why it went out of favor and disappeared, but somewhere in there, about twenty years ago, it started showing up again, this time wrapped in pinwheels and skewered into shapes, to be cooked…well, I was never sure how. I didn’t care. I just bought the pinwheels, unraveled them, and happily went back to recreating my father’s dish.

What he had done was cut the long strip into smaller, manageable pieces, just big enough so three was a wonderful helping for a hungry child, four even better, and five leading to the kind of repletion we all associate with festivals. And then he would sauté them in a mix of butter and oil (or, more probably, margarine and oil, since that was what we ate in those long lost days of the early Sixties), using the lovingly-cared-for, square cast-iron pan in which he cooked many of his magic dishes. When they were browned and savory, he salted them, and turned them out onto the plate, glistening and beefy.

They were deliciously livery, unlike any other cut of beef I had then or since. But when I did finally find them, all pinwheel-constricted in my supermarket’s display case, and released them into my own sauté pan, conscientiously frying them quickly over high heat, so that they were wonderfully browned on the outside and rare on the inside, the way I liked all my beef, they just didn’t taste…quite right. I couldn’t figure it out. I tried again and again. They were good. But they weren’t the skirt steaks of my childhood.

I tried cutting them in bigger pieces. Then in smaller pieces. I tried different kinds of oil. But there was something missing.

I called my father.

“Oh,” he said. “The thing about skirt steak? You have to cook it till well done. Not dried out—but not rare either.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “But…”

“AND,” he said, not letting me finish. “The secret is: you have to use GARLIC SALT.”

Gasp.

I was going through a phase at that point where I could out-food-Nazi any passing food Nazi. I knew exactly what kinds of dishes you were supposed to eat if you were in the slightest bit in the know, and I knew how to cook them—so I thought, with that wonderfully obtuse tunnel vision of the Young Cook. Garlic salt was a complete no-no. All those preservatives. Tsk. And well-done beef? What, was he crazy? Was it possible? How could my father tell me this, who had hovered over every roast beef of my childhood with loving care to make sure that it never got past a certain rare phase of rosy goodness?

Still, when I tried to cook those deconstructed pinwheels my way, I had to admit, it just wasn’t working out.

Then one day in the local Co-op I found a jar of ORGANIC garlic salt. Hallelujah. I was freed from worrying I would be letting down the side by just going to Safeway and getting one of those red-capped jars filled with chemicals (by the way, I never bothered to read the ingredients lists on those jars; for all I know they are pure garlic and salt—ah, youth!). At this point, I was willing to go all the way. So I bought another one of those pinwheels, unraveled it, cut it up into pieces, and, sprinkling it with the PURE garlic salt, proceeded to cook it in a cast-iron pan, in a mix of butter and oil, to a beefy glistening striped brown on both sides. Then I held my breath, turned down the heat under the pan, and cooked till well-done.

Put it on a plate. Dug in—cutting lengthwise, the way I’d always liked it as a child, rather than across the grain of the meat, the way every book told me I was supposed to.

And there it was: the skirt steak of my childhood. In all its glory. I can still see the testimonial in a handwritten book of what I cooked each day that I used to keep back then: “Against all odds,” it admitted, “the garlic salt was the secret.”

There’s a postscript to this, though. Years later, I was discussing skirt steak with my father. And he shook his head wisely, and said: “Of course, the only way to cook skirt steak is very quickly, so it’s still rare. That way it’s tender.”

I looked at him, astonished. “But…but…you told me the only way to cook it was well-done.”

“Did I?” he said. “Then I must have changed my mind.”

So now I cook it both ways. And it’s true: well-done makes it taste particularly livery, which I love. And rare…makes it tender and wonderful. Both ways are great. But now that my father is gone, when I want to remember him and the way he would cook my favorite dishes for my childhood birthdays, I cook it well-done. With garlic salt.

Like this:

Take a nice piece of skirt steak, about half a pound per person if you’re planning on wishing you’d made more. Two-thirds of a pound per person if you’re serving real skirt steak lovers. (Fortunately, this cut has come back into fashion, and you can find it at any decent butcher’s. What a relief.)

