PART TWO
SOME OF the most celebrated culinary writing appears in memoirs, many of them coming-of-age stories that show how, when, and why the author became captivated, indeed often obsessed, by food. A number of these works emphasize the role mothers and grandmothers played in introducing the child to the traditions and the cooking of beloved foods or to the raising and growing of cherished ingredients. Sometimes the experience of enchantment is gradual; sometimes it involves a sudden epiphanic revelation. Many of these memoirs dramatize the renunciation of old and an embrace of new ways of thinking about food. In such stories eating, along with meditation on food, seldom remains simple, but may form the foundation of one’s identity.
Ethnicity is central to many of these memoirs, the role of family often embedded in a history and conventions that celebrate a unique food culture, enveloping the young gastronome in something beyond his or her private needs and desires. So this section turns to the culinary traditions of such diverse places as Barbados, Appalachia, China, India, and the Middle East, as well to a range of hyphenated American subcultures (Jewish-, Italian-, African-, Caribbean- ). African-American memoirists, for instance, frequently stress the relation between foodways and a rich sense of their own childhood community. Henry Louis Gates Jr. remembers how his family, resisting a prevalent white racist stereotype of black people smelling bad, celebrated the wonderful aromas of their own stew bubbling on the stove pot, and the delicious “Homemade Ring Bologna” concocted by a “colored handyman” at a local bakery. Ntozake Shange recalls the okra, Hoppin’ John, pig’s feet, collard greens, and corn bread of her ancestors, and relishes sharing those foods with her appropriately named daughter Savannah. As Shange cooks each dish, she feels an entire heritage rising up within her. Similarly, Audre Lorde describes the tradition of crushing in a mortar spices from the West Indies with the precision and passion learned from her wise Barbadian mother.
These stories dramatize the habits and bonding rituals formed around food within families. Often, as in our selections by Susan Gubar and Elizabeth Ehrlich, their writers gain historical awareness through a return to a community abandoned due to assimilation into mainstream society. Sometimes the stories involve a generational skip: a granddaughter intensely watching as a grandmother takes her back to older ways of making things, while the mother—modern and seduced by laborsaving devices and supermarket ease—resists. So her Nonna entrances young Louise DeSalvo by making bread from scratch, while DeSalvo learns that commercial bread—her mother’s choice—is too white; with that perception young Louise is on her way to becoming a serious cook like her grandmother. In a different but related situation, the great food writer Ruth Reichl remembers being appalled by her mother, whom she subsequently names “the Queen of Mold,” for her habit of keeping and serving foods long since turned green and vile in the fridge, a practice that eventually forced the rebellious child to search out new cuisines.
At the same time, other writers—for instance Linda Furiya and Diana Abu-Jaber—show that no matter how much immigrant parents’ food tastes are shared by the child, they may become a source of embarrassment and conflict when set against American culinary habits. Furiya is chagrined when her mother gives her a traditional Japanese bento-box for her school lunch, even though she loves the delicacies it contains, while Abu-Jaber finds herself humiliated when her Jordanian-American family is chastised for barbecuing chicken on their front lawn, a gross violation of suburban mores. Despite the pain of this incident Abu-Jaber speaks warmly of her parents (in her account there are certainly comic moments), and the title of her book, The Language of Baklava, announces that the Middle Eastern cuisine of their household is a language she has come to speak. Less lovingly, Maxine Hong Kingston tells how her Chinese mother cooked raccoons, skunks, snakes, and turtles, and regaled her daughter with tales of monkey feasts in China, the diners scalping the poor beast and scooping out its brains. Kingston’s melancholic conclusion: “I would live on plastic.”
Other autobiographical texts stress the palate-development of budding culinary enthusiasts. A. J. Liebling recounts his initiation into the nexus of gastronomy and history that characterized the culture of Paris between the two world wars; while M.F.K. Fisher writes about the ambiguities of her initiation into the painful pleasure she associates with one food, oysters, although later in her marvelous memoir, The Gastronomical Me, she was to celebrate her own immersion—like Liebling’s—in a European culinary milieu.
Some memoirists single out special dishes that signal family bonds: the pumpernickel bagels of Calvin Trillin’s Sunday shopping expeditions with his daughters; the savory Mexican menudo that Ray Gonzalez considers a hangover cure; the “food suitcase” crammed with Bengali spices and herbs that Jhumpa Lahiri associates with childhood trips to Calcutta. Still others remember foods served at significant family occasions. Here we have Ehrlich’s tale of a Passover dinner with its food rituals and cooking across the generations, and Sandra Gilbert’s bittersweet verse about her Jewish mother-in-law’s dogged resistance to a succulent Italian artichoke that evoked a culinary world for the Italian-American poet. Despite their differences, all these writers understand gastronomy to be a guide to the remembrance of things past, just as the consumption of a simple madeleine was for the narrator of Marcel Proust’s sublime novel, in the famous passage that we include in the first section of this anthology.
LIEBLING WAS AN essayist on many subjects, including horse racing, boxing, the state of the press, New York street life, war, and food. For several years he wrote columns for The New Yorker on these and numerous other subjects. As a young man in the 1920s he went to Paris to study literature, but he really wanted to learn about French culture, especially its restaurants; that year in Paris led to a lifelong obsession with French food, culminating in Between Meals, a book many regard as the best of all food memoirs. Our selection from this gastronomical coming-of-age tale, Liebling’s account of his “researches as a feeder,” argues that a modest restaurant budget allows for a more discerning palate and more culinary learning than unlimited funds can provide (one is forced to make interesting trade-offs and to be more adventurous). Liebling shows his appreciation for small, humble bistros—where priests and hookers alike might dine—places that serve the simple but delectable family cooking the French call cuisine de grandmère.
from Between Meals: Just Enough Money
IF THE FIRST requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference to the size of the total. The optimum financial position for a serious apprentice feeder is to have funds in hand for three more days, with a reasonable, but not certain, prospect of reinforcements thereafter. The student at the Sorbonne waiting for his remittance, the newspaperman waiting for his salary, the freelance writer waiting for a check that he has cause to believe is in the mail—all are favorably situated to learn. (It goes without saying that it is essential to be in France.) The man of appetite who will stint himself when he can see three days ahead has no vocation, and I dismiss from consideration, as manic, the fellow who will spend the lot on one great feast and then live on fried potatoes until his next increment; Tuaregs eat that way, but only because they never know when they are going to come by their next sheep. The clear-headed voracious man learns because he tries to compose his meals to obtain an appreciable quantity of pleasure from each. It is from this weighing of delights against their cost that the student eater (particularly if he is a student at the University of Paris) erects the scale of values that will serve him until he dies or has to reside in the Middle West for a long period. The scale is different for each eater, as it is for each writer.
Eating is highly subjective, and the man who accepts say-so in youth will wind up in bad and overtouted restaurants in middle age, ordering what the maître d’hôtel suggests. He will have been guided to them by food-snob publications, and he will fall into the habit of drinking too much before dinner to kill the taste of what he has been told he should like but doesn’t. . . .
The reference room where I pursued my own first earnest researches as a feeder without the crippling handicap of affluence was the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts, on the Rue Bonaparte, in 1926–27. I was a student, in a highly generalized way, at the Sorbonne, taking targets of opportunity for study. Eating soon developed into one of my major subjects. The franc was at twenty-six to the dollar, and the researcher, if he had only a certain sum—say, six francs—to spend, soon established for himself whether, for example, a half bottle of Tavel supérieur, at three and a half francs, and braised beef heart and yellow turnips, at two and a half, gave him more or less pleasure than a contre-filet of beef, at five francs, and a half bottle of ordinaire, at one franc. He might find that he liked the heart, with its strong, rich flavor and odd texture, nearly as well as the beef, and that since the Tavel was overwhelmingly better than the cheap wine, he had done well to order the first pair. Or he might find that he so much preferred the generous, sanguine contre-filet that he could accept the undistinguished picrate instead of the Tavel. As in a bridge tournament, the learner played duplicate hands, making the opposite choice of fare the next time the problem presented itself. (It was seldom as simple as my example, of course, because a meal usually included at least an hors d’oeuvre and a cheese, and there was a complexity of each to choose from. The arrival, in season, of fresh asparagus or venison further complicated matters. In the first case, the investigator had to decide what course to omit in order to fit the asparagus in, and, in the second, whether to forgo all else in order to afford venison.)
A rich man, faced with this simple sumptuary dilemma, would have ordered both the Tavel and the contre-filet. He would then never know whether he liked beef heart, or whether an ordinaire wouldn’t do him as well as something better. (There are people to whom wine is merely an alcoholized sauce, although they may have sensitive palates for meat or pastries.) When one considers the millions of permutations of foods and wines to test, it is easy to see that life is too short for the formulation of dogma. Each eater can but establish a few general principles that are true only for him. Our hypothetical rich client might even have ordered a Pommard, because it was listed at a higher price than the Tavel, and because he was more likely to be acquainted with it. He would then never have learned that a good Tavel is better than a fair-to-middling Pommard—better than a fair-to-middling almost anything, in my opinion. In student restaurants, renowned wines like Pommard were apt to be mediocre specimens of their kind, since the customers could never have afforded the going prices of the best growths and years. A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost.
There is small likelihood that a rich man will frequent modest restaurants even at the beginning of his gustatory career; he will patronize restaurants, sometimes good, where the prices are high and the repertory is limited to dishes for which it is conventionally permissible to charge high prices. From this list, he will order the dishes that in his limited experience he has already found agreeable. Later, when his habits are formed, he will distrust the originality that he has never been constrained to develop. A diet based chiefly on game birds and oysters becomes a habit as easily as a diet of jelly doughnuts and hamburgers. It is a better habit, of course, but restrictive just the same. Even in Paris, one can dine in the costly restaurants for years without learning that there are fish other than sole, turbot, salmon (in season), trout, and the Mediterranean rouget and loup de mer. The fresh herring or sardine sauce moutarde; the colin froid mayonnaise; the conger eel en matelote; the small fresh-water fish of the Seine and the Marne, fried crisp and served en buisson; the whiting en colère (his tail in his mouth, as if contorted with anger); and even the skate and the dorade—all these, except by special and infrequent invitation, are out of the swim. (It is a standing tourist joke to say that the fishermen on the quays of the Seine never catch anything, but in fact they often take home the makings of a nice fish fry, especially in winter. In my hotel on the Square Louvois, I had a room waiter—a Czech naturalized in France—who used to catch hundreds of goujons and ablettes on his days off. He once brought a shoe box of them to my room to prove that Seine fishing was not pure whimsy.) All the fish I have mentioned have their habitats in humbler restaurants, the only places where the aspirant eater can become familiar with their honest fishy tastes and the decisive modes of accommodation that suit them. Personally, I like tastes that know their own minds. The reason that people who detest fish often tolerate sole is that sole doesn’t taste very much like fish, and even this degree of resemblance disappears when it is submerged in the kind of sauce that patrons of Piedmontese restaurants in London and New York think characteristically French. People with the same apathy toward decided flavor relish “South African lobster” tails—frozen as long as the Siberian mammoth—because they don’t taste lobstery. (“South African lobsters” are a kind of sea crayfish, or langouste, but that would be nothing against them if they were fresh.) They prefer processed cheese because it isn’t cheesy, and synthetic vanilla extract because it isn’t vanillary. They have made a triumph of the Delicious apple because it doesn’t taste like an apple, and of the Golden Delicious because it doesn’t taste like anything. In a related field, “dry” (non-beery) beer and “light” (non-Scotchlike) Scotch are more of the same. The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago by the then Estonian consul-general in New York, and it accounts perfectly for the drink’s rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy—tomato juice, orange juice, chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.
The consistently rich man is also unlikely to make the acquaintance of meat dishes of robust taste—the hot andouille and andouillette, which are close-packed sausages of smoked tripe, and the boudin, or blood pudding, and all its relatives that figure in the pages of Rabelais and on the menus of the market restaurants. He will not meet the civets, or dark, winy stews of domestic rabbit and old turkey. A tough old turkey with plenty of character makes the best civet, and only in a civet is turkey good to eat. Young turkey, like young sheep, calf, spring chicken, and baby lobster, is a pale preliminary phase of its species. The pig, the pigeon, and the goat—as suckling, squab, and kid—are the only animals that are at their best to eat when immature. The first in later life becomes gross through indolence; the second and third grow muscular through overactivity. And the world of tripery is barred to the well-heeled, except for occasional exposure to an expurgated version of tripes à la mode de Caen. They have never seen grasdouble (tripe cooked with vegetables, principally onions) or pieds et paquets (sheep’s tripe and calves’ feet with salt pork). . . .
Finally, to have done with our rich man, seldom does he see even the simple, well-pounded bifteck or the pot-au-feu itself—the foundation glory of French cooking. Alexandre Dumas the elder wrote in his Dictionary of Cuisine: “French cooking, the first of all cuisines, owes its superiority to the excellence of French bouillon. This excellence derives from a sort of intuition with which I shall not say our cooks but our women of the people are endowed.” This bouillon is one of the two end products of the pot. The other is the material that has produced it—beef, carrots, parsnips, white turnips, leeks, celery, onions, cloves, garlic, and cracked marrowbones, and, for the dress version, fowl. Served in some of the bouillon, this constitutes the dish known as pot-au-feu. Dumas is against poultry “unless it is old,” but advises that “an old pigeon, a partridge, or a rabbit roasted in advance, a crow in November or December” works wonders. He postulates “seven hours of sustained simmering,” with constant attention to the “scum” that forms on the surface and to the water level. (“Think twice before adding water, though if your meat actually rises above the level of the bouillon it is necessary to add boiling water to cover it.”) This supervision demands the full-time presence of the cook in the kitchen throughout the day, and the maintenance of the temperature calls for a considerable outlay in fuel. It is one reason that the pot-au-feu has declined as a chief element of the working-class diet in France. Women go out to work, and gas costs too much. For a genuinely good pot-au-feu, Dumas says, one should take a fresh piece of beef—“a twelve-to-fifteen-pound rump”—and simmer it seven hours in the bouillon of the beef that you simmered seven hours the day before. He does not say what good housekeepers did with the first piece of beef—perhaps cut it into sandwiches for the children’s lunch. He regrets that even when he wrote, in 1869, excessive haste was beginning to mar cookery; the demanding ritual of the pot itself had been abandoned. This was “a receptacle that never left the fire; day or night,” Dumas writes. “A chicken was put into it as a chicken was withdrawn, a piece of beef as a piece was taken out, and a glass of water whenever a cup of broth was removed. Every kind of meat that cooked in this bouillon gained, rather than lost, in flavor.” Pot-au-feu is so hard to find in chic restaurants nowadays that every Saturday evening there is a mass pilgrimage from the fashionable quarters to Chez Benoit, near the Châtelet—a small but not cheap restaurant that serves it once a week. I have never found a crow in Benoit’s pot, but all the rest is good.
PERHAPS AMERICA’S MOST celebrated food writer, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher married young and went with her first husband, Al Fisher, to France, where she quickly became a dedicated gourmet. In Dijon, introduced to French cookery, and then in countless culinary researches afterwards, she learned, as she put it, to “feed hungers” not just for food but for love. Her autobiographical The Gastronomical Me was probably the most groundbreaking “foodoir” of the twentieth-century, but it was accompanied by countless other books, including Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf. After her marriage with Al Fisher broke up, as she recounts in these stories, she met her true love, Dillwyn Parrish, called “Chexbres” in her writings. As she recounts the poignant events of her life, Fisher’s talent for remembering fascinating meals is enriched by her genius for dramatizing the significant personal meanings of such occasions. Here, in her narrative of her encounter with a “First Oyster,” she explores the parallels between sexual hunger and culinary desire.
from The Gastronomical Me: The First Oyster
THERE WERE ABOUT seventy boarders and twenty-five women, and for morning-recess lunch a pack of day-girls, and most of us ate with the delicacy and appreciation of half-starved animals. It must have been sickening to Mrs. Cheever to see us literally wolfing her well-planned, well-cooked, well-served dishes. For in spite of doing things wholesale, which some gastronomers say is impossible with any finesse, the things we ate at Miss Huntingdon’s were savory and interesting.
Mrs. Cheever, for instance, would get a consignment of strange honey from the Torrey pine trees, honey which only a few people in the world were supposed to have eaten. I remember it now with some excitement, as a grainy greenish stuff like some I once ate near Adelboden in the Bernese Alps, but then it was to most of us just something sweet and rather queer to put on hot biscuits. Tinned orange marmalade would have done as well.
At Thanksgiving she would let the Filipinos cover the breakfast tables with dozens of odd, beautiful little beasts they had made from vegetables and fruits and nuts, so that the dining room became for a while amazingly funny to us, and we were allowed to make almost as much noise as we wanted while we ate forbidden things like broiled sausage and played with the crazy toys. The boys would try not to laugh too, and even Mrs. Cheever would incline her queenly topknot less scornfully than usual when spoken to. . . .
Once, for the Christmas Party, she served Eastern oysters, fresh oysters, oysters still in their shells.
Nothing could have been more exotic in the early twenties in Southern California. The climate was still considered tropical, so that shellfish imported alive from the East were part of an oil-magnate’s dream, or perhaps something to be served once or twice a year at Victor Hugo’s, in a private room with pink candleshades and a canary. And of course any local molluscs were automatically deemed inedible, at least by nice people.
The people, that Christmas Party night, were indeed nice. We wore our formals: skirts not less than eight nor more than fifteen inches from the floor, dresses of light but not bright colors and of materials semi-transparent or opaque, neck-lines not more than three inches below the collar bone and sleeves long or elbow-length. We all passed the requirements of the catalog, but with such delectable additions as long chiffon scarves twined about our necks in the best Nita-Naldi-bronchitic manner, or great artificial flowers pinned with holiday abandon on our left shoulders. Two or three of the Seniors had fox furs slung nonchalantly about them, with the puffy tails dangling down over their firmly flattened young breasts in a most fashionable way.
There may even have been a certain amount of timid make-up in honor of Kris Kringle and the approaching libertinage of Christmas vacation, real or devoutly to be hoped for, but fortunately the dining room was lighted that night by candles only.
Mrs. Cheever had outdone herself, although all we thought then was that the old barn had never looked so pretty. The oblong tables, usually in ranks like dominoes in their box, were pushed into a great horseshoe, with a little table for Miss Huntingdon and Miss Blake and the minister and the president of the trustees in the middle, and a sparkling Christmas tree, and . . . yes! . . . a space for dancing! And there were candles, and the smells of pine branches and hot wax, and place cards all along the outer edge of the horseshoe so that the Freshmen would not sit in one clot and the other groups in theirs.
We marched once around the beautiful room in the flickering odorous candlelight, singing, “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” or some such thing to the scrapings of the assistant violin instructor and two other musicians, who in spite of their trousers had been accurately judged unable to arouse unseemly longings in our cloistered hearts.
Then we stood by the chairs marked with our names, and waited for the music to stop and Miss Huntingdon and the minister to ask the blessings in their fluty voices. It was all very exciting.
When I saw that I was to sit between a Senior and a Junior, with not a Freshman in sight, I felt almost uplifted with Christmas joy. It must mean that I was Somebody, to be thus honored, that perhaps I would even be elected to the Altar Guild next semester. . . .
I knew enough not to speak first, but could not help looking sideways at the enormous proud nose of Olmsted, who sat at my left. She was president of the Seniors, and moved about the school in a loose-limbed dreamy way that seemed to me seraphic. Inez, the Junior, was less impressive, but still had her own string of horses in Santa Barbara and could curse with great concentration, so many words that I only recognized damn and one or two others. Usually she had no use for me, but tonight she smiled, and the candlelight made her beady eyes look almost friendly.
The grace done with, we pulled our chairs in under the unaccustomed silkiness of our party-dress bottoms with less noise than usual, and the orchestra flung itself into a march. The pantry doors opened, and the dapper little house-boys pranced in, their smooth faces pulled straight and their eyes snapping with excitement.
They put a plate in front of each of us. We all looked hazily at what we saw, and waited with mixed feelings until Miss Huntingdon had picked up her fork (where, I wonder now, did Mrs. Cheever even find one hundred oyster forks in a California boarding school?) before we even thought of eating. I heard Inez mutter under her breath, several more words I did not recognize except as such, and then Olmsted said casually, “How charming! Blue Points!”
There was a quiet buzz . . . we were being extremely well-bred, all of us, for the party . . . and I know now that I was not the only Westerner who was scared shaky at the immediate prospect of eating her first raw oyster, and was putting it off for as long as possible.
I remembered hearing Mother say that it was vulgar as well as extremely unpleasant to do anything with an oyster but swallow it as quickly as possible, without thinking, but that the after-taste was rather nice. Of course it was different with tinned oysters in turkey dressing: they could be chewed with impunity, both social and hygienic, for some reason or other. But raw, they must be swallowed whole, and rapidly.
And alive.
With the unreasoning and terrible persnicketiness of a sixteen-year-old I knew that I would be sick if I had to swallow anything in the world alive, but especially a live oyster.
Olmsted picked up one deftly on the prongs of her little fork, tucked it under her enormous nose, and gulped. “Delicious,” she murmured.
“Jesus,” Inez said softly. “Well, here goes. The honor of the old school. Oi!” And she swallowed noisily. A look of smug surprise crept into her face, and she said in my ear, “Try one, Baby-face. It ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity. Try one. Slip and go easy.” She cackled suddenly, watching me with sly bright eyes.
“Yes, do,” Olmsted said.
I laughed lightly, tinklingly, like Helen in Helen and Warren, said, “Oh, I love Blue Points!” and got one with surprising neatness into my mouth.
At that moment the orchestra began to play, with sexless abandon, a popular number called, I think, “Horses.” It sounded funny in Miss Huntingdon’s dining room. Olmsted laughed, and said to me, “Come on, Kennedy. Let’s start the ball rolling, shall we?”
The fact that she, the most wonderful girl in the whole school, and the most intelligent, and the most revered, should ask me to dance when she knew very well that I was only a Sophomore, was so overwhelming that it made even the dreamlike reality that she had called me Kennedy, instead of Mary Frances, seem unimportant.
The oyster was still in my mouth. I smiled with care, and stood up, reeling at the thought of dancing the first dance of the evening with the senior-class president.
The oyster seemed larger. I knew that I must down it, and was equally sure that I could not. Then, as Olmsted put her thin hand on my shoulder blades, I swallowed once, and felt light and attractive and daring, to know what I had done. We danced stiffly around the room, and as soon as a few other pairs of timid girls came into the cleared space by the tree, headed toward Miss Huntingdon’s table.
Miss Huntingdon herself spoke to me by name, and Miss Blake laughed silently so that her black wig bobbled, and cracked her knuckles as she always did when she was having a good time, and the minister and Olmsted made a little joke about Silent Sophomores and Solemn Seniors, and I did not make a sound, and nobody seemed to think it strange. I was dumb with pleasure at my own importance . . . practically the Belle of the Ball I was! . . . and with a dawning gastronomic hunger. Oysters, my delicate taste buds were telling me, oysters are simply marvelous! More, more!
I floated on, figuratively at least, in Olmsted’s arms. The dance ended with a squeaky but cheerful flourish, and the girls went back to their seats almost as flushed as if they were returning from the arms of the most passionate West Point cadets in white gloves and coats.
The plates had been changed. I felt flattened, dismayed, as only children can about such things.
Olmsted said, “You’re a funny kid, Kennedy. Oh, green olives!” when I mumbled how wonderful it had been to dance with her, and Inez murmured in my ear, “Dance with me next, will you, Baby-face? There are a couple of things boys can do I can’t, but I can dance with you a damn sight better than that bitch Olmsted.”
I nodded gently, and smiled a tight smile at her, and thought that she was the most horrible creature I had ever known. Perhaps I might kill her some day. I was going to be sick.
I pushed back my chair.
“Hey, Baby-face!” The music started with a crash, and Inez put her arms surely about me, and led me with expert grace around and around the Christmas tree, while all the candles fluttered in time with my stomach.
“Why don’t you talk?” she asked once. “You have the cutest little ears I ever saw, Baby-face . . . like a pony I had, when I was in Colorado. How do you like the way I dance with you?”
Her arm tightened against my back. She was getting a crush on me, I thought, and here it was only Christmas and I was only a Sophomore! What would it be by April, the big month for them? I felt somewhat flattered, because Inez was a Junior and had those horses in Santa Barbara, but I hated her. My stomach felt better.
Miss Huntingdon was watching me again, while she held her water glass in her white thin fingers as if it had wine in it, or the Holy Communion. She leaned over and said something to Miss Blake, who laughed silently like a gargoyle and cracked her knuckles with delight, not at what Miss Huntingdon was saying but that she was saying anything at all. Perhaps they were talking about me, saying that I was nice and dependable and would be a good Senior president in two more years, or that I had the cutest ears. . . .
“Relax, kid,” Inez murmured. “Just pretend . . .”
The pantry door swung shut on a quick flash of gray chiffon and pearls, almost at my elbow, and before I knew it myself I was out of Inez’ skillful arms and after it. I had to escape from her; and the delightful taste of oyster in my mouth, my new-born gourmandise, sent me toward an unknown rather than a known sensuality.
The thick door shut out almost all the sound from the flickering, noisy dining room. The coolness of the pantry was shocking, and Mrs. Cheever was even more so. She stood, queenly indeed in her beautiful gray evening dress and her pearls and her snowy hair done in the same lumpy rhythm as Mary of England’s, and her face was all soft and formless with weeping.
Tears trickled like colorless blood from her eyes, which had always been so stony and now looked at me without seeing me at all. Her mouth, puckered from years of dyspepsia and disapproval, was loose and tender suddenly, and she sniffed with vulgar abandon.
She stood with one arm laid gently over the scarlet shoulders of the fat old nurse, who was dressed fantastically in the ancient costume of Saint Nicholas. It became her well, for her formless body was as generous as his, and her ninny-simple face, pink-cheeked and sweet, was kind like his and neither male nor female. The ratty white wig sat almost tidily on her head, which looked as if it hardly missed its neat black-ribboned nurse’s cap, and beside her on the pantry serving table lay the beard, silky and monstrous, ready to be pulled snug against her chins when it was time to give us all our presents under the Christmas tree.
She looked through me without knowing that I stood staring at her like a paralyzed rabbit. I was terrified, of her the costumed nurse and of Mrs. Cheever so hideously weeping and of all old women.
Mrs. Cheever did not see me either. For the first time I did not feel unattractive in her presence, but rather completely unnecessary. She put out one hand, and for a fearful moment I thought perhaps she was going to kiss me: her face was so tender. Then I saw that she was putting oysters carefully on a big platter that sat before the nurse, and that as she watched the old biddy eat them, tears kept running bloodlessly down her soft ravaged cheeks, while she spoke not a word.
I backed toward the door, hot as fire with shock and the dread confusion of adolescence, and said breathlessly, “Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Cheever! But I . . . that is, all the Sophomores . . . on behalf of the Sophomore Class I want to thank you for this beautiful, this simply marvelous party! Oysters . . . and . . . and everything . . . It’s all so nice!”
But Mrs. Cheever did not hear me. She stood with one hand still on the wide red shoulders of the nurse, and with the other she put the oysters left from the Christmas Party on a platter. Her eyes were smeared so that they no longer looked hard and hateful, and as she watched the old woman eat steadily, voluptuously, of the fat cold molluscs, she looked so tender that I turned anxiously toward the sureness and stability of such small passions as lay in the dining room.
The pantry door closed behind me. The orchestra was whipping through “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” with the assistant violin instructor doubling on the artificial mocking bird. A flock of little Filipino boys skimmed like monkeys into the candlelight, with great trays of cranberry sauce and salted nuts and white curled celery held above their heads, and I could tell by their faces that whatever they had seen in the pantry was already tucked far back behind their eyes, perhaps forever.
If I could still taste my first oyster, if my tongue still felt fresh and excited, it was perhaps too bad. Although things are different now, I hoped then, suddenly and violently, that I would never see one again.
A LIVELY AND prolific novelist, short story writer, and memoirist, Austin Clarke was born in Barbados but moved to Canada as a young man. His works have won a number of important prizes, especially the novel The Polished Hoe, and he has taught or been a writer in residence at universities in the United States and Canada. His exuberant Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, from which we present an excerpt, is a kind of gastronomic autobiography, complete with meditations on his favorite recipes and composed in Barbadian, the West Indies dialect of his homeland. “I don’t eat every day,” Clarke once confided to an interviewer. “And I can’t cook and sit down and eat by myself. . . . So I would eat if I had friends [over]. That is when I would cook.” But the gusto with which he whips up tales of Barbadian cookery and its roots in slavery belies this confession, as he evokes the special pleasures of dishes devised by necessity.
from Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit:
Souse, but no Black Pudding
SOME PEOPLE DOES live only for Sundays. To go to church. Some people does live only for Fridays. Pay-day. Some people does live for Wednesdays. To attend mid-week church or to go to Mothers Union meetings, or just because Wednesday is soup day.
But with me? Gimme Saturdays any morning. Gimme Saturdays seven days of the week! Saturday, when I was growing up, was the day for making black pudding and souse, the best food in the world. As a young, strapping teenager, the race-horse, as my mother called me, I used to walk across half o’ the island o’ Barbados: from Paynes Bay in Sin-James parish, where I was living at the time, right up to the Abbey in Christ Church parish, a journey of twelve miles at least. And when you realize that Barbados is twenty-one miles in the longest straightest direction, you know how long twelve miles is, out o’ twenty-one! Just to get pudding and souse.
Up in the Abbey there was the Kings, a whole family o’ girls who could make some o’ the sweetest pudding and souse in the whole island. To-besides, one of the King girls was in love with me.
But whether or not you was in love, you still would make sure that the woman you eating pudding and souse from was a clean person—clean enough that you could close your two eyes and eat a piece o’ snout, or a piece o’ the ear, and not feel funny. Yuh know? From childhood you was taught to-don’t eat black pudding and souse from any-and-everybody who makes it, you hear? Some people don’t clean the belly and the pig feets clean-clean, yuh!
“Watch what going into your stomach, boy!”
So, from reputation, word o’ mouth, and because you know the woman who make the black pudding and souse (she and your mother might be friends), you would track she down to the ends o’ the earth, just to “taste her hand” on a Saturday. The reputation of the best makers o’ pudding and souse does spread through the whole island, and men does travel from Sin-Lucy parish in the north to Oistin’s Town in Christ Church in the south, just to taste that woman’s hand.
But travelling all that distance to eat black pudding and souse, walking for miles and miles in the damn hot sun if you don’t have a bicycle, is not merely to full-up your belly with pig foots and snout and pieces of ear. Eating black pudding and souse on a Saturday is a social event, with certain protocols that go with it, certain rites and rituals. For example, if you buying the pudding and souse in a rum shop, you have to buy a rum first. If you buying it from a pudding-and-souse woman, you first have to engage her in conversation. Axe she ’bout her thrildren (her children), or her boyfriend if you’s the same age as she. And only when them pleasantries are finish, then you can tell she, “Child, gimme some o’ this nice pudding and souse!”
In Brooklyn, where there is more Barbadians than the sum total o’ Barbadians living in Barbados, the pudding and souse comes in strict political stripes. Lemme explain what this mean.
Pudding and souse, as you remember, is the national dish o’ Barbados. The Barbadian national pastime is talking ‘bout politics. And since eating pudding and souse is something that you does do in a rum shop, whilst you’re talking—and “talking a lotta shite” as we say, meaning talking about politics, church, women, men and thrildren—it is a case o’ night following the day that, whilst sucking on a pig foot, you might be hearing about the Barbadian budget, the latest political scandal in Barbados, hearing who really kill Mark Stokes and drop he in the sea, or if a certain prime minister o’ Barbados dead from drugs or from poisoning, or if a woman kill he, in truth. So, eating pudding and souse in a rum shop is a dangerous pastime. . . .
When I was a boy, every Saturday afternoon as God send, around two o’clock, the hottest part of the afternoon, you would see a woman sitting down by the door of the neighbourhood shop, Miss Edwards’s Shop, behind a big tray placed on a box. The large cloth covering the tray, and protecting its contents from flies, was made from a flour bag that was bleached for days and days until the red and blue names of the Canadian mill and manufacturer disappeared and the cloth became white as snow.
The woman sat on a smaller box as if it were a throne. She wore a starched and ironed dress that had white flowers in the design, and her white apron was starched and pleated, reaching below her knee. Her hair was combed back severely from her forehead in corn rows and tied tightly with a white ribbon.
This is the black-pudding-and-souse woman. A goddess. A Queen of Hot-Cuisine, Bajan style. The High Priestess o’ Souse!
If she didn’t have a good reputation throughout the whole neighbourhood, and if she wasn’t a woman that pass muster, cleanliness-wise and decency-wise, she could sit for days and days on end offering people black pudding and souse free, and not one soul would take even a half-inch o’ pudding or one little piece o’ souse from her tray. But the fact that this woman sitting down there, beside the door of the shop, where all the neighbours buy their groceries, in full daylight, in all her starched white and hairgreased majesty, mean that she is somebody important, somebody accepted, somebody clean in the neighbourhood. Her place is secure and sanctified.
The fact that she selling black pudding and souse, and that you happen to have money in your pocket, don’t mean that you could fork yourself up to her tray and say, “Gimme five shillings in pudding and souse!” You just do not tell her what you want and what you don’t want. Oh, no! You would have to take what she give you, even though it is your money buying it.
Back there and back then, money didn’t do the same kind o’ talking that money does do up here in Canada and Amurca. Oh, no! Before money, you have to have the class to go with it; ’cause a lot o’ other people in the neighbourhood have class, and more class than you. Oh, yes! So, without class, you have to wait your turn.
“And know your blasted place, boy!” the black-pudding-and-souse woman would tell you. And she would laugh, “Heh-hehhh!” to soften the blow in the reminder.
Imagine a boy going up to this black-pudding-and-souse woman and telling she, “Gimme two shillings in souse. And I want the pig’s feet and some of the ear! And three shillings in the black pudding. And I want the white black pudding, not the black black pudding!”
He would have to be born mad!
“What you say?” the black-pudding-and-souse woman would ask he. “You want? You want what? Look, nigger-man, you will get what I decide to sell you. What the hell you mean by ‘you want’? You want a lash in your arse! Have manners, boy. I have souse put-by for the lady in the wall house, out the Front Road—one o’ my steady customers. And I have to save-back ten shillings in pig’s feet for the manager o’ the Plantation. And Mistress Yard, out the Front Road, have to have her souse, six shillings’ worth, and two yards o’ the white black pudding. And you come stanning-up in front o’ me, in front my tray, telling me you want? You want a lash in you lil black arse! Wait your turn, boy. Know your place! I could maybe spare six cents in souse, and give you a sixpence in black pudding. Maybe, if yuh lucky. You want it? Or you don’t want it? Speak your damn mind. I busy with my regular customers!” And as she is saying, she is serving other customers. . . .
Now, to find out how black pudding and souse is made, we have to return to the big wooden table in Gertrude’s backyard where the dead pig is lying.
The pig head cut off by now, and the blood collected in a pail, because some o’ this blood is to be used to make the black pudding. The butcher just handed the four feet, or trotters, to Gertrude, along with pieces o’ pork up by the knees, the ham hocks.
For the rest of the morning the woman will work and work, cleaning these parts o’ the pig, washing them in lime juice. The biggest job is “to clean the belly”—to wash out, over and over again, all the intestines, which is the part used to make black pudding.
First, you take the intestines and empty them out. Then you clean them clean-clean-clean, and soak them in a bucket with lots o’ lime juice and white vinegar. You have to find a way to turn the intestines inside-out in order to clean them even more better still. Then turn-back the insides, outside-in, and wash them some more. And some more, until they really clean.
When you finish cleaning the belly, you have to dry them off and then soak them again in lime juice, a lil salt and a lil white vinegar, and leave them to “draw.” “Drawing” means that the salt and lime juice and vinegar going have a chance to work into the belly, so that the taste of “freshness” (since a pig was alive one minute, dead the next and eaten the same day) is drowned and killed.
You now have time to start peeling the sweet potatoes and grating them. You got to cut up the onions, eschalots, cucumber and fresh broad-leaf thyme into lil pieces. Cut up the hot pepper, and please, don’t pass your two hands near your eyes! That pepper doesn’t make sport. It real hot! Mix in a lil flour with the grated sweet potato to give it some body. Add in some nutmeg or cloves, some sugar, some salt and some hot pepper, and mix up all these ingreasements.
To make black pudding that is black, you would have to add in some blood to give colour to the mixture. But if you have bad nerves, or a weak stomach, forget the blood; you can use food colouring instead. Or just leave the mixture as it is. Black pudding without the blood or food colouring is called white black pudding, or white pudding.
Now get a funnel, and tie the funnel to one end of a clean and dry intestine. Tie-off the other end of the intestine and start stuffing the grated potato mixture into the intestine through the funnel. You ever heard of chitlings? Well, this is how chitlings was born.
When the intestine is full-up with the potato, but not packed too tight, tie-she-off with another piece o’ string. Full-up all the intestines with the potato mixture in this way, until all the grated potato been used.
If you have any intestines leff back, you could boil them or fry them by themselves. If you run out o’ intestine and have some grated potato mixture leff back, throw all of this in a frying pan with hot lard oil, or olive oil, and my God in heaven!—the consequence o’ frying this stuffing is bound to gladden your heart.
Food, like most things, is something that you have to improvise with. You have to use the ingreasements that are available, or that grow in your backyard. We in Barbados, where black pudding and souse was made first in 1752—long before anybody heard o’ Trinidad or Jamaica or Sin-Kitts—we uses to grow a lot o’ sweet potatoes. So we does stuff the intestines with grated sweet potato.
Down in Guyana, and in some parts o’ Trinidad, they never saw a real sweet potato in their lives, unless a uncle or a aunt put one in a envelope or a barrel and post it to Port-of-Spain or Georgetown. But they have rice. So, Trinidadians and Guyanese does stuff their black pudding with rice. It don’t taste too bad. You could eat it. But it ain’t Bajan pudding!
Back to our intestines. They now stuffed with the grated potatoes and waiting on a large plate. Put a large—and I mean large—pot or saucepan o’ water on the fire, and drop in a bay leaf or two. Bring the water to a boil. Then turn down the heat and take up each stuffed intestine careful, careful, careful in your hand, and lay she down in the water, without splashing the water. Don’t cover-down the pot. You need to see what happening inside that pot.
The most important thing to remember not to do, whilst your intestines is boiling, is to talk. Do not talk. Talking is the worst thing you could do, over a pot o’ black pudding that cooking.
Do not open your mouth, even to tell your boyfriend or your girlfriend that you love him or her, or to tell your husband that he is a son-of-a-bitch for not helping you clean the belly. Do not utter one word. Because to talk while your black pudding is cooking in a pot, according to the best superstitions and laws o’ voodoo of Barbados, is to make the black pudding burst in the pot. The sausage casings going burst and explode, and transform the contents o’ this big pot into a pool o’ brown porridge.
I just give you a quick lesson in making black pudding. I wouldn’t advise you to try your hand in making it, though. It’s tummuch work. And too risky.
SOUSE, on the other hand, is different. It’s made from the pig’s feet, from the ham hocks, from parts o’ the pig head, like the snout and the ears, and from some of the leaner parts of the pig, near the belly. These parts, or “features,” are boiled until they are soft. They are either left to cool off in the water in which they were cooked, or are taken out and placed on the counter to cool, or are put in cold water to cool off quickly.
While these pig features cooling off, it’s time to make the prickle. The prickle for souse is the mixture in which the features are put to soak and get “soused-up.” Hence the name of the dish, souse.
Cut up onions, green onions, cucumber and fresh thyme in a large bowl. Don’t slice the cucumber; dice it.
Add salt and pepper to suit your taste. Fresh hot peppers is always better than black pepper shaken from a shaker. Don’t forget a touch o’ white vinegar, to help the pork draw.
Stir up these ingreasements in a bowl, and taste the prickle to make sure it reach the hotness you like. Expert souse-makers does argue that you must pour a lil water in which the features was cooked into the prickle, to give it some body and that nice taste o’ pork.
Incidentally, souse made from a pig just killed is more better and tastier than souse made from pork that you buy in a supermarket.
When the pork features cool off, clean them using a lot o’ lemon. Rub and rub lemon peth all over them. The cleaning of the features at this stage is the most important part of the preparation of souse.
Cut up the features in bite-size pieces and throw them in the prickle. Stir them round, and cover them down for at least one hour. Two hours is the correct amount of time to leave them sousing-up. The more longer they soak in the prickle, the more better they will be soused-up, and the sweeter your souse going taste.
Some people who pretend they was born in the Wessindies does put up their nose at this way of eating souse cold. They argue that souse got to be served hot and eaten hot. But don’t mind them. Those unbelievers are Wessindians who was born in Sin-Kitts or the Bahamas. No Guyanese, nor Trinidadian nor Grenadian, would try to mislead you by telling you that souse have to be served hot.
Souse, the real Barbadian souse, have to be served and eaten one way only: cold.
Another thing that you might hear from some Wessindians is that anyone who does consume blood in their food, from an animal, have cannibalistic tendencies. Well, I am not going tell you that I like pig blood in my black pudding. Nor am I not going tell you that I do not like blood in my black pudding. Historically and culturally speaking, there is two kinds o’ black pudding: black pudding that is black and black pudding that is white.
Now that the features soaking, you have time to pour yourself a beer or a rum and soda, or better still, a Bajan rum punch. And whilst you are sipping that rum punch take out the lengths o’ black pudding from the pot and lay them on a large platter.
Dip a piece o’ paper towel, or even better, a few feathers tied together to make a light brush, in some olive oil, lard oil or any kind o’ oil, and brush it over each piece o’ black pudding as if you’re touching up a water-colour painting. Light and nice. You are going to see the black pudding shine like a first-class Polish sausage.
When you ready to serve, this is how you do it. Get a sharp knife and cut off pieces o’ black pudding, about two inches in length. Put a couple of pieces on a plate with a few pieces o’ souse, consisting of a pig foot, a piece o’ the ear, the snout, and a nice piece from the ham hock. Pour a lil prickle all over the souse, and sprinkle a few pieces of fresh parsley or watercress on the black pudding. You could add some fresh parsley to the souse to make it look pretty, or as North Amurcans would say, to “garnish” it.
There is a special way, ordain in Barbadian culture and history, of eating pudding and souse. You eat it out in the open air, in the hot sun, with the sea breeze blowing in your face and the wind licking your body.
If you don’t eat-off all the souse and black pudding the same day it made, then have it for breakfast the next morning. All you have to do is fry the black pudding in a pan with a lil butter; not with too much heat, though. And you can fry-up the souse too. But don’t pour in the prickle with the souse when you frying it. (Real Barbadians would know how to cut up pieces of the souse, small-small, mix them in flour, and fry them to make “souse-fritters.”)
Serve this meal o’ pudding and souse with some fresh bread, but no butter, as you would if you were serving it on Saturday.
So, this is pudding and souse, the food of the gods and of the slaves of Barbados.
Black pudding and souse would have to be the ultimate in slave food. It is made from the parts of the pig that nobody else wanted or had the heart to eat. But regardless, pudding and souse is the sweetest thing handed down by our ancestors, African slaves, to each and every one of us present-day Wessindians.
Perhaps it is a dish that you would have to be born in the particular culture that prepares it for you to understand and appreciate it. If you taste it once, you bound to want to taste it every Saturday for the rest of your life.
A lot o’ people does talk about it, but few can make it. In other words, the Biblical saying can be applied to the making of pudding and souse: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”
When you meet a woman who does make sweet pudding and souse, you will make sure that you keep her as a friend, as a wife or as a lover for the rest o’ your life, the rest o’ your born days.
The next time you see a black-pudding-and-souse woman, you tell she, “I would like a lil pudding and souse.”
“How you want it?” she going to ask you.
“Man, put it in my hand, man! And don’t forget to pour some of the prickle . . .”
She going cut you a inch o’ black pudding that is black and a inch o’ black pudding that is white, and place them on a sheet o’ brown paper. She going pass the feathers dipped in oil over the black pudding. And you going eat-off these two pieces fast fast because the pudding sweet, oh my God in heaven! It too sweet, in-true! And then the real sport going begin.
“You tekking your souse now, then?” she going axe you.
And with her ladle she going stir up all that sweet prickle, all them ingreasements in her souse-bowl, and she going empty a ladleful in the palm of your hand.
And you going raise your palm to your two lips, with your two eyes closed, to measure in intense concentration the “strength” o’ this souse-prickle. You will keep your two eyes closed still, and empty the contents o’ your palm into your mouth. You will start to chaw and eat, and all the time you’re eating—with your two eyes still closed—you gotta say, “Hem! Ah-hem!” in testimony to the fact that the souse have a sweet fragrance o’ pepper, and it blasted hot.
Water will come to your two eyes, and your throat will be cleared.
“Good Jesus Christ in heaven!” as my mother say, “that is souse, boy!”
BORN AND RAISED in New York City, Lorde defined herself as a “black, lesbian, feminist, warrior, poet.” Her distinguished works in verse include the collections Coal and The Black Unicorn while her influential contributions to feminist theory are represented in The Uses of the Erotic and Sister Outsider. From girlhood a rebel and an activist, Lorde was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978; after undergoing a mastectomy, she became one of the first public figures who refused to wear a prosthesis, explaining in The Cancer Journals her choice not to falsify herself. Her brilliant “biomythography,” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, chronicles her childhood in Harlem and then her years of coming out as a lesbian in the Village and elsewhere. Significant passages of the book meditate on her relationship with her proud West Indian mother, whose native land was “Carriacou” (Curaçao), a lost place of culinary plenty Lorde describes as “my truly private paradise of blugoe and breadfruit hanging from the trees, of nutmeg and lime and sapodilla, of tonka beans and red and yellow Paradise Plums.”
WHEN I WAS growing up in my mother’s house, there were spices you grated and spices you pounded, and whenever you pounded spice and garlic or other herbs, you used a mortar. Every West Indian woman worth her salt had her own mortar. Now if you lost or broke your mortar, you could, of course, buy another one in the market over on Park Avenue, under the bridge, but those were usually Puerto Rican mortars, and even though they were made out of wood and worked exactly the same way, somehow they were never really as good as West Indian mortars. Now where the best mortars came from I was never really sure, but I knew it must be in the vicinity of that amorphous and mystically perfect place called “home.” And whatever came from “home” was bound to be special.
My mother’s mortar was an elaborate affair, quite at variance with most of her other possessions, and certainly with her projected public view of herself. It stood, solid and elegant, on a shelf in the kitchen cabinet for as long as I can remember, and I loved it dearly.
The mortar was of a foreign fragrant wood, too dark for cherry and too red for walnut. To my child eyes, the outside was carved in an intricate and most enticing manner. There were rounded plums and oval indeterminate fruit, some long and fluted like a banana, others ovular and end-swollen like a ripe alligator pear. In between these were smaller rounded shapes like cherries, lying in batches against and around each other.
I loved to finger the hard roundness of the carved fruit, and the always surprising termination of the shapes as the carvings stopped at the rim and the bowl sloped abruptly downward, smoothly oval but suddenly business like. The heavy sturdiness of this useful wooden object always made me feel secure and somehow full; as if it conjured up from all the many different flavors pounded into the inside wall, visions of delicious feasts both once enjoyed and still to come.
The pestle was long and tapering, fashioned from the same mysterious rose-deep wood, and fitted into the hand almost casually, familiarly. The actual shape reminded me of a summer crook-necked squash uncurled and slightly twisted. It could also have been an avocado, with the neck of the alligator pear elongated and the whole made efficient for pounding, without ever losing the apparent soft firmness and the character of the fruit which the wood suggested. It was slightly bigger at the grinding end than most pestles, and the widened curved end fitted into the bowl of the mortar easily. Long use and years of impact and grinding within the bowl’s worn hollow had softened the very surface of the wooden pestle, until a thin layer of split fibers coated the rounded end like a layer of velvet. A layer of the same velvety mashed wood lined the bottom inside the sloping bowl.
My mother did not particularly like to pound spice, and she looked upon the advent of powdered everything as a cook’s boon. But there were some certain dishes that called for a particular savory blending of garlic, raw onion, and pepper, and souse was one of them.