Cut the long strip into manageable pieces, say three to four inches across.

Heat a good heavy skillet on the stove. Cast iron is the best. No need to use nonstick for this.

When it’s hot, add some oil and a dollop of butter. Sunflower oil is good. Peanut oil would be fine. Olive oil, while untraditional, tastes great in my opinion.

When the oil/butter sizzles, add the steaks. Salt generously with garlic salt, or sprinkle with garlic powder and salt. Brown to beautiful bronze stripes.

Turn over. Keep over the high heat for a minute, then turn down and cook till well done, still a little rosy in the middle, but not dry.

That’s the classic. If you like it rare, just sear the other side and cook for three minutes at a higher heat.

Turn out and enjoy.

It’s lovely poured with the juices over shredded lettuce and sliced avocado. Totally against tradition. But then, as my father pointed out, who needs to be shackled by that?

(And by the way, ignore those cookbooks that say this is a cut better braised. I mean, it might be fine braised, but why do you want to bother with all that, when this is the dish that five out of five Catholic children agreed was their idea of a true feast? I mean, why?)

Candied Walnuts

And while I’m on the subject of foods that are more than just something to eat, something that conveys more than nutrition, conveys love, the best example of that in my own life are my Aunt Celia’s candied walnuts. Delicious. Sugary. Buttery. Addictive. Somewhere back in the dim fogs of my childhood, she made these for all of us, and the response was so wholeheartedly in favor, she was doomed to make them for the rest of her life—with love. As she was my godmother, I felt a particular right to demand them, and so just before every Christmas, no matter where I was, a small parcel would arrive in the mail containing a tin of her candied walnuts.

Somewhere in my early forties, my tastes changed somehow, and the walnuts tasted too sugary to me. I never had any trouble getting other people to eat them, though—they were still as delicious as ever; I don’t know what had happened to my taste buds. And I wondered—it was so much trouble for her, this shelling of the walnuts every year and the sugaring of them, and the packing of them in a tin, and the mailing them off to me—maybe I should find a way to let her off the hook she had been on for, oh, probably more than twenty years at that point.

The Beloved Husband and I discussed this seriously. And we concluded (and how glad I am that we came to that conclusion) that the point of the candied walnuts was not calories, but Love. With a capital ‘L’. Neither of us was willing to give up that manifestation of it from my godmother. It had come to mean Christmas to us both.

Then, as mysteriously as my tastes had changed, they changed back again, somewhere around when I turned fifty. And I loved those walnuts every bit as much as I had loved them as a child. The Beloved Husband found the same mysterious change happening in him. Like magic. How glad we were that we had never said anything in those strange, puritanical years where we had a lurking feeling that sugar was an enemy! (And so it is, like so many other things, when there is too much of a good thing.)

Before she died, when she knew she was dying, my godmother typed up the recipe for candied walnuts, as well as for her Green Mold—another well-loved feasting dish in our family (see recipe below, p. 166). And she made copies for all of us, and signed them, and gave us each our own—a farewell present from the most loving woman I have ever had the luck to have known, and been cared for by.

The first Christmas after she was gone, every time we drove past our mailbox three miles up the road, we would both say, “How can it be Christmas? There isn’t going to be a tin of candied walnuts in the mailbox from Aunt Celia.” Still, it was Christmas. But it would never be the same. Fine, yes. Lovely, too. But not the same. Which is the way it is with the years, isn’t it?

But I still have her recipe. And here it is, as she typed it herself:

Candied Walnuts

Have 6½ to 7 cups of shelled walnuts ready.

Butter a large platter or a large piece of foil.

In a big pan combine: 2 cups dark brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

½ cube butter

5½ oz. evaporated milk

Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until mixture forms a sticky ball when dropped in cold water. Say a Hail Mary. Remove pan from heat, add walnuts and stir so that walnuts are coated with the sugar mixture. Turn onto buttered platter (or foil) and separate nuts.

Cecilia F. Torres