For our mother’s souse, it didn’t matter what kind of meat was used. You could have hearts, or beefends, or even chicken backs and gizzards when we were really poor. It was the pounded-up saucy blend of herb and spice rubbed into the meat before it was left to stand so for a few hours before cooking that made that dish so special and unforgettable. But my mother had some very firm ideas about what she liked best to cook and about which were her favorite dishes, and souse was definitely not one of either.
On the very infrequent occasions that my mother would allow one of us three girls to choose a meal—as opposed to helping to prepare it, which was a daily routine—on those occasions my sisters would usually choose one of those proscribed dishes so dear to our hearts remembered from our relatives’ tables, contraband, and so very rare in our house. They might ask for hot dogs, perhaps, smothered in ketchup sauce, or with crusty Boston-baked beans; or american chicken, breaded first and fried crispy the way the southern people did it; or creamed something-or-other that one of my sisters had tasted at school; what-have-you croquettes or anything fritters; or once even a daring outrageous request for slices of fresh watermelon, hawked from the back of a rickety wooden pickup truck with the southern road-dust still on her slatted sides, from which a young bony Black man with a turned-around baseball cap on his head would hang and half-yell, half-yodel—“Wahr—deeeeeee-mayyyyyyy-lawnnnnnnn.”
There were many american dishes I longed for too, but on the one or two occasions a year that I got to choose a meal, I would always ask for souse. That way, I knew that I would get to use my mother’s mortar, and this in itself was more treat for me than any of the forbidden foods. Besides, if I really wanted hot dogs or anything croquettes badly enough, I could steal some money from my father’s pocket and buy them in the school lunch.
“Mother, let’s have souse,” I’d say, and never even stop to think about it. The anticipated taste of the soft spicy meat had become inseparable in my mind from the tactile pleasures of using my mother’s mortar.
“But what makes you think anybody can find time to mash up all that stuff?” My mother would cut her hawk-grey eyes at me from beneath their heavy black brows. “Among-you children never stop to think,” and she’d turn back to whatever it was she had been doing. If she had just come from the office with my father, she might be checking the day’s receipts, or she might be washing the endless piles of dirty linen that always seemed to issue from rooming-houses.
“Oh, I’ll pound the garlic, Mommy!” would be my next line in the script written by some ancient and secret hand, and off I’d go to the cabinet to get down the heavy wooden mortar and pestle.
I took a head of garlic out from the garlic bottle in the icebox, and breaking off ten or twelve cloves from the head, I carefully peeled away the tissue lavender skin, slicing each stripped peg in half lengthwise. I dropped them piece by piece into the capacious waiting bowl of the mortar. Taking a slice from a small onion, I put the rest aside to be used later over the meat, and cutting the slice into quarters, I tossed it into the mortar also. Next came the coarsely ground fresh black pepper, and then a lavish blanketing cover of salt over the whole. Last, if we had any, a few leaves from the top of a head of celery. My mother sometimes added a slice of green pepper, but I did not like the texture of the pepper-skin under the pestle, and preferred to add it along with the sliced onion later on, leaving it all to sit over the seasoned and resting meat.
After all the ingredients were in the bowl of the mortar, I fetched the pestle and placing it into the bowl, slowly rotated the shaft a few times, working it gently down through all the ingredients to mix them. Only then would I lift the pestle, and with one hand firmly pressed around the carved side of the mortar caressing the wooden fruit with my aromatic fingers, I thrust sharply downward, feeling the shifting salt and the hard little pellets of garlic right up through the shaft of the wooden pestle. Up again, down, around, and up—so the rhythm began.
The thud push rub rotate up repeated over and over. The muted thump of the pestle on the bed of grinding spice as the salt and pepper absorbed the slowly yielding juices of the garlic and celery leaves.
Thud push rub rotate up. The mingling fragrances rising from the bowl of the mortar.
Thud push rub rotate up. The feeling of the pestle held between my curving fingers, and the mortar’s outside rounding like fruit into my palm as I steadied it against my body.
All these transported me into a world of scent and rhythm and movement and sound that grew more and more exciting as the ingredients liquefied.
Sometimes my mother would look over at me with that amused annoyance which passed for tenderness.
“What you think you making there, garlic soup? Enough, go get the meat now.” And I would fetch the lamb hearts, for instance, from the icebox and begin to prepare them. Cutting away the hardened veins at the top of the smooth firm muscles, I divided each oval heart into four wedge-shaped pieces, and taking a bit of the spicy mash from the mortar with my fingertips, I rubbed each piece with the savory mix, the pungent smell of garlic and onion and celery enveloping the kitchen.
TRILLIN IS ONE of America’s great writers on food, famous for a set of works—American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat; and Third Helpings—known as “The Tummy Trilogy.” He creates the persona—but it’s also true—of an insatiable eater whose hedonism in consuming good but unfancy food is matched only by his pleasure in tracking it down, whether he’s searching for the perfect bagel shop in Greenwich Village, the best BBQ joint in Kansas City, or a fabled Cajun shack in the Louisiana bayous. He is inevitably serious about food and hilariously funny at the same time. “Health food makes me sick,” he once intoned. As in so many of his writings, here he invokes his two daughters and his late wife, whom he once criticized for being unwilling to eat more than three meals a day. Even as he amusingly discusses the sociology of bagels and their consumption in white-bread America, he attempts to bribe one of his San Francisco-based daughters to return to New York (where he lives) by dangling a lure of great bagels, the kind that California, with its raisin and blueberry varieties, can barely approach.
from Feeding a Yen: A Magic Bagel
NOT LONG AFTER the turn of the millennium, I had an extended father-daughter conversation with my older daughter, Abigail, on the way back from a dim sum lunch in Chinatown. Abigail, who was living in San Francisco, had come to New York to present a paper at a conference. As a group of us trooped back toward our house in Greenwich Village, where she’d grown up, Abigail and I happened to be walking together. “Let’s get this straight, Abigail,” I said, after we’d finished off some topic and had gone along in silence for a few yards. “If I can find those gnarly little dark pumpernickel bagels that we used to get at Tanenbaum’s, you’ll move back to New York. Right?”
“Absolutely,” Abigail said.
There’s a great comfort in realizing that a child you’ve helped rear has grown up with her priorities straight. When I phoned Abigail from the Oakland airport once to ask if she knew of an alternative route to her house in San Francisco—I’d learned of a huge traffic jam on the normal route, toward the Bay Bridge—she said, “Sure. Go south on 880, take 92 west across the bridge to 101, and we’ll meet you at Fook Yuen for lunch.” Fook Yuen is a dim sum restaurant in Millbrae, about five minutes from the San Francisco airport, and its way with a dumpling has persuaded us that flights in and out of San Francisco are best scheduled in the middle of the day. I report this response to a traffic jam as a way of demonstrating not simply that Abigail always has a fallback career as a taxi dispatcher awaiting her but also that she has the sort of culinary standards that could induce her to switch coasts if the right bagel came along.
But when I mentioned the Chinatown walk exchange to my wife, Alice, she had a different interpretation. She said that Abigail had been speaking ironically. I found it difficult to believe that anybody could be ironic about those bagels. They were almost black. Misshapen. Oniony. Abigail had always adored them. Both of my daughters have always taken bagels seriously. When my younger daughter, Sarah, was a little girl, I revealed in print that she wouldn’t go to Chinatown without carrying a bagel—“just in case.” At the time that Abigail and I had our conversation about the gnarly black pumpernickel bagel, Sarah was also living in California, in Los Angeles. She seemed perfectly comfortable with the Chinese food there. In fact, when I’d eaten with her at Chinois on Main, in Santa Monica, it occurred to me that her knowledge of the menu was nearly encyclopedic. She had many years before outgrown the need to have a bagel with her at a Chinese restaurant—which was fortunate indeed, because bagels in California were not anywhere near up to her standards.
For a while, I brought along a dozen or two New York bagels for Sarah whenever I went to Southern California, but I finally decided that this policy was counterproductive. “If a person prefers to live in California, which happens to be thousands of miles from her very own family,” I told her, “it seems to me appropriate that such a person eat California bagels. I understand that in some places out there if you buy a dozen wheat germ bagels you get your choice of a bee pollen bagel or a ginseng bagel free.” Sarah eventually moved back East. I’m not going to make any claims for the role of my bagel-withholding policy in that decision, but the fact remains: she did eventually move back East.
I have previously recorded Abigail’s response, at age four or five, when, on a visit to my family in Kansas City, Missouri, she’d worked her way partly through a bagel I can describe, given my affection for my hometown, as an honest effort that had simply fallen way short of the mark, the baker having been put in the position a New York deli cook would have found himself in if asked to turn out a bowl of andouille gumbo. “Daddy,” she said, “how come in Kansas City the bagels taste like just round bread?” In other words, she knew the difference between those bagel-shaped objects in the Midwest and the authentic New York item that had been hand-rolled and boiled in a vat and then carefully baked by a member in good standing of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union. I think it might be fair to characterize her as having been a bagel prodigy.
When I was a child, bagel consumption in Kansas City was not widespread. Bagels were thought of as strictly Jewish food, eaten mainly in New York. In those days, of course, salsa would have been considered strictly Mexican food, if anybody I knew in Kansas City had ever given any consideration to salsa. I doubt if many gentiles in Kansas City had ever heard of a bagel, let alone eaten one. Bagels were available in only two or three stores, one of which was called the New York Bakery. It was only in the real New York that bagels were part of the culture, for both Jews and gentiles. New Yorkers have always talked about picking up freshly baked bagels late at night and being reassured, as they felt the warmth coming through the brown paper bag, that they would be at peace with the world the next morning, at least through breakfast. They’ve talked about that day in the park when nothing seemed to soothe their crying baby until a grandmotherly woman sitting on a nearby bench, nattering with another senior citizen about Social Security payments or angel food cake recipes or Trotskyism, said that the only thing for a teething infant was a day-old bagel. They’ve talked about the joy of returning to New York from a long sojourn in a place that was completely without bagels—Indonesia or a tiny town in Montana or some other outpost in the vast patches of the world that New Yorkers tend to think of as the Bagel Barrens.
Roughly corresponding to the time it took our girls to grow up and move to California, bagels had become assimilated. Gefilte fish was still Jewish food, but not bagels. The bagel had gone from a regional ethnic food to an American standard, served at McDonald’s and available on supermarket shelves all over the part of America that baked-goods sociologists have long identified with white bread. At one point, I read that, because of a new plant established by one of the firms producing supermarket bagels, the state that led all other American states in turning out bagels was Iowa. A couple of years before Abigail and I discussed pumpernickel bagels on the way back from Chinatown, The New York Times had run a piece by Suzanne Hamlin reporting that in places recently introduced to bagels, emergency rooms were seeing an increasing number of bagel-related injuries—cuts, gouges, and severed digits caused by “impatient eaters who try to pry apart frozen bagels with screwdrivers, attempt to cut hard bagels with dull knives and, more than likely, use their palms as cutting boards.” There had been no increase in New York bagel injuries.
From the Times story, you could draw the conclusion that a lot of Americans were being given access to bagels before they knew how to handle them, in the way that a lot of Americans are said to have access to 9-mm pistols or semiautomatic rifles before they know how to handle them. I suspect any number of New Yorkers responded to the story by saying, in the superior tone customarily used by someone from Minneapolis who’s relating the chaos caused in Birmingham by a simple snowstorm, “People there just don’t have any experience in such things”—or, as the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue did say to the Times, “Those people just aren’t ethnically equipped.”
Aside from the safety issue, the mainstreaming of formerly ethnic or regional food like bagels must have been confusing for those citizens who grew up before it became common to find Cajun restaurants in upper Midwestern shopping malls and lobster shacks in Amarillo. In the eighties, when it was revealed that eating poppy-seed bagels could result in a false positive on a drug test, I saw one of the perils inherent in everybody’s suddenly eating everything, whether ethnically equipped or not. I envisioned an applicant to the FBI academy who seems in the tradition of the bureau: he’s a well-set-up young man with a square jaw and a direct gaze. He’s almost maddeningly polite. His name is O’Connor. He went to Fordham. He always wears a suit and a white shirt and wing-tipped shoes. His father was in the bureau. His drug test seems to indicate that he’s a user.
O’Connor is looking stunned. “I can’t understand it,” he says. “Maybe it was something I ate.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure that was it,” the tester, a grizzled agent near retirement age, says sarcastically. “We all know how corned beef and cabbage can mess up these results.”
“You don’t think it could have been those chiles rellenos I had for lunch, do you?” O’Connor says, ignoring the sarcasm. “That pico de gallo that came with them was pretty hot stuff.”
“Maybe you can catch on with the Parks Department, O’Connor,” the tester says, in a more sympathetic tone. “Or Sanitation. You’re a husky lad.”
“I can’t believe blackened redfish would do it,” O’Connor says. “Maybe it was that braised bok choy I had with my squid last night. That’s all I’ve eaten lately, except for the poppy-seed bagels with lox and cream cheese that Father Sweeney served at the Holy Name Society breakfast this morning.”
“The dope is making you talk crazy, son,” the tester says.
The sad part is that they would have almost certainly been inferior poppy-seed bagels. Provisions for the Holy Name Society breakfast might well have been purchased at the local supermarket or at one of those places that make bagels with weird ingredients—blueberries, say, and cinnamon, and more air than you’d find in a Speaker of the House. O’Connor, not having been raised in the connoisseurship, probably wouldn’t have known the difference. Not so my daughters. When they were children, bagels were not only their staple food—the food they clung to in unfamiliar surroundings—but also the food used in important rituals. On Sunday mornings, I often took them to Houston Street, on the Lower East Side. At Russ & Daughters, which is what New Yorkers refer to as an appetizing store, we would buy Nova Scotia salmon. Then we’d go next door to Ben’s Dairy to get cream cheese and a delicacy known as baked farmer’s cheese with scallions. Then we were at Tanenbaum’s, a bakery that was probably best known for a large, dark loaf often referred to as Russian health bread. We were not there for Russian health bread. We were there for Abigail’s pumpernickel bagels. Abigail had never exhibited any irony when the subject was pumpernickel bagels. Would Proust have been ironic about the madeleine, particularly if he had fetched up in a place where you couldn’t get a decent madeleine if your life depended on it?
“So you think she’s just humoring her old dad?” I asked Alice, during our discussion of the bagel conversation I’d had with Abigail on the way back from Chinatown.
“I do.”
Alice was probably right. I understood that. Abigail was enjoying California, and she had a job there that she loved. As I’ve admitted before, my daughters have simply made good on their implicit threat to grow up and lead lives of their own. Parents are supposed to accept that. Still, I decided that I’d look around for those pumpernickel bagels. As my father used to say, “What could it hurt?”
COEDITOR OF THIS volume, Gilbert is a feminist theorist, literary critic, essayist, and poet. Her eight collections of verse include Emily’s Bread and Kissing the Bread, whose titles reflect the culinary interests that sometimes surface in her writing, including our selection here. A professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, she has most recently authored The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity.
“No Thank You, I Don’t Care for Artichokes,”
decreed my mother-in-law as my husband
passed the platter of inward-turning
soft-skulled Martian baby
heads around the table,
and they were O so shyly slyly
jostling each other with their boiled-
green sardonic gossip
(what was the news they told?)
when he sharply answered, “Mother,
have you ever
eaten an artichoke?”
she said, majestic, “but I just know
I don’t care for them, don’t
care for them at all”—
for truly, if they weren’t Martian,
they were at the least Italian,
from that land of “smelly cheese”
she wouldn’t eat, that land of oily
curves and stalks, unnerving pots
of churning who knows what,
and she, nice, Jewish, from the Bronx,
had fattened on her Russian-
Jewish mother’s kugel, kosher
chicken, good rye bread. . . .
Bearded, rosy, magisterial
at forty-five, he laughed,
kept plucking, kept on
licking those narcissistic
leaves, each with its razor point
defending the plump, the tender
secret at the center, each
a greave or plate of edible
armor, so she smiled too,
in the flash of dispute,
knowing he’d give her ice cream later,
all she wanted, as the rich
meal drew to an end
with sweets dished out in the lamplit
circle, to parents, children, grandma—
the chocolate mint she craved,
and rocky road he bought especially
for her, whose knees were just
beginning to crumble from arthritis,
whose heart would pump more creakily
each year, whose baby
fat would sag and sorrow
as her voice weakened, breathing
failed until she too
was gathered into the same
blank center
where her son
laughing, magisterial
(though pallid now)
had just a year before
inexplicably settled.
BORN AND RAISED in a Chinese immigrant family in Stockton, California, Maxine Hong Kingston rocketed to fame with the publication of her best-selling memoir The Woman Warrior—a work fascinating for its mixture of apparently realistic autobiography with Chinese myths and tales. This excerpt from the book typifies the author’s ambivalent feelings toward her mother and the conventions of her Chinese heritage. She both admired her mother (who was a midwife in China) and yet was often embarrassed by her Old World ways. Here she recalls a cuisine marked by strange and, to the young girl, grotesque foods, one of them (about which she only heard secondhand) involving the cruel treatment of a live monkey in a gastronomic practice some say continues in parts of Asia today. The Woman Warrior was followed by several other equally compelling books, most notably China Men, which meditates on the life of Kingston’s father.
from The Woman Warrior: Mother’s Cooking
MY MOTHER HAS cooked for us: raccoons, skunks, hawks, city pigeons, wild ducks, wild geese, blackskinned bantams, snakes, garden snails, turtles that crawled about the pantry floor and sometimes escaped under refrigerator or stove, catfish that swam in the bathtub. “The emperor used to eat the peaked hump of purple dromedaries,” she would say. “They used chopsticks made from rhinoceros horn, and they ate ducks’ tongues and monkeys’ lips.” She boiled the weeds we pulled up in the yard. There was a tender plant with flowers like white stars hiding under the leaves, which were like the flower petals but green. I’ve not been able to find it since growing up. It had no taste. When I was as tall as the washing machine, I stepped out on the back porch one night, and some heavy, ruffling, windy, clawed thing dived at me. Even after getting chanted back to sensibility, I shook when I recalled that perched everywhere, there were owls with great hunched shoulders and yellow scowls. They were a surprise for my mother from my father. We children used to hide under the beds with our fingers in our ears to shut out the bird screams and the thud, thud of the turtles swimming in the boiling water, their shells hitting the sides of the pot. Once the third aunt who worked at the laundry ran out and bought us bags of candy to hold over our noses; my mother was dismembering skunk on the chopping block. I would smell the rubbery odor through the candy.
In a glass jar on a shelf my mother kept a big brown hand with pointed claws stewing in alcohol and herbs. She must have brought it from China because I do not remember a time when I did not have the hand to look at. She said it was a bear’s claw, and for many years I thought bears were hairless. My mother used the tobacco, leeks, and grasses swimming about the hand to rub our sprains and bruises.
Just as I would climb up to the shelf to take one look after another at the hand, I would hear my mother’s monkey story. I’d take my fingers out of my ears and let her monkey words enter my brain. I did not always listen voluntarily, though. She would begin telling the story, perhaps repeating it to a homesick villager, and I’d overhear before I had a chance to protect myself. Then the monkey words would unsettle me; a curtain flapped loose inside my brain. I have wanted to say, “Stop it. Stop it,” but not once did I say, “Stop it.”
“Do you know what people in China eat when they have the money?” my mother began. “They buy into a monkey feast. The eaters sit around a thick wood table with a hole in the middle. Boys bring in the monkey at the end of a pole. Its neck is in a collar at the end of the pole, and it is screaming. Its hands are tied behind it. They clamp the monkey into the table; the whole table fits like another collar around its neck. Using a surgeon’s saw, the cooks cut a clean line in a circle at the top of its head. To loosen the bone, they tap with a tiny hammer and wedge here and there with a silver pick. Then an old woman reaches out her hand to the monkey’s face and up to its scalp, where she tufts some hairs and lifts off the lid of the skull. The eaters spoon out the brains.”
Did she say, “You should have seen the faces the monkey made”? Did she say, “The people laughed at the monkey screaming”? It was alive? The curtain flaps closed like merciful black wings.
“Eat! Eat!” my mother would shout at our heads bent over bowls, the blood pudding awobble in the middle of the table.
She had one rule to keep us safe from toadstools and such: “If it tastes good, it’s bad for you,” she said. “If it tastes bad, it’s good for you.”
We’d have to face four-and five-day old leftovers until we ate it all. The squid eye would keep appearing at breakfast and dinner until eaten. Sometimes brown masses sat on every dish. I have seen revulsion on the faces of visitors who’ve caught us at meals.
“Have you eaten yet?” the Chinese greet one another.
“Yes, I have,” they answer whether they have or not. “And you?”
I would live on plastic.
ONE OF THE most fiercely candid food writers of her time, Moore was perhaps best known for Fat Girl, a scathing memoir of her childhood with an icy mother, a tough-minded grandmother, and an eccentric uncle, but she also explores the subject in Eating My Heart Out, an equally intense memoir. Born in Oklahoma, Moore gradually migrated westward, living in Olympia, Washington, before she settled in Berkeley, California, where she was a long-distance editor of the San Diego Reader. Sometimes almost brutal in their frankness—she described herself as a “short, squat toad of a woman”—her autobiographical narratives lamenting her childhood obesity or confiding a passionate tale of adultery explore the sexual and sensual contexts of eating and cooking in powerful detail. Our selection here, “Sauerkraut and a Pig-Sticking,” is both a narrative of farm life and a sensitive remembrance of a little girl’s early confrontation with the cruelty of the “food chain.”
from Never Eat Your Heart Out:
Sauerkraut and a Pig-Sticking
AFTER MY MOTHER divorced my father, she sent me to live with my grandmother on the ramshackle farm Uncle Carl bought her before he joined the Navy. I stayed there two years, until I was ready to start first grade.
With help from her two hired hands, Bushels and Buckles, my grandmother grew a two-acre vegetable garden. Bushels and Buckles cultivated the rocky soil with a mule. The mule reluctantly pulled the rusted plow, whose parts were held together by baling wire. One hired hand steered while the other went along behind, holding the plow. The mule didn’t have a name. “Mule,” they called him, or “Jackass,” and while they kicked and beat him, they yelled some of the first filthy language I ever heard. That mule led an awful life. Scars ran along his ribs where his former and present owners had whipped him. He hated humans. When you started toward him, he lifted his hairy upper lip and hissed and brayed, swished his tail and pawed the dirt.
My grandmother grew on her two acres: Country Gentleman sweet corn, collards, early and late English peas, Kentucky Wonder green pole beans, Fordhook limas, slicing and pickling cucumbers, dill, green puller and red Bermuda and yellow storage onions, green cabbages and purple cabbages whose outer leaves turned blue under morning dew, carrots, purple-shouldered ivory turnips, Mortgage Lifter tomatoes, bell peppers, beets, potatoes, okra, yellow crookneck squash, muskmelon, Charleston Gray watermelon, pumpkin, and Hubbard squash so heavy I couldn’t carry even one and whose spiny, prickly green vines wound with a will of their own, as a snake will, in among rows of onions and turnips and beets. The vines were thick as my wrist and the tendrils that clasped tight around onion tops and cornstalks seemed likely any minute to wind their way around me. They would lace me in a tight bodice that squeezed out my breath. I would turn blue as the huge red cabbage heads turned after rain, and my eyes would pop, and I would be too breathless to scream.
Bushels and Buckles and I hauled cucumbers in zinc milking buckets into the kitchen to my grandmother. We carried peppers, onions, and cabbages. We heaped them onto sideboards and into the deep sink. On the stove, its burners’ blue flames turned high, vinegar and cloves and mustard and celery seeds seethed in my grandmother’s dented canning kettles. Every wind, those mornings, carried the sharp tinge of vinegar with it. My grandmother took her butcher knife, a knife probably larger in memory than in fact, and chopped the hard green tomatoes, green cabbage, bell peppers into smithereens for the piccalilli relish that Uncle Carl liked to eat with meat loaf and chuck roast and Polish sausage. She lobbed the four-pound cabbages up onto her chopping block. She pulled off the outer leaves, each leaf wide as an opened fan. The leaves had been chewed by cabbage moths. This undressing exposed the cabbage’s inner leaves, smooth as a man’s newly shaved cheek. Grunting with each whack, my little grandmother went after the heads with her butcher knife, attacking as an angry peasant would attack the head of a despotic king.
When she had the cabbage shredded, she tossed it into her stoneware kraut crocks and mixed the raw cabbage with salt. She kept adding cabbage and salt until the crock was full. With each addition, she’d tamp down the cabbage so that it would be packed tightly into the crocks. When she’d chopped up every head and filled every crock, she’d call for one of the hired hands to shift the crocks into the dark pantry next to the kitchen. That done, she shrouded each crock with clean white cheesecloth, and then, on top of the cheesecloth, she set dinner plates. In warm weather, the cabbage would start to “work” in a few days, ambient bacteria producing lactic acid that brought a vile scum to the top. The kitchen and dining room would take on the sour, treacherous odor of fermenting cabbage, treacherous because that odor veers so near the odors that precede death.
Egyptians, my grandmother told me, lived on kraut while they carried the bricks that built the Great Pyramids. Not until I was an adult did I learn that it was the Chinese, while building the Great Wall, who lived on kraut. Whenever I saw photographs of pyramids or camels at the zoo, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, or Nasser or Anwar Sadat on television declaring war or signing treaties, what came to mind was the briny harsh rotting odor of cabbage fermenting into kraut.
As summer turned to fall, my grandmother kept careful watch over the last of the bell peppers. Nights when temperatures threatened to go down into the low forties and high thirties, Bushels and Buckles would be sent to cover the pepper plants with sheets, and as soon as the sun came up in the morning, they’d uncover the plants. By the time my grandmother’s cabbage had turned to kraut, and all through the kitchen the principal odor was that of fermented cabbage, the green and red bell peppers would be big enough to stuff. She would gather together several dozen peppers and cut off their tops, pull out the seeds and the pithy white linings to which the seeds cling. She’d parboil the peppers, put them out on cookie sheets to cool. Once the peppers cooled, she’d stuff each shell with a handful of the cured kraut. She’d have ready the hot, sterilized quart canning jars; on two burners water in the two canning kettles bubbled, and in a third kettle a pickling brine simmered. Into each jar she’d place one red pepper and two green, or two red and one green, pour in a soup ladle of pickling brine, pop a lid on the filled jar, and then screw on the metal ring. When all that was done and the jars wiped clean, she processed the jars in the canning kettles, seven jars to each kettle.
Anyone looking at the jars of green and red peppers cooling on kitchen counters couldn’t but think, How pretty! Cooking turned the red peppers’ skins to dark ruby and the green to a severe dark olive. The kraut rose in a mound atop each ruby and green pepper and then dangled down the peppers’ ribbed sides in ivory strands. When you jostled one of the jars, the kraut strands drifted in the briny pale ocher suspension like the long hair of underwater swimmers.
My grandmother and Bushels and Buckles waited for what they called a “good hog-sticking day” to butcher the Chester Whites and black-and-white Poland Chinas. Such a day would fall after the first hard frost. You wanted cold weather so that the meat wouldn’t spoil; you wanted the flies dead, and a good hard frost killed flies.
The trio, dressed in their oldest clothes, killed and butchered two hogs at a time, probably because that was all they could handle in one day, what with farm chores that couldn’t wait—feeding stock and poultry, milking cows, separating milk, raking out the henhouse, gathering eggs.
Bushels and Buckles took a rope and walked down to the muddy pig wallow and noosed one of the two chosen hogs and marched it toward a huge tree between the barn and the house. A rope hung off a branch that grew eight or ten feet off the ground. What kind of tree it was I don’t know, but it was a tree tall enough and so generously branched that when in full leaf it cast a wide circumference of shadow beneath it, enough shade to keep grass from growing and to make the bare dirt cool even on hot days.
You couldn’t help feeling sorry for the hog, grunting and heaving, as the hired hands, sooty hat brims pulled low over their foreheads so you couldn’t see their eyes, prodded and harried it uphill on its short stumpy legs and cloven hooves. Brought to a halt beneath the tree, the hog blinked, batted its long hog eyelashes, and seemed to smile the way hogs do, waiting perhaps to have its ears scratched or to be offered some treat. It might root then with its hoelike snout, snorting up melting hoarfrost.
Bushels or Buckles, I don’t remember which, drew his finger across his neck, in imitation of a knife cutting a throat, and made a horrible whickering noise. My grandmother and Bushels and Buckles looked at the smiling hog and laughed, and then my grandmother looked at me and shushed the hands, and said they’d need to get busy.
Bushels and Buckles looped and then tied the rope that swung from the branch around the hog’s hind legs and pulled until the three- or four-hundred-pound animal dangled upside down. The limb gave off an awful groan while the men pulled, staggering from the effort. Surprised to find itself upended and no doubt terrified, the hog squeaked and squealed. The high-pitched squeals ascended, between branches, into the blue sky.
Bushels or Buckles thrust a long knife into the hog’s throat, cutting, I think now, the jugular vein. The hog gasped. Dark blood poured out, gushed really, onto the dirt and fallen leaves. The muddy trotters twitched for a few seconds, the hog’s head drooped and its eyes closed, long lashes fluttering. My grandmother would say, “He gave up the ghost.”
Did the mule, hens, roosters, Jerseys and Guernseys, the other Poland Chinas and Chester Whites observe a moment of silence? No. But I remember the scene that way, remember that the normally noisy farm, its animal Muzak always playing, for a moment went silent. I remember every cluck and whinny and moo and oink erased. Not even the dog, shut up in the house while they stuck the hog, barked.
After both hogs were stuck and bled, clots and rivulets of blood soaked my grandmother’s and Bushels’s and Buckles’s clothes. My grandmother’s strong arms dripped hog blood from the elbows down onto her hands.
The hogs were cut down and dragged across the ground, their black blood leaving trails on the hard dirt, and put to soak in an old footed bathtub filled with steaming water. Pigs are blanketed with coarse hair, and the hot water helped loosen the skin’s hold on the hair. My grandmother used her butcher knife to scrape bristles off the ears and more delicate hairs from lips and snouts. She brought her sharpening stone in her pocket; she honed and rehoned her blade. While my grandmother worked on the head, the hired hands shaved the hog’s body until the skin was naked and smooth.
With help from one of the hired hands, my grandmother sawed off each of the four feet. The three of them swore while they worked, and sweated, even in the cold air. With her knife, she sliced away the cartilaginous ears, the lips, and the snout. These she saved for pickling.
What did my grandmother do with the hooves? How did she get the hogs’ toenails off? I read now that butchers prise them out with pliers. I don’t remember what she did. I do remember that in the kitchen she dropped the hooves, ears, and snouts into pots of boiling water set on the kitchen stove. I remember that while the hooves boiled, they bumped against the kettle.
Late afternoon, hawks—or were they vultures?—wheeled and drifted down to the ground beneath the tree where the last of the summer’s flies glutted themselves on hog blood. The birds called to their fellows, their calls in a tenor range and more human than birdlike. They grabbed up bits of the Poland China’s black-and-white skin; they flocked around the bathtub, filled then with pink water atop which skin and scum and bristle floated as water lilies float. The birds perched on the tub’s edge and dipped down their heads and drank and fed. After the hawks or vultures left, black crows flew in over the downed cornstalks and pecked and cawed. Then they, too, flew away.
Hog-sticking nights, while I got ready for bed, my grandmother and Bushels and Buckles, blood dried on their clothing, worked under the kitchen’s dim overhead light. Bugs seethed, circling the bulb. Even with the windows and the back door open, the last flies and moths of the season hitting lazily against the screens, the heat was terrible near the stove. The heat was summer-noon heat. Steam rose from kettles set atop every burner. The heat reddened my grandmother’s and the hired hands’ faces; sweat streamed from their foreheads, dripped off their chins.
The kitchen resembled a butcher shop where a crazy drunken butcher was in charge. Disassembled hog crowded every surface. Hoofless legs and snoutless, earless heads and slabs of fatback and squares of what would be smoked into bacon were puzzle pieces. I reassembled the hogs in my mind back down through the hours to morning, when they seemed to smile under the tree.
The trio worked quickly, to keep the meat from going bad. They ate hurriedly while they worked, cold biscuit in one hand, and nearby, for the men, a brown bottle of bootleg whiskey they called “medicine,” which they sipped from. Bushels, who had a finger missing on one hand, massaged rough salt into hind and front thighs and chops for hams and smoked pork chops. Buckles chewed a dead cigar stub stuck in one corner of his mouth and pressed gobbets of pink flesh through the meat grinder. The meat dropped into bowls and milk buckets; every big bowl my grandmother owned was heaped with ground hog. It was for sausage, a mixture she seasoned with sage and hot red pepper, then rolled into balls and canned.
I don’t remember what my dreams were, those nights. I had nightmares back then from which I’d wake, screaming, in the high four-poster bed, from which I always feared I’d fall.
I remember that the next morning when I walked into the kitchen, they would still be working, their bloody clothes hanging looser and stinking from sweat, Bushels and Buckles still wearing their grubby hats. Because all three would be wearing the clothing they’d started out in the day before, because over twenty-four hours stains had spotted their hands and clothing one atop another like stucco, the world seemed to have stood still while the two hogs turned to meat.
From the door into the kitchen I watched them. They drank coffee and ate with their hands from a plate of cold biscuit and sausage and fried cracklin’s. They spoke quietly and coughed dry coughs. They did not look each other steadily in the eye. If Bushels, for instance, happened to catch my grandmother’s eye, he looked away quickly, looked down toward his filthy overalls. They moved slowly, as if under a spell. I felt newly afraid of all three of them. They seemed like people from a story who together had done some terrible deed and were waiting, fearful, for a knock at the door. But that probably is not how it was for them. Most likely they were tired; “bone weary,” as my grandmother said. They were old, too, the men in their fifties and my grandmother sixty-something and, although she did not know it, only six or seven years away from death.
Glass jars packed with sausage balls and pigs’ feet, pigs’ ears, snouts, and lips lined the counters. More glass jars stood on newspapers laid out on the linoleum. My grandmother pointed to the plate of cold biscuit stuffed with sausage, told me to get myself dressed and then come back and take myself some food and eat it on the dining-room table. “Spread out a newspaper on that table so you don’t get my good cloth greasy,” she’d say. So that’s what I did.
She’d sleep all that morning and afternoon, my grandmother would, while the jars cooled. I listened to her snores, her long stertorous sighs, and to the pings of the cooling jars. I made myself lunch from the breakfast scraps. What else I did, I don’t know. I must have played with my dolls, undressed and redressed them, must have gone outside and walked in between the white Leghorn hens that ran loose between house and barn. I may have tossed pebbles at them to make them fly up and scatter, something I did when I believed no one was watching. I may have played with the farm dog, a brindled male mutt who regularly ran after the Leghorns with his penis hanging out of its sheath. I didn’t much like him. He didn’t care anything for humans, and if he had a name I can’t remember it.
Finally, my grandmother got up and put on a clean housedress and her rubber boots and went out to check her cows. She cooked dinner, a pan of the hogs’ ribs she’d baked in the night and sauerkraut scooped out of the crock and boiled potatoes. I remember the rib’s seared fat and the charred rib bone sticking out of either end of stringy meat, and I suspect I refused to eat the ribs.
IN THE COURSE of a long and successful academic career as a professor at Hunter College and a notable scholar of Virginia Woolf, Louise DeSalvo turned to the writing of memoirs and other personal essays. Her lively books include Asthma, Adultery, and On Moving but perhaps the most compelling concern her Italian-American heritage: Vertigo and Crazy in the Kitchen. Here, especially in the context of food, she explores the ambiguities so often experienced by those who live, as it were, on the hyphen between cultures. On the one hand, she longs to celebrate her grandmother’s Old World bread and rejects her mother’s problematic attempts at assimilation into white-bread America; on the other hand, she is repelled by many Old World dishes (fresh-killed chicken, head cheese, snails) while savoring all-American apple pie. Similarly, she confides, she wants to make her own pasta, but she decides that “you can tell how enslaved the women of any country are by the kind of preparation their traditional foods require”—including, obviously, rolling out homemade pasta.
MY grandmother is in the kitchen cutting the Italian bread that she has made. The bread that my grandmother has made is a big bread, a substantial bread, a bread that you can use for dunking, or for open-faced sandwiches, or for scraping the last bit of sauce from a bowl of pasta, or for toasting and eating with jam, or for breaking into soups and stews, or for eating with a little olive oil and a shake of coarse salt, or with a thick slice of slightly underripe tomato, or with the juices and seeds of a very ripe tomato and some very green olive oil (pane e pomarole).
My grandmother’s bread is a good bread, not a fine bread. A bread that will stay fresh, cut side down, on the breadboard for three or four days, depending on the weather. A thick-crusted, coarse-crumbed Italian bread. A peasant bread. A bread that my mother disdains because it is everything that my grandmother is, and everything that my mother, in 1950s suburban New Jersey, is trying very hard not to be.
My grandmother’s bread and the pizza she makes from her bread dough—tomato and cheese; garlic and olive oil; onion, sugar, and poppy seeds—are the foods that sustain me throughout my childhood. Without them, I know I would starve, because I hate everything my mother cooks. Hate it, because my mother burns the food that she cooks or puts too much salt in it or forgets to time the chicken and brings it to the table running with blood because she doesn’t pay attention or because she is angry at my grandmother, at me, at the world, or because she is depressed and doesn’t care about food, doesn’t care about anything. Hate it because the ingredients themselves are terrible—gristly meat, bloated bratwurst, fatty sausage, slightly off hamburger gotten for a bargain that she tries to disguise with catsup and Worcestershire sauce. Or hate it (without realizing it then) because I can taste the rage in her food, can hear it in the slamming and banging of the pots and pans in her kitchen, in the clash of metal against metal in her stirring.
The kitchen, when my mother is cooking, is not a place I want to be. And so. No cookie-baking in the kitchen. No rolling out pie dough together. No lessons in how to make sauce.
And my mother’s rage—at me for being selfish, at my grandmother for living with us since my grandfather died, at herself for her never-ending sorrow at not being able to create a life that can sustain her in spite of her loving my father, loving us (me and my sister), or so she says to my father, but never to me—scares me, makes me want to hide in a closet or rush from the house. It is a thick, scorching rage that I cannot predict, cannot control, cannot understand, a rage that I can feel against my skin. It is a rage that I do not want to catch from her. Though, of course, I do.
And so. I do not eat my mother’s food if I can help it. Do not enter the kitchen when she cooks. Do not help her cook, for she will not let me, and prefers when I am not near her, when no one is near her. Do not help her clear the dishes, do not help her clean after we eat. And I leave the table, leave the kitchen, as soon and as fast as I can after what passes for supper in our house.
My eating my grandmother’s bread and my not eating my mother’s food is one reason my mother screams at me. (She has others: that I will not play with my sister and so keep her out of my mother’s hair; that I sulk; that I answer back; that I have a mind of my own; that I am a burden; that I always have my nose in a book; that I do not love her; that I escape the house as often as I can; that I climb onto the roof from the upstairs bathroom window whenever there is a fight in our house, which is often, and so make a spectacle of myself, and let the neighbors know that despite my mother’s superclean floors, her superladylike behavior, and her super-American ways, all is not well in our house.)
My eating my grandmother’s bread and my not eating my mother’s food is another reason my mother hates my grandmother, her stepmother, not her “real” mother, who died when my mother was a baby. A mother, she laments, who would have loved her, who would have taken care of her, and not resented her, as this woman does, this fake mother of hers, because they are not the same blood. My mother shouts this whenever they fight, which is often.
But I do not know what being the same blood means or why their not being the same blood should divide them. For, at times, when my mother talks to my father about what is happening in the world, she says that all people are created equal, and that the differences among people are only skin deep. But once, when I ask her if she and my grandmother were created equal, she said, no, because my grandmother never showed her any love, because my grandmother is a pain in the ass, because my grandmother drives her crazy. She says that some people, like my dead grandfather, deserve respect, and others don’t. And that my grandmother is one of the ones who don’t. And that if I don’t shape up, I’ll become one of the ones who don’t, too.
MY mother does not eat the bread my grandmother bakes. My mother eats the bread that she buys a few times a week from the Dugan’s man, who comes round in his truck to our suburban neighborhood in Ridgefield, New Jersey, where we move after my grandfather dies. This bread, unlike my grandmother’s, has preservatives, a long shelf life, my mother says. You can keep this bread for a long, long time without it becoming green-molded. To my mother, this bread is everything that a good bread should be.
The bread my mother buys is white bread, sliced bread, American bread. A bread that my father, my sister, and I eat only under protest or when it is transformed into something else. A bread that my grandmother would never eat, even if she were starving, and she told my mother so the one time she tasted this bread, and she told my mother, too, that she knows what it is to starve, what it is not to have enough food, and that even if she did not have enough food, she would not eat this bread.
My mother thinks that eating this bread will change her, that eating this bread will erase this embarrassment of a stepmother—all black dresses and headscarves and scavenging for dandelions on the neighbors’ lawns, and superstitions, and tentacled things stewing in pots, and flurries of flour that ruin my mother’s spotless kitchen, and infrequently washed Old World long woolen undergarments—this embarrassment of a stepmother who, my mother swears, never bathes, who treats water as if it is something to pray to, not something to wash in. (When my grandmother sees the amount of water my mother puts into the bathtub when my sister and I bathe, she mutters “Mare Adriatico” in disgust, clucks her tongue, and walks into her darkened bedroom to say the rosary.)
Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, she will stop being Italian American and she will become American American. Maybe my mother thinks that if she eats enough of this other bread, people will stop thinking that a relative of my father’s, who comes to visit us from Brooklyn once in a while, is a Mafioso, because he’s Italian American and has New York license plates on his new black car, and sports a black tie and pointy shoes and a shiny suit and a Borsalino hat tipped way down over his forehead so you can hardly see his eyes. And if you can hardly see his eyes, my mother says, what kind of a man must the neighbors think he is? Maybe my mother remembers the incarcerations, deportations, and lynchings of Italians, the invasion of Italian neighborhoods in Hoboken, New Jersey, during the war when we lived there. Maybe my mother thinks eating this bread will keep us safe.
This bread that my mother buys from the Dugan’s man is whiter than my grandmother’s bread. It is as white, as soft and as spongy, as the cotton balls I use to take off my nail polish when I am a teenager, as white as the Kotex pads I shove into my underpants.
My mother eats this bread all the time, morning, noon, and night, and she uses it to make us toasted-cheese sandwiches. Two slices of American cheese pulled in shreds from their cellophane wrappers, slapped between two slices of buttered American bread (torn when buttered, because it is so soft) fried in a too hot frying pan while my mother, distracted, walks away to do something else until she smells the butter burning, says “Oh my goodness,” returns to the stove, flips the sandwiches, gets distracted again, walks away again, smells the butter burning again, says “Oh my goodness” again, and serves the sandwich to us with lots of catsup on the side to disguise the filthy taste.
After Thanksgiving, my mother uses this bread to make turkey sandwiches with stuffing and gravy and cranberry sauce, the most acceptable use for this bread because then the bread is roasted, which hardens it, and, because the toaster we have is automatic, my mother can’t fuck up the toast, unless she shoves it back in for a second round. My mother uses this bread to make French toast, too, what she calls her special Sunday night supper. But because she has never developed the knack of completely beating the egg that coats the bread, her French toast always has little pieces of coagulated egg white hanging off it, which I call snot strings.
Sometimes I pull the snot strings off the bread and hang them out of my nostrils. This I do, not to infuriate my parents, but for my own amusement, to distract myself from the funereal atmosphere of our supper table. But when I do it, my father reprimands me for my bad manners, tells me to respect the food my mother made, says all he wants at the end of a day’s work, after taking guff from his bosses and hearing the rat-a-tat-rat of the machines all goddamned day long, is a nice meal, and some goddamned peace and quiet. I ignore him, look at the ceiling, pretend he’s not there. He comes after me. I jump up, run away. He chases me around the table, out of the room, up the stairs.
But my sister and I like having this bread in our house because you can do many things with it. You can take a piece of this bread, pull off the crust, smash it down, roll it into a little ball. You can play marbles with this bread. You can pull the middle out of a slice of this bread and hang it over your nose or twirl it around your finger. You can pull the middle out of a slice of this bread and bring it up to your eye and pretend you’re Nancy Drew looking for clues to a crime that was committed in your kitchen. You can take circles out of this bread and smash them down into Communion wafers and play “Holy Priest of God” dishing out the body of Christ. (This doesn’t get my mother angry; this amuses her. She has no use for Holy Communion, for the Church or its priests, even though she sends us to Catholic grammar school.)
You can also eat this bread with your meal, and sometimes we do, if there is none of my grandmother’s bread. But when you eat this bread, it sticks to the roof of your mouth and you have to pry it off with your fingers. Then you get yelled at for your horrible table manners, and are told to leave the table and go up to your room. Which is a good thing. If your father had a hard day at work and is in a lousy mood, or if he was out fighting fires as a volunteer and is exhausted, he’ll chase you up the stairs to your room, but you can usually outrun him, slam your bedroom door shut, push your bureau against the door. Then you get blamed for ruining dinner.
My grandmother’s bread doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth. Which is why I like it. Which is why my father likes it. That my father likes my grandmother’s bread more than he likes my mother’s bread makes my mother angry. That my father likes my grandmother’s bread means that he’s on my grandmother’s side (the wrong side) in the ongoing bread war. That we like my grandmother’s bread means that there’s no hope for this family making it into the big time. It means that we’re stuck in the rut of where we came from, that we’re satisfied with who we are, and not striving for all that we can be. My mother is striving for all that we can be, here in suburban New Jersey. And she wants us to strive along with her.
A WRITER, FEMINIST theorist, literary critic, and distinguished university professor, Gubar first gained acclaim when she coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic with Sandra M. Gilbert, a book the collaborators followed with a three-volume sequel, No Man’s Land, and with their coedited Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. But Gubar’s recent work has been wide-ranging and eclectic; she has produced studies of cross-racial impersonation (Racechanges), of Holocaust literature (Poetry After Auschwitz), and of religious motifs (Judas: A Biography). Her most recent writings have been electrifying examinations of her current struggle with ovarian cancer: Memoir of a Debulked Woman and a series of blogs on “living with cancer” for the Well column of The New York Times. In the same memoiristic mode, “Cooking the Kaddish,” which we have excerpted here, combines a rich meditation on family history and the Jewish prayer for the dead with a series of recipes that brilliantly evoke the savors of the cultural inheritance that has helped shape her own kitchen.
I NEED TO learn how to say the mourner’s Kaddish, just as in years past I needed to teach myself how to make matzo-ball soup and challah, brisket and latkes. The urgency is palpable. . . . Most of my closest friends are, somehow, Catholic or rather Catholic-born and in a rage at the Pope and his bishops. Or they are agnostics unschooled in their parents’ Protestantism. They cannot help me. But I did teach myself to make the soup and the bread, the meat and potatoes, and even some jokes so surely I can learn how to recite the prayer. It is only twenty-five lines long when I print out a transliteration from the Web. Certain phrases bring back a familiar and profoundly satisfying rhythm. But when I try to read it aloud, I sound like a dyslexic second-grader. And the first line of my print-out looks a bit different, with the letter “t” appearing where the letter “s” should be: “Yitgaddal v’yitkaddash sh’meh rabbah.” Who do I need to mourn? . . .
The second line of the Kaddish reads “B’almah dee-v’ra chiru-teh.” It means “in the world which He created according to His will.” In no way do I fault my mother for providing me with a Jewish “education”—the word has to be put in quotes—that left me ignorant about Judaism or for not teaching me how to cook Jewish foods. She inhabited a world that had shockingly abrogated her will and wishes, when the Nuremberg laws debarred her from attending a university and later when Hitler’s genocidal mania necessitated her, my father’s, and my brother’s flight from Hamburg to New York. We kids were enrolled in a Reformed temple in Brooklyn where no real learning took place.
Somehow I am finding it easy to remember “Yitgaddal v’yitkaddash sh’meh rabbah.” It is “Yit” (not “Yis”), a former student explains on email, because younger congregants follow modern Israeli pronunciation which is Sephardic, not Ashkenazi. But it seems harder to get “B’almah dee-v’ra chiru-teh” into my head so I encourage myself by remembering how many decades ago I learned to make my very first Jewish food and perhaps the paradigmatic Jewish food. My mother did not made chicken soup from scratch, though one of my keenest memories of my father’s funeral—beyond the closed coffin and my Aunt Rosie exclaiming that I shouldn’t have been allowed to wear white shoes—was the bowl of Campbell’s chicken soup (add one can of water and heat) that I was given upon returning home from the cemetery. With regard to the prayer, I anticipate other rhythms pulsing ahead, phrases I do know, but now “Ba’almah deev’ra chiru-teh” must be learned. It takes time to make soup and apparently it will take time to get “Ba’almah deev’ra chiru-teh” into my thick head.
So here is how I make chicken stock. Since it’s a no brainer, I can repeat “Ba’almah deev’ra chiru-teh” as often as necessary.
Put a whole chicken or a bunch of wings and whatever other parts of the chicken you have on hand into a big pot and cover with water. As you bring to a boil, skim off the foamy crud that rises to the top. Then add a carrot, a stalk or two of celery, an onion, maybe a cut-up parsnip and some parsley, and lower the heat to a simmer, cooking (partly covered) for two or three hours. When you pierce the chicken with a fork and it falls apart, it is done. Strain through a sieve or colander, pushing the soft veggies down to extract their juices. Take the chicken off the bone, throw out the skin, and put some of the meat in the soup, but save some for a chicken salad or pot pie.
“Ba’almah deev’ra chiru-teh” begins to sink in. My dad used to say, when a poor man eats a chicken, either the man is sick or the chicken is sick. “Vas steht am tisch?” An old Yiddish joke comes to mind, from Elliot Gilbert, alev hascholem. What stands on a table, makes flapping like this with its wings, and sings coo-co-reek-oo? A meshugina. . . .
“Kaddish?” my older daughter Molly asks on the phone. “You’re writing about Kaddish? Isn’t that a drink?”
She had been bat-mitvahed more than two decades ago in the only synagogue in our college town.
“Oh,” she then remembered, as I laughed. “Yitgaddal, yitga-something.”
Like mother, like daughter. But I think I’ve got “Ba’almah deevr’a chiru’teh” down so onward to line three which in my (abundantly ignorant) judgment concludes the opening of the prayer: “v’yamlich malchuteh,” meaning “May He establish His Kingdom.” I hear the three lines forming a unity because of the rhyming of the last syllable “teh” in “chiru’teh” and “malchuteh.” . . . In his astoundingly erudite book Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier castigates American Jews like me for “sentimentality” about the mourner’s prayer. Instead of rending my clothes, as the orthodox mourner does, I am rendering schmaltz. But schmaltz too has its purposes, in small doses.
After schmaltz collects on the top of the frozen or refrigerated stock, it can easily be removed and tossed, for no substance better clogs the arteries, but set aside two tablespoons since a little cannot do much harm and it provides the glue for the matzo-balls which I never tasted as a child. On Friday nights, Grandma Alice came to prepare German food: stuffed cabbage (savory, not sweet), weisswurst, braised flanken and halibut, boiled potatoes, vinegary cucumber salad, Apfelpfannkuchen. On Sunday evenings, one Mr. Levy arrived with a battered attaché case redolent with the most marvelous smells from a sausage named cervelat and a thinly sliced cured beef that I once later found in Italy where it was called bresaola. Weekdays, canned vegetables and pan-fried chops were devoured so quickly by my parents that my stomach cramped with resistance to and fright at their frantic need to eat. “May He establish His Kingdom” so that there will never again be so many dead and unburied relatives, such fear-filled refugees: “v’yamlich malchuteh.” Jewish food was a novelty sampled at friends’ houses or on a rare evening out.
Only in graduate school, after finding Jennie Grossinger’s cook book, did I learn to produce something better than the dense billiard balls I had tasted in delis. That book is long gone, but I credit it for the lightness of these matzo-balls.
Bring the stock to a boil, add slices of celery and carrots, and simmer for half an hour. In a Cuisinart, whiz four egg yolks, a slice of onion, a teaspoon of salt, a dash of cayenne pepper, and two tablespoons of schmaltz. In a large bowl, use an electric mixer to whip four egg whites until quite stiff. Gently fold the yolk mixture into the whites and then gently fold in three-quarters of a cup (or a cup) of matzo-meal. Cover tightly and refrigerate for half an hour while adding salt and pepper and (if needed) a bouillon cube (or boxed stock) to the broth. After running your hands under cold water, shape each one-and-a-half inch ball gently between your palms and gently slip it into the simmering stock. Cover and cook (the about twenty matzo-balls) for three quarters of an hour.
The operative word is gently, a word related to the reiteration of the Kaddish which some people recite for eleven months and many people recite on every jahrzeit. Sometimes one can make up for lack of tradition or ignorance of tradition through reading and experimenting until Jewish penicillin or ambrosia exalts and sanctifies all who gather together. . . .
In matters of religion and language, it is not possible to compensate for a lack of tradition, and exactly why am I making the effort? Regardless of the cause that inhibits one generation from initiating the next into preserving rituals and costumes, what is not handed down cannot be retrieved. A morsel or sound bite may be sampled perhaps, but not retrieved. Like cooking the books, cooking the Kaddish deceives through fabrication. Should I be saying words that I don’t understand literally, figuratively, or historically? How can I recite what I don’t mean? Why do I suppose that my having taught myself to cook Jewish foods would enable me to teach myself a Jewish prayer for the dead, when feasting and mourning represent antithetical activities?
Stiff-necked, stubborn, I summon up people who chant, hum, or whisper mantras of incomprehensible sounds as a way of slowing down time and consciousness, and I determine to learn “B’chay-yechon uv’yo-meychon” while kneading bread, which also slows down time and consciousness. My younger daughter Simone used to call our dinners at home “slow food.” While kneading, I will need to mourn my mother’s disappearance in old age, her loss of a coherent consciousness, so I Google challah and the Kaddish. On You Tube a mild-mannered man in a sweater-vest lets me hear the rhythm of the line and the last syllable of “B’cháy-yechon” echoed by the ending of “uv’yo-méychon”: “during your lifetime and during your days” refers back to “malkhuteh.” May God establish His kingdom, the prayer asks, soon so we can see it in our own being, with our own eyes. But the orthodox site on challah starts with five pounds of flour, which sounds extravagant, even nonsensical, to me.
I return to an older recipe to produce not the sweet, soft bread that has gained popularity in Midwestern bakeries, but a braided loaf that has the shellacked look of a traditional challah. During my mother’s lifetime, she grieved over many losses, but during her days now she forgets them. Sad as the foggy confusion seems, there is a mitvah to losing loss, or so I hope as I make the dough. . . .
“Uv’chay-yey de-chol beit yisra-el / Ba-agalah uvizman kareev”: May God establish His kingdom soon so we can see it in our own being “and during the lifetimes of all the House of Israel, speedily and very soon.” My mother will not live to see that apocalyptic time, but she did manage to find the leaven to rise three times, like a punched-down challah: after the suicide of her mother, of her father, and of her husband. Their memory was not a blessing. She kept getting dragged to the house of mourning where she lost her appetite for ceremonial feasting, but felt the pressing need to eat so as to survive. “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). Like my father, my mother slaved at manual labor from dawn to dusk so that during her lifetime, speedily and very soon, her children needed not. Her heart was stricken, as she bought the day-old bread at Ebinger’s Bakery and smiled at my father’s joke of the newly married man who never found his wife’s cooking as good as his mother’s until one day she accidently burnt his toast and “Ahha,” he exulted, “it tastes just like mama’s.” . . .
How astonishing after such heavy slogging, word by word, that the next seven lines arrive like a piece of cake. Did I, after all, take something away from the Saturday services and Sunday classes at Beth Emeth? Or is it the measured music in my mouth?
Y’hey sh’mey rabbah m’varach
L’olam ul’olmey almah-yah.
Yitbarach, v’yishtabach
V’yitpa-ar v’yiromam
V’yisnasseh v’yit-haddar
V’yit-alleh v’yit-hallal
Sh’mey de kudshah b’reech hu.
No, not like a piece of cake, since the lines are hefty, weighty—more like the meat of the prayer, its main course, its muscle, its nourishing protein. Here is a prayer I can relish, for it simply prays that we pray; it urges no more than that we should extol the creation and its creator. To memorize its injunction, I take out the brisket that I make at Passover, when God told the liberated to open their mouths to be filled. “Y’hey sh’mey rabbah m’varach / L’olam ul’olmey almah-yah”: these core lines feel familiar on my lips maybe because they are generally recited by the entire congregation. I pay dues at the local synagogue so as to support the Jewish community, but the only communal event I regularly share—with my Jewish and non-Jewish meshbocha—is the Seder. . . . At Passover in our dining room, many people use the ritual horseradish as a stinging condiment, its nose- and eye-watering bitterness an accent to the sweetness of the brisket. . . .
Both cooking and the Kaddish deeply invest participants in the satisfactions of repetitive rhythms. When years ago I served what Simone called “slow food” at six p.m. every night, I tried to tempt the girls with healthy versions of fast food or with a succession of spicy international kid-pleasers: hamburgers or tacos, fish and chips, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken wings in oyster sauce, lentils and sausage. The Gothic goop over which they hooted because it made them gag was “the daily stuff,” a brew concocted by a child at their pre-school who mixed together everything on his tray, like pasta and Jell-O or chili and pudding. Wary of the eating disorders of adolescents, I enlisted my daughters in the slicing and dicing, repetitive and rhythmic acts as habitual and addictive as memorizing and reciting. Both cooking and reciting organize time in unexceptional but visceral increments. Because the habitual and sometimes addictive patterns of cooking involve physical acts, while those of reciting require mental acts, cooking and reciting the Kaddish go together like fish and chips or meatballs and spaghetti or, for that matter, the girls’ favorite dish: latkes and applesauce, although making potato pancakes requires a lot of last-minute work. . . .
Putting the latkes in the oven for twenty minutes gives the exhausted cook time to recover so she can enjoy them with her guests. Also a recovery, the next-to-the-last section of the Kaddish takes full advantage of its penultimate position by relying heavily on earlier structures. A variation on an established theme, “Y’heh sh’lamah rabbah min sh’may” (“May there be abundant peace from heaven”) invokes the oracular line “Y’he sh’mey rabbah m’varach” (“May His great name be blessed”). “V’chay-yim alenu v’al kol yisrael” (“and life for us and for all of Israel”) returns with a difference to the earlier “Uv-chay-yey de-chol beit yisra-el” (“and during the lifetimes of all the house of Israel”). And then we have a third “V’imru amen.” Taken together, “May there be abundant peace from heaven / and life for us and for all of Israel / And say, Amen.” . . .
The Kaddish is not a kvetch. It has nothing in common with the joke about the grandma who—shocked that a giant wave has taken away her adorable grandson—beseeches God for his return and then, after a giant wave deposits him back on her blanket (complete with his bathing suit, pail, and shovel), beseeches God again, “What about his little cap?” No, the Kaddish does not bemoan the survivor’s grief, request resurrection of the dead, beg for consolation, or inscribe the memory of a particular individual into the book of life. Astringent, it is not a tepid thanksgiving either. The Kaddish is an urgent directive to attain a posture of praise and wonder that concludes with a prayer for universal peace: “O-seh shalom / bimromav / Hu-ya-aseh shalom alenu / V’al kol yisra-el / V’imru Amen.” Everyone knows the word “shalom.” Many know the lyrics of “Shalom Alenu.” Shalom functions as a greeting in Israel where Jewish food consists of falafel, eggplant caviar, humus, pita, tabbouleh, and diced cucumbers and tomatoes. If Jewish food is the food eaten by Jews, almost every cuisine pertains, including the German food my relatives craved, so it seems appropriate to learn the lines “May He who makes peace / in His high places / grant peace upon us / and upon all Israel / and say, Amen” while baking a Linzertorte. More dense than cake, a slice tastes like a cookie. . . .
But to be honest, my own density persists. The writing of this essay has proceeded more quickly than full retention of the prayer. . . . I still need a cheat-sheet which I will now take along with me on my daily walks, for it turns out that walking, like cooking, can keep the words bubbling. Boiling and braising the Kaddish, roasting and frying and baking the Kaddish, I have been struggling to translate the meaning of the phrases I am reciting so it cannot be altogether true that the incomprehensibility of its foreign lexicon is the blessing I seek. I have discovered that the Kaddish does not differentiate between the chosen and the not chosen, nor does it affirm any faith in a spiritual afterlife for the individual psyche or soul. As for male God language, it would be just as absurd if the divine were called “She.” Why tamper with a language centuries old? I make peace with Leon Wieseltier when he explains, “Tradition is not reproduced. It is thrown and it is caught. It lives a long time in the air.” The prayer I hope to catch is airy, unlike the Linzertorte.
REICHL WAS THE restaurant critic for The New York Times for five years in the 1990s, where she was perhaps best known for wearing a series of costumes representing women of different personalities and social classes in order to remain anonymous and to test a restaurant’s attitudes toward its patrons. She wrote about this practice and her life as a reviewer in the third of her food memoirs, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. Reichl’s contribution to the New York restaurant scene was twofold: to expose gastronomical pretention and to celebrate good, serious cooking in off-the-radar places that did not represent the city’s preoccupation with haute cuisine. After her stint at the paper she edited Gourmet for over a decade. Here Reichl writes about her mother, who inadvertently started her daughter on a career in food exactly because the mother’s horrific taste in food was so disconcerting to the young Ruth. This chapter from Reichl’s first memoir, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, is a kind of reverse mentor narrative, suggesting how she was driven to seek out good food in the face of the maternal culinary practices that inspired her daughter to call her “the Queen of Mold.”
from Tender at the Bone: The Queen of Mold
MOST MORNINGS I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling. You could tell instantly just by opening the door. One day in 1960 I found a whole suckling pig staring at me. I jumped back and slammed the door, hard. Then I opened it again. I’d never seen a whole animal in our refrigerator before; even the chickens came in parts. He was surrounded by tiny crab apples (“lady apples” my mother corrected me later), and a whole wreath of weird vegetables.
This was not a bad sign: the more odd and interesting things there were in the refrigerator, the happier my mother was likely to be. Still, I was puzzled; the refrigerator in our small kitchen had been almost empty when I went to bed.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked. “The stores aren’t open yet.”
“Oh,” said Mom blithely, patting at her crisp gray hair, “I woke up early and decided to go for a walk. You’d be surprised at what goes on in Manhattan at four a.m. I’ve been down to the Fulton Fish Market. And I found the most interesting produce store on Bleecker Street.”
“It was open?” I asked.
“Well,” she admitted, “not really.” She walked across the worn linoleum and set a basket of bread on the Formica table. “But I saw someone moving around so I knocked. I’ve been trying to get ideas for the party.”
“Party?” I asked warily. “What party?”
“Your brother has decided to get married,” she said casually, as if I should have somehow intuited this in my sleep. “And of course we’re going to have a party to celebrate the engagement and meet Shelly’s family!”
My brother, I knew, would not welcome this news. He was thirteen years older than I and considered it a minor miracle to have reached the age of twenty-five. “I don’t know how I survived her cooking,” he said as he was telling me about the years when he and Mom were living alone, after she had divorced his father and was waiting to meet mine. “She’s a menace to society.”
Bob went to live with his father in Pittsburgh right after I was born, but he always came home for holidays. When he was there he always helped me protect the guests, using tact to keep them from eating the more dangerous items.
I took a more direct approach. “Don’t eat that,” I ordered my best friend Jeanie as her spoon dipped into one of Mom’s more creative lunch dishes. My mother believed in celebrating every holiday: in honor of St. Patrick she was serving bananas with green sour cream.
“I don’t mind the color,” said Jeanie, a trusting soul whose own mother wouldn’t dream of offering you an all-orange Halloween extravaganza complete with milk dyed the color of orange juice. Ida served the sort of perfect lunches that I longed for: neat squares of cream cheese and jelly on white bread, bologna sandwiches, Chef Boyardee straight from the can.
“It’s not just food coloring,” I said. “The sour cream was green to begin with; the carton’s been in the refrigerator for months.”
Jeanie quickly put her spoon down and when Mom went into the other room to answer the phone we ducked into the bathroom and flushed our lunches down the toilet.
“That was great, Mim,” said Jeanie when Mom returned.
“May we be excused?” is all I said. I wanted to get away from the table before anything else appeared.
“Don’t you want dessert?” Mom asked.
“Sure,” said Jeanie.
“No!” I said. But Mom had already gone to get the cookies. She returned with some strange black lumps on a plate. Jeanie looked at them dubiously, then politely picked one up.
“Oh, go ahead, eat it,” I said, reaching for one myself. “They’re just Girl Scout mint cookies. She left them on the radiator so all the chocolate melted off, but they won’t kill you.”
As we munched our cookies, Mom asked idly, “What do you girls think I should serve for Bob’s engagement party?”
“You’re not going to have the party here, are you?” I asked.
“No,” said Mom. I exhaled. “In the country. We have more room in Wilton. And we need to welcome Shelly into the family properly.”
I pictured our small, shabby summer house in the woods. Wilton is only an hour from New York, but in 1960 it was still very rural. My parents had bought the land cheaply and designed the house themselves. Since they couldn’t afford an architect, they had miscalculated a bit, and the downstairs bedrooms were very strangely shaped. Dad hardly knew how to hold a hammer, but to save money he had built the house himself with the aid of a carpenter. He was very proud of his handiwork, despite the drooping roof and awkward layout. He was even prouder of our long, rutted, meandering driveway. “I didn’t want to cut down a single tree!” he said proudly when people asked why it was so crooked.
I loved the house, but I was slightly embarrassed by its unpainted wooden walls and unconventional character. “Why can’t we have the party in a hotel?” I asked. In my mind’s eye I saw Shelly’s impeccable mother, who seemed to go to the beauty parlor everyday and wore nothing but custom-made clothes. Next to her, Mom, a handsome woman who refused to dye her hair, rarely wore makeup, and had very colorful taste in clothes, looked almost bohemian. Shelly’s mother wore an enormous diamond ring on her beautifully manicured finger; my mother didn’t even wear a wedding band and her fingernails were short and haphazardly polished.
“Nonsense,” said Mom. “It will be much nicer to have it at home. So much more intimate. I’d like them to see how we live, find out who we are.”
“Great,” I said under my breath to Jeanie. “That’ll be the end of Bob’s engagement. And a couple of the relatives might die, but who worries about little things like that?” . . .
Just thinking about it made me nervous. “I’ve got to stop this party,” I said.
“How?” asked Jeanie.
I didn’t know. I had four months to figure it out.
My best hope was that my mother’s mood would change before the party took place. That was not unrealistic; my mother’s moods were erratic. But March turned into April and April into May and Mom was still buzzing around. The phone rang constantly and she was feeling great. She cut her gray hair very short and actually started wearing nail polish. She lost weight and bought a whole new wardrobe. Then she and Dad took a quick cruise to the Caribbean.
“We booked passage on a United Fruit freighter,” she said to her friends, “so much more interesting than a conventional cruise.” When asked about the revolutions that were then rocking the islands she had a standard response: “The bomb in the hotel lobby in Haiti made the trip much more interesting.”
When they returned she threw herself into planning the party. I got up every morning and looked hopefully into the refrigerator. Things kept getting worse. Half a baby goat appeared. Next there was cactus fruit. But the morning I found the box of chocolate-covered grasshoppers I decided it was time to talk to Dad.
“The plans are getting more elaborate,” I said ominously.
“Yes?” said Dad politely. Parties didn’t much interest him.
“It’s going to be a disaster,” I announced.
“Your mother gives wonderful parties,” my father said loyally. He was remarkably blind to my mother’s failings, regularly announcing to the world that she was a great cook. I think he actually believed it. He beamed when someone mentioned my mother’s “interesting dishes” and considered it a compliment when they said, “I’ve never tasted anything quite like that before.” And, of course, he never got sick.
“Did you know that she’s planning it as a benefit for Unicef?” I asked.
“Really?” he said. “Isn’t that nice.” He had turned back to the editorials.
“Dad!” I said, trying to get him to see how embarrassing this could be. “She’s sending notices to the newspapers. She’s inviting an awful lot of people. This thing is getting out of control. It’s only a month away and she has nothing planned.”
“It’ll all work out,” Dad said vaguely, folding the newspaper into his briefcase. “Your mother is a very smart woman. She has a PhD.” And then, as if there was no more to be said, he added, “I’m sure you’ll be a big help.”
It was hard to get mad at my father, who was as baffled by my mother’s moods as I was, and just as helpless before them. They were like the weather: unpredictable, and often unpleasant. Dad, I think, enjoyed her energy, but then, he could always go to the office when he needed to escape. Which is what he did now. Disgusted, I called my brother.
Bob lived uptown in a fancy apartment and had as little to do with my parents as he could decently get away with.
“She’s planning to make my engagement party a benefit?” he asked. “You mean she expects Shelly’s family to pay to attend?” I hadn’t quite considered that aspect, but I could see his point.
“I guess so,” I said. “But that’s not the part that worries me. Can you imagine Mom cooking for over a hundred people in the middle of summer? What if it’s a really hot day?”
Bob groaned.
“Can’t you get called away on business?” I asked. “What if you had a conference you had to go to? Wouldn’t she have to call the whole thing off?”
Unfortunately my mother was not the least bit fazed when informed that my brother might not be in town. “The party’s not for you,” she said to Bob, “it’s for Shelly’s family. They’ll come even if you’re too rude not to make an appearance.”
“But Mom,” said Bob, “you can’t ask them to buy tickets to the party.”
“Why not?” asked Mom. “I think it’s just disgusting the way people who have so much forget about those who are less fortunate. How could you possibly object to raising money for underprivileged children in honor of your marriage? I can’t believe I have such a selfish, thoughtless son!” And Mom slammed down the phone.
She always managed to do that, always turned your arguments against you. And so there we were, 150 people invited to lunch on the lawn, a representative from Unicef and photographers promised from all the newspapers. In one of her more grandiose moments Mom wrote her old friend Bertrand Russell in Wales and asked him to come speak; fortunately he was nearing his ninetieth birthday and declined. But he did send a hundred copies of his most recent antiwar booklet, a sort of fairy tale printed on gold paper. It was called History of the World in Epitome (for use in Martian infant schools) and it was very short. The last page was a picture of a mushroom cloud.
“These will make wonderful favors!” said Mom smugly, pointing out that they were autographed. She was so pleased she sent out a few more invitations.
“What are you going to serve?” I asked.
“Do you have any ideas?” she replied.
“Yes,” I said, “hire a caterer.”
Mom laughed as if I had made a joke. But she was moved to call and rent some tables and folding chairs, so at least the guests wouldn’t be sitting on the ground. I suggested that she hire someone to help cook and serve, but she didn’t seem to think that was necessary. “We can do that ourselves,” she said blithely. “Can’t you get your friends to help?”
“No,” I said, “I can’t.” But I did call Jeanie in the city and ask her to ask her parents if she could come out for the week; she thought my mother was “exciting” and I needed moral support.
As the party approached, things got worse and worse. Mom went on cleaning binges that left the house messier when she was done than when she started, and Jeanie and I went around behind her desperately stuffing things back into closets to create some semblance of order. Mom mowed half the lawn; we mowed the other half. Meanwhile my father, looking apologetic and unhappy, conveniently came up with a big project that kept him in the city.
One morning Mom went to a wholesale food company and came back honking her horn loudly, her car filled to the brim. Jeanie and I rushed out to unload fifty pounds of frozen chicken legs, ten pounds of frozen lump crabmeat, industrial-size cans of tomato and split-pea soup, twenty-five-pound sacks of rice, and two cases of canned, spiced peaches.
“This must be the menu,” I said to Jeanie.
“What?” she asked.
“I bet she’s going to make that awful quick soup she thinks is so great. You know, it’s in all the magazines. You mix a can of tomato soup with a can of split pea soup, add a little sherry, and top it with crabmeat.”
“Yuck,” said Jeanie.
“Then I guess she’s going to cook those millions of chicken legs on top of rice, although how she thinks she’s going to cook them all in our little oven I don’t know. And the canned spiced peaches can be the vegetable; they’re easy because all you have to do is open the can and put them on the plates.”
I was surprised (and relieved) when she ordered a giant cake from the local bakery. That left only the hors d’oeuvres; I wondered what she had up her sleeve.
The next day I found out. Jeanie and I were playing croquet, but we put down our mallets when Mom’s horn started, and watched the car speed through the trees, leaving billows of dust in its wake. We ran out to see what she had dragged home.
“Horn & Hardart was having a sale!” Mom announced triumphantly, pointing to the boxes around her. They were filled with hundreds of small cartons. It looked promising. “It’s almost like getting it catered,” I said happily to Jeanie as we toted the boxes inside.
My happiness was short-lived; when I began opening the cartons I found that each contained something different.
“The Automat sells leftovers for almost nothing at the end of the day,” said Mom, “so I just took everything they had.” She was very pleased with herself.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.
“Why, serve it,” she said.
“In what?” I asked.
“Big bowls,” she said.
“But you don’t have anything to put in big bowls,” I pointed out. “All you have is hundreds of things to put in little bowls. Look,” I began ripping the tops off the cartons, “this one is potato salad. This one is coleslaw. This one is cold macaroni and cheese. Here’s a beet salad. Here’s some sliced ham. Nothing matches!”
“Don’t worry,” said Mom, “I’m sure we can make something out of all of this. After all, everything in it is good.”
“Yes,” I muttered to Jeanie, “and by the time it gets served everything in it will be four days old. It will be a miracle if it’s not moldy.”
“I think it would be better if it was,” said practical Jeanie. “If people see mold they won’t eat it.”
“Pray for rain,” I said.
Unfortunately, when I woke up on the day of the party there was not a cloud in the sky. I pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep. But not for long. “Nobody sleeps today,” Mom announced, inexorably pulling back the covers. “It’s party day!”
Some of the food had acquired a thin veneer of mold, but Mom blithely scraped it off and began mixing her terrible Horn & Hardart mush. “It’s delicious!” she cried, holding out a spoonful. It wasn’t. Fortunately it looked even worse than it tasted.
I thought the chicken legs were a little dubious too; in order to get them all cooked we had started two days earlier, and the refrigerator couldn’t hold them all. But they glistened invitingly, and the oven-baked rice looked fine. We spooned the peaches into Mom’s big glass bowls, and they looked beautiful.
I wasn’t very happy about the soup. Mom had left the crabmeat out of the freezer to defrost for two days, and even she didn’t like the way it was smelling. “I think I’ll just add a little more sherry.” she kept saying as she poured in bottles of the stuff.
“People will get drunk on the soup,” I said.
“Fine,” she said gaily, “then maybe they’ll donate more to Unicef.”
My brother arrived, took one look at the rickety chairs on our uneven lawn, and headed straight for the bar. Mom had hired some local high school boys to be bartenders, and they were pouring whiskey as if it were Coke.
“You’ve got to stay sober,” I said to him. “You’ve got to make sure that nobody in Shelly’s family eats the soup. And they should probably watch out for the chicken too.”
Bob had another drink.
My memories of the party are mercifully blurred, but a yellowed clipping from the Norwalk Hour tells part of the story. My mother looks radiantly into the camera beneath a headline reading WILTON FAMILY HOSTS BENEFIT FOR UNICEF.
A family photograph of me handing a check to a grinning official in front of a sign that says SECURITY COUNCIL in both French and English tells another part of the tale.
But my brother owns the end of the story. Thirty-five years later his children can still make him turn green by asking. “Remember the time Nana Mimi poisoned everyone?”
“Ooh,” he moans, “don’t remind me. It was awful. First she extorted money from them. Then she gave out those antibomb favors; it was the early sixties, for Christ sake, and these were conservative businessmen and housewives. But the worse thing was the phone calls. They kept coming all night long. Nobody felt good. Twenty-six of them actually ended up in the hospital having their stomachs pumped. What a way to meet the family!”
I missed all that, but I do remember the phone ringing while we were still cleaning up. Mom was still exulting in the photographer’s flashbulbs, and saying for what seemed like the forty-seventh time, “Look how much money we raised!” She picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” said Mom brightly. I think she expected it to be another reporter. Then her voice drooped with disappointment.
“Who doesn’t feel well?”
There was a long silence. Mom ran her hand through her chic, short coiffure. “Really?” she said, sounding shocked. “All of them?” She slumped a little as her bright red fingernails went from her hair to her mouth. Then her back straightened and her head shot up.
“Nonsense,” I heard her say into the phone. “We all feel fine. And we ate everything.”
“SPEAKING AMERICAN AIN’T necessarily nourishing,” declares Shange in this first chapter of her cookbook/memoir if I can Cook / you KNow God can. Throughout her career she has celebrated her roots in African-American culture in poems, plays, and novels, including her famous “choreodrama” for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Born Paulette Williams in New Jersey and educated at Barnard, she changed her name to Ntozake (“she who has her own things,” in Xhosa) Shange (“she who walks with lions,” in Zulu) as she became increasingly involved in chronicling the lives and achievements of black women. “What’d You People Call That?”—with its sardonic title—eloquently muses on classic soul food recipes: Hoppin’ John, pig’s tails, chitlins, greens. And tellingly, the book from which it is drawn is dedicated “To Ellie, my mother, who could make a kitchen sing and swing, make it a sacred or profane gathering, a spooky, funny place, a refuge, a hallowed midnight meeting with her daughter.”
from if I can Cook / you KNow God can: What’d You People Call That?
BLACK-EYED PEAS AND rice or “Hoppin’ John,” even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the “nigra” as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us. Yes, we eat potato salad on Independence Day, but a shortage of potatoes up and down Brooklyn’s Nostrand Avenue in July will not create the serious consternation and sadness I saw/experienced one New Year’s Eve, when there weren’t no chitlins to be found.
Like most American families strewn far and near ’cross the mainland, many African-American families, like my own, experience trans-cross Caribbean or Pan-American Highway isolation blues during global/national holidays. One Christmas and New Year’s my parents and siblings were somewhere ’tween Trinidad, Santo Domingo, and Los Angeles. My daughter and I were lucky enough to have a highly evolved horizontal family, that is, friends and associates from different bloodlines, but of the same spirit, reliable, loving, and alone, too, except for us.
Anyway, this one winter I was determined that Savannah, my child, should have a typical Owens/Williams holiday, even though I was not a gaggle of aunts and uncles, cousins, second and third cousins twice removed, or even relatives from Oklahoma or Carolina. I was just me, Mommy, in one body and with many memories of not enough room for all the toddlers at the tables. How could I re-create the smells of okra and rice, Hoppin’ John, baked ham, pig’s feet, chitlins, collard greens, and corn bread with syrup if I was goin’ta feed two people? Well, actually one and a half people. She woulda counted as a half in the census. But how we are counted in the census is enough to give me a migraine, and I am trying to recount how I tried to make again my very colored childhood and my very “black” adolescence.
So in all of Clinton-Washington where I could walk with my shopping cart (I am truly an urban soul), there were no chitlins or pig’s feet. I remember standing with a very cold little girl right at the mouth of the C train entrance. Were we going on a quest at dusk on New Year’s Eve or were we going to be improvisationally nimble and work something out? I was cold, too, and time was not insignificant. Everything I had to prepare before midnight was goin’ta take all night. Back we went into a small market, sawdust on the floor, and a zillion island accents pushing my requests up toward the ceiling. “A pound and a half of pig tails,” I say. Savannah murmured “pig tails” like I’d said Darth Vader was her biological father.
Nevertheless, I left outta there with my pig’s tails, my sweet potatoes, collards, cornmeal, rice and peas, a coconut, habañera peppers, olive oil, smoked turkey wings, okra, tomatoes, corn on the cob, and some day-old bread. We stopped briefly at a liquor store for some bourbon or brandy, I don’t remember which. All this so a five-year-old colored child, whose mother was obsessed with the cohesion of her childhood, could pass this on to a little girl, who was falling asleep at the dill pickle barrel, ’midst all Mama’s tales about suckin’ ’em in the heat of the day and sharin’ one pickle with anyone I jumped double Dutch with in St. Louis.
Our biggest obstacle was yet to be tackled, though. The members of our horizontal family we were visiting, thanks to the spirits and the Almighty, were practicing Moslems. Clearly, half of what I had to make was profane, if not blasphemous in the eyes/presence of Allah. What was Elegua, Santeria’s trickster spirit, goin’ta do to assist me? Or, would I have to get real colloquial and call on Brer Rabbit or Brer Fox?
As fate would have it, my friends agreed that so long as I kept the windows open and destroyed all utensils and dishes I used for these requisite “homestyle” offerings, it was a go. I’ll never forget how cold that kitchen was, nor how quickly my child fell asleep, so that I alone tended the greens, pig’s tails, and corn bread. Though I ate alone that New Year’s Eve, I knew a calm I must attribute to the satisfaction of my ancestors. I tried to feed us.
PIG’S TAILS BY INSTINCT
OBVIOUSLY, the tails have gotta be washed off, even though the fat seems to reappear endlessly. When they are pink enough to suit you, put them in a large pot full of water. Turn the heat high, get ’em boilin’. Add chopped onion, garlic, and I always use some brown sugar, molasses, or syrup. Not everybody does. Some folks like their pig extremities bitter, others, like me, want ’em sweet. It’s up to you. Use a large spoon with a bunch of small holes to scrape off the grayish fats that will cover your tails. You don’t need this. Throw it out. Let the tails simmer till the meat falls easily from the bones. Like pig’s feet, the bones are soft and suckable, too. Don’t forget salt, pepper, vinegar, and any kinda hot sauce when servin’ your tails. There’s nothin’ wrong with puttin’ a heap of tails, feet, or pig’s ears right next to a good-sized portion of Hoppin’ John, either. Somethin’ about the two dishes mix on the palate well.
HOPPIN’ JOHN (BLACK-EYED PEAS AND RICE)
REALLY, we should have soaked our peas overnight, but no such luck. The alternative is to boil ’em for at least an hour after cleaning them and gettin’ rid of runty, funny-lookin’ portions of peas. Once again, clear off the grayish foam that’s goin’ta rise to the top of your pot. Once the peas look like they are about to swell or split open, empty the water, get half as much long grain rice as peas, mix ’em together, cover with water (two knuckles’ deep of female hand). Bring to a boil, then simmer. Now, you can settle for salt and pepper. Or you can be adventurous, get yourself a hammer and split open the coconut we bought and either add the milk or the flesh or both to your peas and rice. Habañera peppers chopped really finely, ’long with green pepper and onion diced ever so neatly. Is it necessary to sauté your onion, garlic, pepper, and such before adding to your peas and rice? Not absolutely. You can get away without all that. Simmer in your heavy kettle with the top on till the water is gone away. You want your peas and rice to be relatively firm. However, there is another school of cookin’ that doesn’t mix the peas with the rice until they are on the actual plate, in which case the peas have a more fluid quality and the rice is just plain rice. Either way, you’ve got yourself some Hoppin’ John that’s certain to bring you good luck and health in the New Year. Yes, mostly West Indians add the coconut, but that probably only upset Charlestonians. Don’t take that to heart. Cook your peas and rice to your own likin’.
COLLARD GREENS TO BRING YOU MONEY
WASH 2 large bunches of greens carefully ’cause even to this day in winter critters can hide up in those great green leaves that’re goin’ta taste so very good. If you are an anal type, go ahead and wash the greens with suds (a small squirt of dish detergent) and warm water. Rinse thoroughly. Otherwise, an individual leaf check under cold runnin’ water should do. Some folks like their greens chopped just so, like rows of a field. If that’s the case with you, now is the time to get your best knife out, tuck your thumb under your fingers, and go to town. On the other hand, some just want to tear the leaves up with gleeful abandon. There’s nothing wrong with that, either. Add to your greens that are covered with water either 1/4 pound salt pork, bacon, ham hocks, 2–3 smoked turkey wings, 3–4 tablespoons olive oil, canola oil, and the juice of 1 whole lemon, depending on your spiritual proclivities and prohibitions. Bring to a boil, turn down. Let ’em simmer till the greens are the texture you want. Nouveau cuisine greens eaters will have much more sculpted-looking leaves than old-fashioned greens eaters who want the stalks to melt in their mouths along with the leaf of the collard. Again, I add 1/3 cup syrup, or 2 tablespoons honey, or 3 tablespoons molasses to my greens, but you don’t have to. My mother thinks I ruin my greens that way, but she can always make her own, you know. Serve with vinegar, salt and pepper, and hot sauce to taste. Serves 6–8.
FRENCH-FRIED CHITLINS
I WAS taught to prepare chitlins by my third and fourth cousins on my mother’s side, who lived, of course, in Texas. My father, whose people were Canadian and did not eat chitlins at all, told me my daughter’s French-fried Chitlin taste like lobster. Most of the time you spend making these 5 pounds of highfalutin chitlins will be spent cleaning them (even if you bought them “pre-cleaned,” remember, the butcher doesn’t have to eat them!). You need to scrub, rinse, scrub some more, turn them inside out, and scrub even more. By the time you finish, the pile of guts in front of you will be darn near white and shouldn’t really smell at all. Now you are ready to start the fun part. Slice the chitlins into 1/2-inch strips and set them aside. Prepare a thin batter with 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup milk, 1/3 bottle of beer—drink the rest—and seasonings to taste (if you forget the cayenne, may God have mercy on your soul!). Heat 2–3 inches of oil or bacon grease—use what you like as long as you don’t use oil that has been used to fry fish—until very hot but not burning (360–375 degrees). Dip each strip into the batter, let excess drip down, and fry until golden brown. Only fry one layer at a time and be sure to move the chitlins around in the pot. After patting away excess grease with a paper towel, serve with dirty rice, greens, and corn bread. Or you can just eat them by themselves on a roll like a po’boy.
BUT seriously, and here I ask for a moment of quiet meditation, what did L’Ouverture, Pétion, and Dessalines share for their victory dinner, realizing they were the first African nation, slave-free, in the New World? What did Bolivar crave as independence from Spain became evident? What was the last meal of the defiant Inca Atahualpa before the Spaniards made a public spectacle of his defeat? I only ask these questions because the New York Times and the Washington Post religiously announce the menu of every Inauguration dinner at the White House every four years. Yet I must imagine, along with the surrealistic folk artists of Le Soleil in Port-au-Prince in their depictions of L’Ouverture’s triumph, what a free people chose to celebrate victory. What sated the appetites of slaves no longer slaves. Africans now Haitians, ordinary men made mystical by wont of their taste for freedom? How did we consecrate our newfound liberty? Now this may only be important to me, but it is. It is very important. I need to know how we celebrate our victories, our very survival. What did we want for dinner? What was good enough to commemorate our humanity? We know Haitians are still hungry. Don’t we?
A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR at Harvard and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research there, Gates is probably the world’s most prominent contemporary scholar of African-American literature. His The Signifying Monkey was a groundbreaking book in the field, while his Norton Anthology of African American Literature, coedited with Nellie Y. McKay, definitively established a canon of the writings he has done so much to define and promote. A producer of numerous shows for PBS (“Finding Your Roots,” “African-American Lives”), he has won such awards as the MacArthur Prize and the National Humanities Medal. In the midst of his busy academic and public career, however, he has also found time to write powerful memoirs about his childhood and youth in West Virginia. Colored People, from which our selection is drawn, is an extended autobiographical essay that developed from his search for roots and his passionate attention to the minutiae of family history. Its lively culinary analysis (“white people can’t cook”) offers another way to think about the pleasures of soul food.
from Colored People: Wet Dogs and White People
MAMA WAS PRACTICAL as well as proud. Her attitude was that she and Daddy would provide the best for us, so that no white person could put us down or keep us out for reasons of appearance, color aside. The rest was up to us, once we got in those white places. Like school, which desegregated without a peep in 1955, the year before I started first grade. Otherwise she didn’t care to live in white neighborhoods or be around white people.
White people, she said, were dirty: They tasted right out of pots on the stove. Only some kind of animal, or the lowest order of trash, would ever taste out of a pot on the stove. Anybody with manners knew that; even colored people without manners knew that. It was white people who didn’t know that. If you are cooking, Mama would say, and want to check your seasoning, take the big wooden spoon you use for stirring, place some stew or whatever it is in a cup or small bowl, and then, with a separate spoon or fork, have a taste. Tasting right out of a pot was almost as bad as drinking after somebody, on the same side of the cup or glass, or right after them on a Coca-Cola bottle without wiping their lips off real good. “I’d rather go thirsty myself,” Uncle Raymond would say. By the mid-sixties, he was also given to pronouncing: “I’d rather white people call me a nigger than call me black.” If he’d had to choose between being called black and drinking out of the same bottle after another human being, I’m not sure what Uncle Raymond would have done.
One thing we always did was smell good, partly because we liked scents, but partly because white people said we smelled bad naturally, like we had some sort of odor gene. “Here come you niggers, funking up the place”—even we’d crack that kind of joke a lot. So one thing colored people had to do around white people was smell good. And not have ash on our elbows or knees. Crust, we called it. Moisturizing cream was “crust eradicator,” and Mama made sure we always brought some when we went over to the swimming pool, so as not to Embarrass the Race.
But it was white people who smelled bad, Mama always said. When they got wet. When they get wet, she said, they smell like dogs.
I do hate the smell of a wet dog, I have to confirm. But I don’t think white people smell like that when their hair is wet, and I have done a lot of sniffing of wet-headed white people in my time. At first, as a child, I had a mission to test my mama’s hypothesis:
“Hello, my name is Skipper. I’m taking a survey. . . . Could I smell your wet hair?”
Actually, my technique was subtler, though only slightly.
I remember sidling up to my favorite classmate, Linda Hoffman, one day at the swimming pool—which had integrated in that same year, 1955—nostrils flared, trying to breathe in as deeply as I could, prepared for the worst. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, suspiciously. “Uh, rose fever,” I said.
She didn’t believe me.
And my mother would not have believed the result of my researches, even had I shared them with her. That these doggy-smelling white people should cast olfactory aspersions upon us was bitter gall for her.
Yet if the anxiety about stereotype made colored Piedmont a generally sweet-smelling lot, there was a very significant exception, one that pertains to the mystery surrounding one of Piedmont’s singular attractions—Dent Davis’s Famous Homemade Ring Bologna.
Davis’s delectable bologna was dark red, with a tight, crimson, translucent skin, and was sold in rings at Davis’s Bakery, downtown on Ashfield Street. Dent was German, or so we believed, and he ran the shop with his two middle-aged daughters. Each had her dark hair in a bun, always “done”—as women, for some reason, still say—and one of them, Matilda, always wore luscious red lipstick. She was not a pretty woman, perhaps, but with her light-beige powdered cheeks, her dark-brown, almost black hair and dark-brown eyes, and that red lipstick, when she stood before the golden and dark-brown breads, cookies, and pastries, or wrapped the blood-red links of her daddy’s bologna in white waxed butcher’s paper with that deliberate way she had, she was, I was convinced, one of the loveliest creatures on God’s green earth.
However delicious our tap water, however delicious our local brand of syrup, none of these delicacies of the Potomac Valley tasted better than fried pieces of Dent’s bologna. For Dent Davis had a secret ingredient, whose nature nobody has ever ascertained. And I mean nobody.
Nobody white, that is.
Because all the colored people in Piedmont attributed the special taste and texture to Mr. Boxie, Dent Davis’s faithful colored handyman, who had Dent’s trust and faith, possessed the keys to his shop and house, and was always on hand, even when Davis locked everyone else out so he could make up a batch of that secret bologna.
What’s in that bologna? the colored men would ask Mr. Boxie.
Can’t say, he’d reply, with a wry twist of his lips. Can’t say.
That nigger knows what’s in that bologna, the town—our town—would whisper. Wonder if Dent lets him help make it?
The town’s concern with Dent’s liberality in relation to Mr. Boxie had nothing to do with the fact that Dent Davis was German and Mr. Boxie was colored, and the year was 1955 or so, when the words “civil rights” were about to become current. Boxie was Dent’s man, so all of that was by-the-by. The town’s concern was that Mr. Boxie was the dirtiest, smelliest, sloppiest, most disheveled colored man in all of Piedmont, and maybe the world. Mr. Boxie put the un in unkempt. The town said Mr. Boxie was funky, long before Motown or James Brown thought of making “funky” mean cool, hip, or “down.” No, Mr. Boxie was funky because he smelled bad.
“A whiff of Boxcars,” Big Mom, Mama’s mama, would say, “would knock even a grown man out.” And to think that Mr. Boxie was the chief chef in the making of Piedmont’s sole contribution to the world’s culinary chef d’oeuvre was more than I—once I had confirmed the rumor’s truth beyond the wrought-iron railings of the elementary-school courtyard—could bear.
Tell me it ain’t so, Pop, I said to my father. It’s so, boy. It was true, then: the funk was what did it. It was a long time before I’d try Dent Davis’s bologna again, enriched as I now knew it to be by Mr. Boxie’s stench. And I never again tried it raw. Fried, however, was another matter. Gas will kill anything, Aunt Marguerite said to me one day as I eyed my dinner plate balefully, wanting so much to be able to forget the loathsome origins of this delicacy that she had placed before me. Anything, she insisted. I managed to smile at her between mouthfuls, after the first full swallow stayed down.
WHITE people couldn’t cook; everybody knew that. Which made it a puzzle why such an important part of the civil rights movement had to do with integrating restaurants and lunch counters. The food wasn’t any good anyway. Principle of the thing, Daddy’s buddy Mr. Ozzie Washington would assert. They don’t know nothin’ about seasoning, my aunt Marguerite would say. I like my food seasoned, she’d add.
If there is a key to unlocking the culinary secrets of the Coleman family, it is that a slab of fatback or a cupful of bacon drippings or a couple of ham hocks and a long simmering time are absolutely essential to a well-cooked vegetable. Cook it till it’s done, Mama would say. Cook it till it’s dead, we’d learn to say much later. When I first tasted a steamed vegetable, I thought it was raw. The Colemans were serious about their cooking and their eating. There was none of this eating on the run; meals lasted for hours, with lots of good conversation thrown in. The happiest I ever saw my aunts and uncles in the Coleman family was when they’d slowly eat their savory meals, washing everything down with several glasses of iced tea. Especially at the Family Reunion, or on Christmas Day up at Big Mom’s house. “Eating good”—with plenty of fat and cholesterol—was held to be essential to proper health and peace of mind.
There were plenty of Colemans: nine brothers—known as “the boys”—and four sisters, the youngest of whom had died when she was a day or two old. (There’s enough niggers in your mother’s family, Daddy would remark, to cast a Tarzan movie.)
Sunday in Piedmont was everybody’s favorite day, because you could eat yourself silly, starting just after church. Mama didn’t go to church on Sundays, except to read out her obituaries. She’d cook while we were at Sunday school. Rarely did the menu vary: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, baked corn (corn pudding), green beans and potatoes (with lots of onions and bacon drippings and a hunk of ham), gravy, rolls, and a salad of iceberg lettuce, fresh tomatoes (grown in Uncle Jim’s garden), a sliced boiled egg, scallions, and Wishbone’s Italian dressing. We’d eat Mama’s Sunday dinners in the middle of the day and keep nibbling for the rest of the afternoon and evening. White people just can’t cook good, Aunt Marguerite used to say; that’s why they need to hire us.
BORN AND RAISED in Detroit, Ehrlich grew up as a “red diaper baby” in a secular Jewish family. She has worked as a journalist for Business Week, written a biography of famous turn-of-the-century investigative reporter Nellie Bly, and taught at the Columbia School of Journalism. Her prize-winning recipe-studded memoir Miriam’s Kitchen traces her conversion to Orthodox Judaism under the aegis of her mother-in-law Miriam, a Holocaust survivor whose meticulous and loving kosher practices become increasingly compelling to the young wife. Learning to separate dairy cookery and its utensils from meat-based cuisine and its own utensils, preparing foods for the celebratory Shabbas meal, and even taking a ritual bath in a mikvah, Ehrlich examines and meditates on the traditional customs of observant Jews. If the world of the men is the synagogue, she shows, the realm of the women is the kitchen, where time is marked by weekly Sabbath dinners and festive occasions like Rosh Hashanah and Passover. “The year ebbs and flows,” she writes. “Miriam’s cakes work, form, swell and subside, and the universe is good to us: another cake already on horizon’s rim.”
from Miriam’s Kitchen: Passover
IN THE BEGINNING there was Brooklyn, and it was Passover. We had journeyed east in our Plymouth from Detroit. We brought school books, and our spring coats. The call of our rich tradition had been heard—Next year in New York!—and heeded. We, the destined ones, would miss an extra week of school, right after Easter vacation.
We sat at my grandmother’s dining room table, on stiff mahogany chairs upholstered in blood-red velvet. Candle flame flickered, chandelier glowed, crystal refracted, the dark of evening gently fell. Above the Belgian rug, my feet dangled in navy blue maryjanes. They weren’t as fancy as patent leather, but you could wear them to school. A wineglass stood at every place, with an extra goblet for Elijah the prophet, who visits every Seder table. At the head of the table, my father, impressive in his high, boxy, black skullcap, resembling an Eastern Orthodox bishop, performed the Passover recounting, the Haggadah, in rapid, rusty, musical Hebrew. . . .
“Let’s go, Edward,” spurred my grandmother. She had been cooking, cleaning, and changing dishes for days with my mother’s help, and didn’t want the roast chicken to dry up. . . .
My father said when to raise glasses, and when to drink the four draughts of wine—or grape juice—draughts that a free person, celebrating redemption, can drink. He washed his hands ceremoniously, reciting the proper blessing. He pointed to a roasted lamb bone, which had been set on fire over the gas burner earlier that day, displayed as a symbol of the animal sacrifices practiced by early Hebrews.
Holding out his strong, freckled hands, my father broke matzo, the unleavened bread baked in speed by the escaping slaves, and we handed around the crisp pieces. During the eight days of Passover, or Pesach, one may not eat regular bread, or anything prepared with or touched by a leavening agent such as yeast or baking powder. We didn’t miss it; the Seder’s first matzo wipes bread-hunger from the mind.
Next came the dipping, once and twice. My father dipped parsley, a token of green spring and new beginnings, into the salt water that stands for Israelites’ tears. Down the table the dripping sprigs were passed. Raw bits of horseradish root, to recall the bitterness of bondage, were dipped in haroses, a sweet, wet gravel of finely chopped apples, raisins, cinnamon, and wine. This haroses symbolized the mortar with which the slaves toiled under the cruel sun-god. “We built the pyramids!” I breathlessly discovered. From then on, history was personal.
Green-sprouted horseradish pieces were passed. Brave children, dying of hunger by then, tried the bitter herb, yelped, gulped water. Red-eyed, we fanned our open mouths. The physic worked. They taught their children to remember.
Finally, finally, the festive meal. Fruit salad in dishes of gold-rimmed glass. Invariably fruit, though I don’t know why—for spring? There were grapefruits and oranges, chunks of pineapple and peeled apples marinated in lemon and orange juice, strawberries, bananas. I had watched this salad prepared. My father, sitting at the kitchen table with a paring knife, peeled and sectioned the citrus fruit. My mother hulled boxes of strawberries, berries selected each by each. The kitchen table grew juicy with brilliant color.
After the fruit, the hard-boiled egg, the pagan sign of life’s renewal, served whole to each person in a bowl of saltwater broth. Under the big spoon grasped in a small fist, the egg skittered dangerously. I supposed it was forbidden to cut the egg with a knife. I never asked. I crumbled matzo over the bowl and rose to the challenge of nailing the slippery egg.
Chicken soup with matzo balls, or kneydlekh, as we called them, and toasty soup nuts, bought in a blue-and-gray box in the store, kosher for Passover, to float in the shallow dishes.
Ahhh. Here we breathed deeply, wriggled expectantly in our seats. I wonder at our appetites, the quantities we ate as children. I think we ate it all.
Next issued gefilte fish. It came from the kitchen, on a thin china plate, a thick slab of it, homemade, with a slice of carrot and the detested jellied broth. It was served with khreyn, grated horseradish root, flavored with vinegar, sugar, and salt. Outside on the stoop that afternoon, my father had rubbed the pungent root on a hand grater balanced atop an enamel basin. His eyes streamed with the hot smell of it. My sister and brother and I ran up for a sniff, a hilarious scream, pretending to faint and die.
Roast chicken, huge quarters of spring pullets my mother had cleaned and plucked, had kashered—made kosher, had massaged, according to my grandmother’s direction, with a paste of crushed garlic, paprika, pepper, salt, and sage, had roasted in glass baking pans. Skin side down, covered, skin side up, covered, then the foil off to crisp, roasted certainly for hours until the meat nearly fell off the bone, and velvety chunks of potatoes browned in the drippings.
I cannot picture a vegetable. Perhaps I did give up at some point, or was there none? No, this is all I remember, save for a slice of cucumber pickle and possibly a little more matzo, until the stewed prunes, the sponge cake, the coconut macaroons, the chocolate-covered orange peels, the tea with lemon and sugar, the last bit of matzo eaten as dessert, and the final songs.
After the meal, we opened the door for Elijah, and ran back to the table: a quiver ran through his cup of wine. My father looked innocent. . . .
IN the kitchen next morning there was a lightness and cleanliness, a freshness, and Passover smells. New linen dishtowels hung on the rack. The kitchen table was spread with an ironed cloth. There would be eight days of matzo: matzo with whipped butter and salt, matzo sandwiches, matzo puddings, dumplings, farfel, sponge cakes, also egg dishes, and fruit salad, and stewed prunes. How many eggs would be purchased for Passover week? Eggs to boil whole, to mix into chopped liver, to make pancakes fluffy, to fry with onions. Five or six per person, per day? No one can do this anymore, but are we really more healthy for it?
My grandmother rendered chicken skin for the yellow fat, schmaltz. As we gathered round the fragrant stove like so many chubby fledglings, she gave us the cracklings, the grivnes, to eat.
She made a giant ginger-scented matzo-meal pancake, round in its iron skillet, half-fried, half-baked, dense, crisp-edged, and two inches high. This fankukhn, cut into wedges, lavished with sugar and cinnamon, was one kind of breakfast. She steamed matzos over hot boiling water, spread each limp matzo square with hot chicken fat, sprinkled it with coarse salt, and rolled it up, to be eaten with soft-boiled eggs. She poured boiling water over crumbled matzos and strained the pieces, scrambled them with egg, fried them in oil, and this was matzo brei. She poured sweet red wine into hot morning tea. There was a week of such breakfasts, a blissful week of spring.
During the days, we walked with my father and played in the neighborhood park, among spring puddles and sunbursts and chalk hopscotch boards. The only cloud in our sky was that vernal harbinger, the first sighting of the Ice Cream Man. Oh, we would badger my father for tempting wares we knew were not kosher for Pesach, or face an early crisis of consciousness. Sometimes we had to leave New York in an incomplete state, having partaken of no Good Humor bar.
The years rolled on, it seems so quickly now. One spring I remember teasing for an ice cream and being stunned when my father said, “O.K.” The condition was it must be finished at the playground, before we strolled back within view of grandmother’s house.
Was this, just maybe, what set our rites of spring so softly crumbling?
After this, my recollections blur. My father began to skip parts of the Haggadah, and to stumble on the Hebrew from time to time. My grandmother died. The family met in New York for Christmas then, not Pesach. Our small Detroit Seders drifted toward English, grew shorter. Teenagers tried for political relevance, dogmatic and sincere.
Gefilte fish came from a jar. We barely noticed when the green apple blossom dishes, our own Passover set, stayed packed up in the basement one time, then forever. When was the last bit of chicken skin crisped in the pan, the last grivn eaten?
My father still scoured the oven each spring. My mother made matzo balls. I don’t blame my parents. One spring in college, I didn’t go home for Passover, though spring break coincided with the full April moon. I wandered the empty campus, an exile from history, and I ate a burger in a bun. The tides were bearing my craft away from the high-church Seders I once loved, and I held the rudder.
AT last the man I would marry brought me home to meet his parents, and they chopped gefilte fish by hand.
For years I was content to eat it, oblivious of the work involved, though I uttered empathic things. Now I am going to watch: Miriam, my mother-in-law, feeding chunks of whitefish and pike through an electric grinder. Long pinkish pulverized strings of mash falling hypnotically into a bowl as the face of the grinder goes round and round.
Father-in-law Jacob places two folding chairs seat to seat, covers this makeshift table with an old towel. On it, he balances a wooden board heaped with ground fish. Pulling up a third chair, he sits. He grasps a sharp-bladed cleaver with both hands, and begins to chop. Ten cuts this way, ten cross-hatched cuts, cleaving the translucent sea-flesh, twelve more this way, the ax-blade again mounding the fish, lifting high, weighing down, a lifetime of fine etched lines in the board, like lines on the palm of a hand.
I offer to help.
“Chop the fish?” Jacob, incredulous.
Miriam makes a face: “For what?”
When I insist, Jacob shrugs, a squint of humor in it. He still opens doors for me, hoists the shopping bags of Miriam’s cooked food down their front stairs to my car. The implication of female frailty infuriated me once. Now I treasure Jacob, a good man who embodies his responsibilities, whose sense of duty is a kind of knowledge, one that indeed gives him eerie strength.
Where the fish is concerned, at least, I am about to be humbled. Leaning over the board to chop, my back begins to ache. My shoulder throbs with the up-down pulse of the heavy cleaver. Flying bits of fish stick to my hair, mashed pink fish works crazily to the ends of the board. The board wobbles unsteadily on the chairs. The handle grows sticky and hot.
Surreptitious, I glance at the clock.
“It’s too hard for you,” comments Miriam, her back to me, at the sink. She is cleaning the grinder with a toothbrush and toothpick, piece by shining piece.
“No problem!” I gasp. I scrape fish away from the edges of the board, pull fish into a mound, scrape, pull. I chop. My two red hands grip the cleaver. My shoulders burn, but pride keeps me chopping a good ten minutes, and it seems like forty-five.
“There!” I proclaim, unable to go on. I work the handle out of my claw.
“Thank you!” exclaims Miriam, wiping her hands. “Hmmm,” she adds, examining the fish.
I wash my hands tenderly. Miriam sprinkles sugar on the fish. Jacob, wordlessly, resumes chopping. He had not bothered to sit down meanwhile at all.
“Couldn’t you use a food processor?” I say, a bit plaintively, once my pulse slows.
“For the fish?” Jacob allows himself a rare, private smile. “Sure not.”
“I tried it once,” remarks Miriam, cutting onions into a pot with fish bones, a bay leaf, water, and pepper. She will mix the chopped fish with egg, matzo meal, seasonings, then shape oval patties in her palm with a knife to simmer in the broth. “The one you brought.”
Oh, yes, I had forgotten. A gift, back when food processors were new, back when Miriam was still asking, “How should I call you to the family?” for I was neither wife nor fiancée, and her cousins and their children were busy with weddings, mazel-tovs, bar mitzvahs, and all the other communal demarcations and progressions. I had other things on my mind. “Friend,” I used to answer, resolutely obtuse in the face of Miriam’s sharp discomfort and longing. One son, and not a boychik either . . . living with a girl (though this was not quite acknowledged), and nothing happening. No grandchildren.
“You can have it, it’s downstairs in the box still,” she said. The food processor. “The fish didn’t come out good.” She thinks back. “It didn’t—feel.”
I watch Jacob and the shimmering fish mass, as it is heaped, divided, broken down, pulled together. The texture has gone way beyond chopped flesh. It grows—gelatinous, sponge-like, it glows and expands, gains mass and presence, substance. In a word, it feels. Jacob is one with his task, his wiry arms rising, falling, his face intent but composed.
“What about a chopping bowl? A hand chopper?” I ask faintly, entranced.
“This would be all right,” she admits. “But I don’t have the bowl.” . . .
FOR many Passovers I sat down to Miriam’s dense, miraculous gefilte fish wishing it were not sweet. I dressed it in sharp horseradish, while my husband’s family corrected my spotty Litvakish Yiddish. Then one year it struck me that I had changed. I liked the fish sweet, and the horseradish sweet, and the red cabbage salad and the carrots sweet.
I guess it is only poetic justice and the debt the universe owed my bubbe, who must have been raised on sugar in fish. At an age when I moped around college libraries and worse, she was busy transliterating her husband’s food preferences. She longed for more sweetness from time to time.
AND so, I began keeping Passover, and hosting an annual Seder. I get ready for Pesach, little by little, and do a little more each year. Some of it is spring cleaning. I dust and wipe and shake out the rugs, and in a good year, I get to the windows. Then I get rid of improper food, the crumbs and crusts and anything not kosher for Passover: the hametz. I line drawers and shelves with new paper, and fit them out with Passover dishes. I scour the sink and clean the oven. I cover the countertops and kitchen table. All for a span of eight days, and then I box up Pesach again for another year. . . .
I thought long about changing dishes. A year came when I took the leap. My parents were visiting; we leapt together. My dad commandeered the wheel and we drove to a distant housewares outlet. I chose dishes, enough for the big multiple-course Seder dinner. I bought pots and pans, cutting boards, paring knife, spatula, outfitting a phantom kitchen.
My mother showed me how to boil my silverware, kasher my glasses, make Pesach in fridge and sink, remembering this and that as we went along. We packed up the everyday things. And then, only then, we began to make the Seder.
Everyone cooked. We followed the Brooklyn menu, and we followed Miriam’s menu. My mother made chicken soup and matzo balls, and Miriam brought her Passover egg noodles for the soup as well, delicate crepe threads of egg and potato starch. I attempted Miriam’s rabinik, which means “grated thing,” a mystery to my mother until she recognized her mother’s potato pudding. We boiled eggs, for serving in salt water, for chasing around the bowl with your spoon. Miriam brought the gefilte fish.
We invited the family. My father’s sister, Selina, arrived with a fankukhn, in a gift box, tied with gold ribbons. Forty years after perfecting soufflés, she had spent the day destroying fankukhn failures and had at last got it, “Sort of,” she said.
We went through the rites, Jacob in his thick glasses leading, trying hard to read slow and allow for English. We drank wine and retold the story, as children giggled and showed off. It came time for the entrance of Elijah, whose full glass awaited at the table’s heart. Children ran to the door, throwing it open under a starry sky.
“If you want wine, come in now!” a child yelled into the night.
It was our firmest apostate, Aunt Selina, who found herself shocked at the joke. “I was the oldest, I used to have to walk down a long dark hallway alone, to let in Elijah. I was scared,” she mused. “Imagine them joking about it.”
I remembered my grandmother’s hallway, long and dark, remembered Elijah’s wine in its tall goblet, shimmering and moving as if invisibly sipped, as my father, straight-faced, jostled the table leg with his knee. There was a glowing solemnity about Passover then. I don’t know if it will return. Yet for my children, Passover is not a mausoleum, and I like this, too.
THE JORDANIAN-AMERICAN WRITER, who divides her time between Miami and Portland, Oregon, has written several acclaimed novels (including Arabian Jazz, Crescent, and Birds of Paradise) as well as a memoir about her family’s traditions—primarily its foodways—titled The Language of Baklava, in which she describes meals made with typical Middle Eastern ingredients cooked in suburban upstate New York as well as in Amman and the deserts of Jordan. A frequent contributor to National Public Radio, the American-born Abu-Jaber has spent considerable time in her father’s native Jordan, both as a child and later as the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, when she interviewed Jordanian and Palestinian women about their lives and work. In this passage from her memoir she recounts the consternation her family caused in their neighborhood when her father grilled in the front yard, a practice not only mystifying to the neighbors but disturbing to practitioners of the great American backyard barbecue. Abu-Jaber’s childhood emotions veer between shame and pride at this seemingly un-American culinary custom.
from The Language of Baklava:
A House and a Yard
OUR SPRAWLING NEIGHBORHOOD is filled, in its family rooms and rec rooms and extra bedrooms, with a nation of children. There’s Karen, Carl, Lilah, Raymond, Lisa, Donna, Sally, Jamie, the Malcolm twins, and many more all within the first three blocks of the school bus route. Jamie Faraday used to be best friends with Sally Holmes until I appeared in the lunchroom with my bags full of cold roasted chicken kabobs slathered in hummus and wrapped in pita bread. Sally dragged back the seat beside me, plumped her chin onto the heel of her palm, and said, “What you eating?” Down the length of the long linoleum table, I see Jamie abandoned. She lifts her head and I see myself come into focus; her forehead rises with a look almost like recognition. Now Jamie eyes me warily every time she gets on the bus, takes note of Sally seated beside me, and waves with an enraged little flip of the hand. Then she clatters down the aisle far from our seat into exile.
I notice all this but don’t completely take it in: I’m trying to get my bearings. Throughout our first year back in the States, I seem to see everything through a glittering mist. I hear the expression American dream and I think that, somehow, this quality of mistiness must be what it refers to. The children in the neighborhood are so soft and babyish that they barely seem to have outlines. In other ways they are deliberate, remorseless, and exacting. The politics of the school bus and the rumor mill of the classroom are fierce, filled with intrigue and menace. It all feels so different from the good-times kids I knew in Jordan, with their shared gum, their sharp, brown shins and broken-toothed grins. In America, I learn there is a certain way to dress (hip-huggers, flared jeans), a certain way to wear your hair (gleaming, Prince Valiant bobs), a certain lunchbox to carry (Barbie for girls, G.I. Joe for boys—I am nearly cast out of fourth grade when I show up with a Flintstones box). And there are, it turns out, many things that—under any circumstances—you do not do.
For example, the neighbors don’t barbecue in their front yards. That is apparently what the backyard is for. The backyards here are fenced off and guarded—spaces as private as other people’s dreams. But our front yard has the better view and has easier access to the front door, which is closer to the kitchen and hence a very practical place for grilling. Also, the front yard will allow us to share food, cross our legs on the plastic lawn chairs, and gossip with the neighbors, as we did in Jordan. We have survived a long, howling, isolated Syracuse winter that hardened into filthy icebergs of decaying snow. By April, Bud is ready to pronounce it spring and set up his hibachi. On the first warmish sunny day, we drag out the picnic table, digging mud furrows through the half-frozen yard. Bud has chicken marinated in olive oil, vinegar, rosemary, and a whole head of garlic. Its butter yellow skin hisses and crackles over the coals, and the aroma fills my head. The beautiful charred smell of the grill circulates through the spring air and bare tree branches, still shocked with cold. . . .
WE set the table, bring out bowls of elegant baba ghanouj and sprightly tabbouleh salad full of bulgur and fresh parsley, a basket of hot bread, and skewers heavy with onion and tomato wedges to be roasted. We sit, marveling over our good fortune—to live in these rolling green lawns, these creamy houses, and the bold vaulted sky of our new neighborhood. The chicken is crusty and redolent with garlic and rosemary. We eat well, shivering just a bit in our jackets. I have a sense—as I often do when I contemplate this blue moon-stone sky—of the future. It is a broad, euphoric feeling. Does the rest of the family feel this way? I don’t know for sure, though I imagine they do. Whenever we all drive home together, Mom asks as we pull in the driveway, “Who do you suppose lives in this little house?”
We are lost in the food, in the smell of grilling, and in the spring when there is a powdery sort of sensation sprinkling down the back of my neck and suddenly I realize a man and a woman are standing at the edge of the street, just a few feet away, staring at us.
I put down my chicken leg, which has rolled juices and smoke between my fingers. “Hi!” I call brightly. New neighbors! They look hungry. The woman starts and blushes, as if she didn’t imagine that we could see them. Her eyes are a pale linen blue, of such crisp clarity that she looks as if she could X-ray with them.
Bud stands, maître d’ of the front lawn. “Welcome. I’m Gus, this is my wife, Pat—”
The two strangers pull back and lightly bump into each other. I dimly register the sense that they didn’t think Bud could talk.
“We just moved here in November.” Bud gestures at the house as if they might assume we were picnicking on someone else’s lawn. “I hope you’re hungry! We’ve got all this crazy food—shish kabob, baba gha—”
The woman’s kerchief white hand flutters up to her throat. There’s a pause, and Bud bends back a little and asks me quietly, “Haddol nawal?” (Are they Gypsies?”) They look marooned and stateless, standing there mute in the street. But I remember seeing a family of Gypsies once in the old market in Jordan, with their fringed scarves and spangled earrings and high-voltage expressions. These mild, normal people don’t look anything like that—the man in belted beige slacks and tasseled loafers and the woman in a milky, synthetic blouse and culottes. Finally the man clears his throat and says, “Oh no, no, thank you—we . . . we just, um, ate. Um.” He blinks. “We, uh . . . we uh . . . we live over there, on Cumberland Drive? We uh . . . well, our neighbors—you know the Tinerkes on Roanoke Circle?”
Bud frowns, trying to process the name. I picture rabbity little Timmy and chinless Bitsy Tinerke sitting in the third seat from the front of the school bus.
“Anyway. Well, see, they live really close by here, too.” The man and the woman glance at each other. He puts his hands on his slender snaky hips. “Well, they saw you-all out here eating or burning things or something and then called us to say there might be some kind of—I don’t know, exactly—maybe some kind of trouble going on out here? And so we just came on over to check into it—you know, we all like to keep an eye on things—this is a nice neighborhood—and so . . .” His voice trails off; his face is slowly turning an alarming, bruised color.
Bud is still standing there, still frowning, as if this man is speaking in tongues. Then my mother stands and the couple look startled once again. She is nearly six feet tall, with good level shoulders and a long neck and unwavering Cassandra eyes. She also puts her hands on her hips, almost casual. “There’s no trouble here,” she says in her smooth, leaf-blown voice.
They put up their hands and back away as if she is waving a pistol at them. “No, no, no trouble at all—sorry for the—the misunderstanding. . . . Welcome to the neighborhood!” Then they are gone.
And that’s about when I get the feeling that starts somewhere at the center of my chest, as heavy as an iron ingot, a bit like fear or sadness or anger, but none of these exactly; it is simply there, suspended between my ribs. I look up at the neighborhood and the mist has cleared. All the mean, cheaply framed windows are gaping at us, the sky empty as a gasp.
THE next day on the school bus, Jamie climbs on, gives me her hard smile, hesitates, then flounces down on the seat next to me. She tilts her head and parts her lips. I look up in alarm. “Just to let you know,” she says in a sweet, burning way.
She crosses one bare leg over the other, and her brilliant white socks bounce with the rocking of the bus. “Well, you know, of course. My parents saw you out there the other night. I heard them talking with the neighbors. They said it was an ‘unholy disgrace.’ See, okay, the thing is, you better know that in this country nobody eats in the front yard. Really. Nobody.” She looks at me solemnly and sadly, her bangs a perfect cylinder above her brows. “If your family doesn’t know how to behave, my parents will have to find out about getting you out of this neighborhood.”
She squints, pinches her lips together in a narrow, bitten-down way. I can see every pointed pale lash, the pink ridges above her lower lids.
I feel the iron inside of me. It drives through every bit of my body. It vibrates like a bell clapper. I turn away from her and tip my forehead against the frigid pane of glass. There’s an echo in my head saying: She’s right. Shame fills me: I see it in the rain stroking the windows, so bright that it burns holes in the backs of my eyes. When Jamie finally slides out of the seat, I don’t even hear her go.
I MOPE, barely speaking, for a solid week, appetiteless, rejecting Bud’s lunches of stuffed squash, shawerma, kibbeh. Even Mom’s peanut butter and Fluff on white bread brings tears to my eyes, and I stuff it in the garbage barrel at the cafeteria.
Mrs. Manarelli asks me what’s wrong.
But I have no way of explaining to her that I have awakened from the mist and now our neighborhood looks hard and squat and drudgy. I have no way to explain Jamie Faraday’s pink-rimmed eyes and long bulb of a nose. Instead I just mope and shrug and sigh wordless blue shadows. So she slants her head to one side, then swats at my behind and tells me I don’t have no sign of a butt at all. And I get indignant and say I do so have signs of a butt. And she says fine, well, okay then, come on inside, I need your help in the kitchen.
The entrance to Mrs. Manarelli’s house smells like roasting tomatoes and garlic. She doesn’t go in much for opening the window curtains, which she says fades everything, so the whole downstairs is doused in shadow and all the furniture crackles under clear plastic covers. Directly over the couch in the living room is a spotlit, gilt-framed painting of the Last Supper, and here the notes of tomato sauce are so pronounced that you could imagine this is what the apostles are eating. Her husband, Johnny, sits on the couch, ankles crossed on the coffee table, always glaring at what seems to be the same word in the newspaper. The family room smells of red wine, fruit, and chocolate, and I know the bedrooms upstairs smell either of bread when she’s baking or of the fresh cedar, lavender, and pine hillsides of another country. Once, in the upstairs bathroom, I was so transported by the scent of rosewater that Mrs. Manarelli found me there a half hour later sitting on the edge of the tub, combing my hair and singing.
We go into the kitchen and there is something shimmering in a gelatin mold on the counter. She instructs me to soak a kitchen towel under the warm-water tap and wipe this along the mold. Then she turns it out onto a pastry board dusted with confectioner’s sugar; a puff of sugar blooms in the air. It is so brilliantly white that it reminds me of the nuns speaking of food that removes all sin. Mrs. Manarelli wipes a knife with the hot towel, cuts into the whiteness, and brings me a slice of panna cotta gleaming and dewy on a Melmac plate.
She sits beside me at the speckled linoleum table just like our own and says speculatively, “Only men in my life—husband, son . . . why do you suppose that is?”
I blink. I want to dwell on my own problems, but this is a novel idea to me, in our house of mostly girls. I reach for my grandmother’s favorite explanation: “Maybe it’s because Jesus says so.”
“Jesus!” she snorts. Then she sighs and fans herself and looks off at the place where the ceiling meets the wall. “Eat your dessert,” she says. “Jesus.”
The first spoonful of panna cotta is so startling, I want to laugh or sing or confess my sins. It tastes of sweetness and cream and even of the tiny early flowers the cows have eaten to make the cream.
I take another bite of panna cotta and another. Before long, without even realizing it, I’m talking, telling all, secrets dissolving like panna cotta in the mouth. Mrs. Manarelli scrapes her chair in closer, puts her chin on her hand, and watches me talk about grilled chicken and the Gypsy people in loafers and the school bus and how Sally now likes me better than Jamie and how that is my fault and Jamie’s cinched smile and how I don’t have the right lunchbox or the right pants or shoes or socks and how things are different from Jordan and how I can never remember my sins in confession so I make up new ones and isn’t that a sin of a sin and does that mean I am going right to hell, are they going to kick us out of the neighborhood, and can we move back to our apartment in the courtyard with my boyfriend Hisham?
When I have exhausted myself and have scraped up every bit of panna cotta on my plate, Mrs. Manarelli goes and stands at the stove as if she is cooking something, but the little red light on her stove isn’t on. She is muttering things in different languages, and her voice sounds serrated: I hear angry odds and ends of words. Finally she turns around and says, “There’s nobody going to hell around here except for the ones think they aren’t gonna go. That’s if you ask me. And they damn better not ask or they’ll find out a thing or five they don’t want to know!”
This comment raises more questions for me than it answers. While I’m mulling this over, she grabs the phone receiver and shakes it like a mace. “What’re their names?” she demands. “I got a few choice words for them.”
“Who?”
“The Gypsies! The Gypsies and their loafers!”
“Maria Elena Theresa, do not call the neighbors.” Her grouchy husband’s voice erupts from the living room where he is rattling the newspaper. “We are no longer in Brooklyn, we are in civilization up here now. People don’t do that kind of stuff up here.”
“Don’t tell me what people do!” she shouts back. “The Italians invented civilization!”
“I was Italian five years before you was born,” he retorts. “I got a PhD in civilization.”
She shakes the receiver a few more times at the wall behind Johnny’s head, jaw set at an indignant angle, as if she is still arguing with him. But she seems to concede the argument because she slams the phone back down and turns to the counter. Now Mrs. Manarelli is busying herself with a new plan of attack. She wraps up the panna cotta in waxed paper, then cloth napkins, like swaddling a big baby. She puts it in a basket with some cold sliced roast beef, some soft white cheese in a jar, some tender roasted red peppers in oil, tiny black olives, and a crusty round loaf of bread. “We’re going out!” she shouts at her husband. Then she says to me, “C’mon, kid.”
We walk next door to my house and Mrs. Manarelli knocks loudly, then comes halfway in, yelling up the stairs to my mother. Mom comes down the stairs, patting at her new bouffant hairdo, tall and firm and shiny. Mrs. Manarelli holds up her basket, tells her that she’s brought a picnic and doesn’t want to eat it at the round, speckled table in the kitchen, she wants to eat it outside. Mom starts laughing. “But it’s fifty degrees out—and I just got my hair done!” I admire her long neck and towering hair, all of her descending the foyer stairs like a goddess on a trophy.
“Hoity-toity, Pat,” Mrs. Manarelli says, and nudges me. “Now, there’s a woman.”
Mom stares at us a moment as we stand grinning and wind whipped in the doorway, gives a last, regretful pat to her hairdo, and goes in to put on her parka and collect my sisters. Mrs. Manarelli also looks magnificent. Usually she’s plump and hunched up, her hair trapped in a net like a dark fish. But once we go back outdoors, she comes unfurled: Her short brown hair bobs in the wind, her lips are round and scarlet against the whiteness of her skin. She stands straighter, and under her wool church coat the hem of her cotton print dress flails around her knees. It’s the end of April and we had the last snowfall four weeks ago, our ill-fated barbecue three weeks ago. The neighborhood windows and doorknobs still stay rimmed with frost an hour after the sun comes out.
The hibachi is stowed away in the garage, but the picnic table floats abandoned on the thawing grass out front, and this, of course, is where Mrs. Manarelli wants to eat. She spreads out a checkered tablecloth, and when we can’t get the cloth to stop blowing off the table, we sit on top of it. Mom brings out plates and wineglasses and Kool-Aid for me and my sisters, and there is a look on her face as though we’ve just told one another a good joke. Her cheeks gleam with the cold, and her high hair unravels in the wind like a ball of yarn. It’s so cold that I’m having trouble tasting anything, and Monica says she wants to go back inside and see the rest of her soap opera. (She’s only four, but she’s already addicted to the high drama of General Hospital.) But then Mrs. Manarelli unveils the baby panna cotta: It shivers and gleams white as a star. We eat it directly from the waxed paper with plastic spoons.
The neighborhood cars pass, some quickly, some slowly, and we wave at them all with the wave we’ve seen at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, a feathery tilt at the wrist, forearm upright. No one can tell us anything. We are five queens drifting over the suburbs on our own private float.
RAISED IN A small midwestern farm town, Linda Furiya launched her writing career in San Francisco, with a column that appeared in Japanese-American newspapers; eventually she moved to Beijing where she wrote articles on Chinese food, and later she traveled to Shanghai, where she attended a cooking school before returning to the States. Like so many ethnic Americans, she writes about the complexities of growing up in an American community and feeling alien, given the traditions of her foreign-born parents. When she was a child, she recalls here, her Japanese mother’s cooking caused her considerable embarrassment: for her school lunch her mother provided bento boxes with chopsticks and rice balls, inspiring stares and taunts from the girl’s classmates. Our selection is from the first of Furiya’s two memoirs, Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America. Her more recent memoir is How to Cook a Dragon: Living, Loving, and Eating in China.
from Bento Box in the Heartland:
Swallowing Fish Bones
MY MOTHER FIRST told me this story when I was six years old, before I knew that the language she spoke was Japanese.
Her personal tale takes place in Tokyo during the 1930s, when she was a young girl. Her neighborhood, she explained, was a jigsaw puzzle of low-story, fragile houses constructed of wood and paper. The homes survived the many earthquakes that shook Japan, yet most burned away like dried leaves when Tokyo was bombed during World War II.
Every day a community of mothers in the neighborhood gathered together to feed their babies a midday meal and to rest from endless household duties and the tongues and ears of nosy in-laws.
While the older women gossiped and watched over the little ones, the younger women made lunch for the babies, who ate softer versions of what their mothers served at their tables—rice, fish, soup, and vegetables.
Often the fishmonger’s wife brought a whole fish to broil until the skin charred and cracked on a small outside grill. The mothers slid the flaky, sweet, white meat off the bone with the tap of a chopstick.
Using their fingers to feel for any stray fish bones, they thoroughly mashed, pinched, and poked the tender fish meat before mixing it with rice and moistening it with dashi (fish stock). Despite all the care, sometimes a transparent bone, pliable and sharp as a shark’s tooth, slipped past scrutiny.
I picture her wearing braids and standing in the distance, quietly observing yet part of the gathering. Now her short hair frames her face like the black slashes of an ink brush. In this story my mother explains how before modern medicine, the mortality rate was high not only for newborns, but even for healthy men, who were struck dead from illnesses that would start as a common cold.
“One day you are in good health, the next . . .” Mom’s eyes flicker at this point, like two flints sparking. She snaps her fingers at the swiftness of it all. Back then, mothers needed reassurance that their babies were strong, and eating was an infant’s first test of survival. If the baby didn’t know how to eat, suck from its mother’s nipple, or push out a fish bone, the child wouldn’t know how to survive when she grew older. . . .
GROWING up in the only Japanese family in Versailles, Indiana, I quickly learned that I would have to overcome many fish bones. My very first notion of how different we really were struck me among the pastel-colored molded trays and long bleached wood tables of the school cafeteria.
MY elementary school lunchroom was a sweaty, brightly lit place that reeked of hot cooking oil, Pine-Sol, and the yeast from rising bread dough. It was dead quiet when empty, and otherwise it echoed with the sound of children’s high-pitched talk and laughter and heavy wood and metal chairs scraping against the tile floor.
I had never eaten a lunch before then without my parents. My two older brothers, Keven and Alvin, ate lunch at school. Mom was a stay-at-home mother. She churned out three meals a day as efficiently as a military mess hall. My father worked second shift at a factory in Columbus, Indiana, where he assembled truck engines. Because he started his shift midafternoon, he ate a hot, filling lunch at home to compensate for his dinner, a cold bento box of rice, meat, and vegetables, with a cup of green tea from his thermos.
These lunches with my parents were magnificent feasts made in our tiny kitchen. The size of a hall closet, the small room became alive during lunchtime, like a living, breathing creature, with steam puffing from the electric rice cooker, rattling from the simmering pots, and short clipping notes of Mom chopping with her steady hand guiding her nakiri bocho (Japanese vegetable knife).
At the dining room table, Dad and I grazed on cold Japanese appetizers—spicy wilted cabbage pickled in brine with lemon peel, garlic, smashed whole red chili peppers, and kombu (seaweed). Meanwhile, Mom prepared hot dishes—cubes of tofu garnished with ginger and bonito flakes (dried fish shavings). There was salmon fillet, if we could get it, grilled to the color of Turkish apricots on a Japanese wire stove-top contraption; or sirloin, sliced tissue-thin, sautéed with onions, soy sauce, and a dash of rice wine. And there was always a bowl of clear fish broth or cloudy miso soup and steamed white rice.
As I was used to such sumptuous lunches, it wasn’t long before the novelty of my school’s cafeteria fare wore off and my eyes wandered toward the lunch boxes other children brought from home. From inside the metal containers, they pulled out sandwiches with the crusts cut off, followed by tins of chocolate pudding and homemade cookies.
My best friend, Tracy Martin, was part of the lunch box brigade. Her mother packed the same lunch items every day—a cold hot dog and applesauce. We also ate with Mary, a Coppertoned, baby-faced girl with a Clara Bow haircut, whose mother precut all the food in her lunch box, even her cookies, into bite-size pieces.
I wanted to be a part of this exclusive group, and after much pestering, I was thrilled when my mother relented and agreed to pack my lunches.
When I joined Tracy and Mary at lunchtime, carrying my own lunch box, I studied the girls, who carefully unpacked their containers as if they were unveiling family heirloom jewelry, observing the packed-lunch protocol. I unlocked my lunch box and casually peeked under the lid. My stomach lurched. I expected a classic elementary school lunch of a bologna, cheese, and Miracle Whip sandwich and a bag of Durkee’s potato sticks, but all I saw were three round rice balls wrapped in waxed paper. Mom had made me an obento, a Japanese-style boxed meal.
I snapped the lunch box lid shut before the other girls caught a glimpse of what was inside. How could this have happened?
“Sandwich?” Mom asked in a genuinely astonished voice when I came home from school that afternoon protesting. “Why go to trouble to make lunch for just plain old sandwich?”
“That’s what everyone else brings. That’s what I want,” I demanded. My desire to emulate my classmates was palpable. My obento lunches were a glaring reminder of the ethnic differences between my peers and me.
THE agony of being different from my classmates was intensified the day Scott Leach pointed out the slanted shape of my eyes. Scott had snow-white hair and constantly dug his pinkie finger deep in his ear. One morning as we stood in the milk line, he turned to me and furrowed his eyebrows, pointing at my eyes as if they were insect specimens.
“Why do they look like lines?” he asked with a smirk far more adult than his age.
When the other kids laughed, I knew this wasn’t a normal question. My throat tightened as if a fish bone were on the verge of lodging itself in my windpipe. I took a step back, bringing my index finger up to my mouth to shush him, only to witness him pull his own eyes back at the corners to more laughter from the classmates in line. Encouraged by the other children’s reaction, Scott pulled his eyes back and tilted his head from side to side.
I stood there like a mannequin. I was filled with helpless, choking anxiety. The spell was broken only when the recess bell rang to go back to class. The incident initiated what became open season for teasing me.
A couple of days later at recess, after I won a round at hopscotch, Susie Sillerhorn, a pinch-nosed blond and known sore loser, announced that she had heard my parents talking “sing-songy” in the grocery store. Susie’s pal Donna Underwood joined in by pulling back her eyes until they appeared closed and made pinging nonsense noises. The other girls laughed.
Defiantly, I asked why she was doing that. “You should know what I’m saying. This is how your folks talk,” she replied haughtily. I didn’t know the name of it then, but the feeling this early interaction left me with was my first feeling of injustice.
Still, I wanted their friendship and to be accepted, so silently, but with deep resentment, I put up with friends who called me Chink and Jap. Some innate self-control wouldn’t allow me to give my prosecutors the lesson they probably needed to learn, of knowing they were hurting me. Eventually, though, the resentment, anger, and developing drive for self-preservation gave me the gumption to fight back.
My first stand, albeit lame, was against Tracy, who instantly resorted to calling me Jap when we got into an argument about whose tree swings were better. She watched my reaction with calm, steady eyes. Tracy knew the power behind the word.
Unable to think of anything to say, I spurted out the first thing that came to mind. I called her “pizzahead” because of her Italian ancestry. It was weak, like throwing confetti at an opponent, but it was my first stab at fighting back.
At night, I’d lie awake and fantasize about how to get revenge. I imagined that Dad was an undercover agent on a special assignment, a foreign dignitary from Japan. His cover was a factory job in a small Midwest town. I saw the surprised looks on my friends’ faces when they realized we weren’t who they thought we were. The meanest ones, including Susie and Donna, begged me to be their best friends. I smiled smugly and shook my head. My family was leaving Versailles and I wouldn’t be going to school there anymore, I explained. Then I enjoyed their looks of dismay and confusion, just as they had enjoyed themselves when they teased me. A cavalcade of shiny black Cadillac sedans appeared and whisked us away. I waved at my classmates from the rearview window until they disappeared. I hugged my pillow and twisted my bedsheets so hard, wishing my fantasy would come true.
When I believed it couldn’t get any worse, a turning point came one afternoon as I waited to use the playground swings. Raymond Neilley, a chubby boy in JCPenney Huskies jeans, pulled his eyes back in the overused imitation my peers favored.
“Chinky, chinky, Chinese,” he sang, doing a little dance. For the first time, blinding fury replaced fear. First of all, I wasn’t Chinese. I heard the other kids around me snickering as they encircled us and moved in closer. Dread prickled me like a scratchy blanket on a hot day. My mouth was cottony and my palms were slick. I could feel my heart beat quickly, rushing color to my face. Mom’s fish bone story came to mind. It wasn’t about swallowing or spitting, I realized, but about fight or flight.
“Shut up, fatso,” I said, louder than a whisper. I recognized a flash of fear pass over Raymond’s plump face, yet he continued to taunt me.
I raised my voice, making it commanding and deep. “I said shut up, you big ball of . . . lard!” I plucked this word out of a conversation I had overheard at the grocery store. It wasn’t the choicest of names, but it had a nice menacing ring to it with high potential to damage, like the kind of mud balls my brothers threw when they fought with the neighborhood kids. Inside each firm handful of wet earth was a surprise, a skin-breaking chunk of gravel.
Raymond’s darting eyes confirmed I had hit a raw nerve, filling me with giddy power.
Like a bombardier honing in on a target, I unleashed all the anger that I had pent up during the past weeks, screaming “fatso” and “lard” until the other children, like summer cicadas, joined in on my name-calling. Raymond didn’t say anything. He stared and tried to figure out how the tables had turned.
After that the other kids thought twice before they teased me. If they tried, I fought back with everything I could get on them. Crossed eyes, crooked bangs, rotten teeth, dirty fingernails, moles, eyeglasses, and freckles were all fair game.
With the gift of victory, I began to shake the overwhelming need to be like my friends. So what if I played by myself, got the cold-shoulder treatment, or had to deal with whispering behind my back? Nothing, I decided, could be as bad as putting up with the name-calling and the dread of waiting for it to come. I understood now why some boys took a beating instead of accepting daily torment: It was pride. I lost a sense of innocence that first year of school, but from it grew a defined measure of self that would stay with me and emerge during difficult times in my life.
TRACY interrupted my thoughts. “Whatcha bring?” A straw pulled at the corner of her mouth as she sipped grape Kool-Aid from a plastic cup. The fish bone scratched at the back of my throat. I knew what I had to do. I took the apple out of my lunch box with discretion.
“Is that all you have?” Tracy asked.
“No, there’s more. I’m just not hungry right now.” I avoided her eyes.
Along with the apple, Mom had wrapped in plastic a few cookies among the tightly packed rice balls. The conversation was buzzing around me. I said as little as possible. The apple and cookies stuck in my throat like wet soot, but I ate slowly and purposefully, as if nothing were wrong.
Feigning a stomachache, I left the cafeteria with my lunch box tucked safely under my arm. I looked behind me nervously before I ducked into the girls’ restroom.
Huddled in the pewter-gray toilet stall with the medicinal smell of Lysol, I cradled one of the three firmly packed rice balls in my hands. Its seaweed wrapping had the crispness of handmade rice paper. My pounding heart steadied a moment as I imagined Mom shaking salt on the palms of her clean wet hands and then pressing and rotating each ball three or four times until it was uniform. Despite my repeated requests for a sandwich, she persisted with the rice balls. She knew they were my favorite.
Startled by the noise of a toilet flushing in a nearby stall, I took a big bite of the onigiri. My teeth ripped through the crunchy seaweed wrapping, through the salty rice, to the surprise center, a buttery chunk of salmon placed precisely in the middle of the rice and seaweed ball. The other rice balls had centers of pickled plum and silky kelp.
It was a secret act that I found empowering and primal, rather than diminishing. I was hungry, and yet there was an odd sense of invincibility, the banishment of fear of what might happen if a teacher walked in on me. I had the sensation that if I left one grain uneaten, something inside me would shrivel up and die. I took big mouthfuls of the rice and chewed as fast as I could until there was no more.
That afternoon, delighted to find my lunch box empty, Mom asked if I enjoyed the rice balls. I told her I did and said nothing else. She continued to make one delicious obento after another, and for the remainder of the year I ate cookies and apples with my friends and consumed the rest of my lunch in the stall of the girl’s bathroom. The lunch box crowd voted unanimously that my mother packed the lamest lunches in history.
I never told Mom about the fish bones I navigated my first year in school. I also announced that I wanted to eat school lunches again once I got into second grade.
BORN IN LONDON to parents from West Bengal, Lahiri came to the States when she was two. She was raised in Rhode Island, and though she writes incisively about the hyphenated lives of Indian-Americans, she considers herself American, noting that “I wasn’t born here but I might as well have been.” An accomplished fiction writer—her first collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies, won a Pulitzer Prize, and her novel The Namesake was made into a movie—she has also earned a doctorate in English literature, with a dissertation on Renaissance theater. “Indian Takeout” wistfully evokes the sensory pleasures of the “Food Suitcase” that she remembers from childhood family visits to Calcutta, where her parents would furiously purchase the staples of Bengali cooking (mustard oil, curry leaves, saffron) that they couldn’t find in New England. Now, as she notes, such foods are widely available in American supermarkets, yet the food suitcase retains its air of geographic mystery, its aromas of distance.
I AM THE daughter of former pirates, of a kind. Our loot included gold, silver, even a few precious gems. Mainly though, it was food, so much that throughout my childhood I was convinced my parents were running the modern equivalent of the ancient spice trade. They didn’t exactly plunder this food; they bought it in the bazaars of Calcutta, where my mother was born and to which we returned as a family every couple of years. The destination was Rhode Island, where we lived, and where, back in the Seventies. Indian groceries were next to impossible to come by.
Our treasure chest, something we called the Food Suitcase, was an elegant relic from the Fifties with white stitching and brass latches that fastened shut with satisfying clicks. The inside was lined in peach-colored satin, had shirred lingerie pockets on three sides and was large enough to house a wardrobe for a long journey. Leave it to my parents to convert a vintage portmanteau into a portable pantry. They bought it one Saturday morning at a yard sale in the neighborhood, and I think it’s safe to say that it had never been to India before.
Trips to Calcutta let my parents eat again, eat the food of their childhood, the food they had been deprived of as adults. As soon as he hit Indian soil, my father began devouring two or three yellow-skinned mangoes a day, sucking the pits lovingly smooth. My mother breakfasted shamelessly on sticky orange sweets called jelebis. It was easy to succumb. I insisted on accompanying each of my meals with the yogurt sold at confectioners in red clay cups, their lids made of paper, and my sister formed an addiction to Moghlai parathas, flatbread folded, omelet-style, over mincemeat and egg.
As the end of each visit neared, our focus shifted from eating to shopping. My parents created lists on endless sheets of paper, and my father spent days in the bazaars, haggling and buying by the kilo. He always insisted on packing the goods himself, with the aura of a man possessed: bare-chested, seated cross-legged on the floor, determined, above all, to make everything fit. He bound the Food Suitcase with enough rope to baffle Houdini and locked it up with a little padlock, a scheme that succeeded in intimidating the most assiduous customs inspectors. Into the suitcase went an arsenal of lentils and every conceivable spice, wrapped in layers of cloth ripped from an old sari and stitched into individual packets. In went white poppy seeds, and resin made from date syrup, and as many tins of Ganesh mustard oil as possible. In went Lapchu tea, to be brewed only on special occasions, and sacks of black-skinned Gobindovog rice, so named, it is said, because it’s fit for offering to the god Govinda. In went six kinds of dalmoot, a salty, crunchy snack mix bought from big glass jars in a tiny store at the corner of Vivekananda Road and Cornwallis Street. In, on occasion, went something fresh, and therefore flagrantly illegal: a bumpy, bright green bitter melon, or bay leaves from my uncle’s garden. My parents weren’t the only ones willing to flout the law. One year my grandmother secretly tucked parvals, a vaguely squashlike vegetable, into the Food Suitcase. My mother wept when she found them.
My parents also bought utensils: bowl-shaped iron karhais, which my mother still prefers to ordinary pots and pans, and the areca-nut cracker that’s now somewhere in the back of the silverware drawer, and even a boti, a large curved blade that sits on the floor in Bengali kitchens and is used instead of handheld knives. The most sensational gadget we ever transported was a sil-nora, an ancient food processor of sorts, which consists of a massive clublike pestle and a slab the size, shape and weight of a headstone. Bewildered relatives shook their heads, and airport workers in both hemispheres must have cursed us. For a while my mother actually used it, pounding garlic cloves by hand instead of pressing a button on the Osterizer. Then it turned into a decorative device, propped up on the kitchen counter. It’s in the basement now.
The suitcase was full during the trip from Rhode Island to Calcutta too, with gifts for family. People there seldom asked for any food from America: instead they requested the stuff of duty-free, Dunhills or Johnnie Walker. We brought them Corning Ware plates and bowls, which, in their eyes, were exotic alternatives to the broad, gleaming stainless steel dishes they normally used. The only food we packed for ourselves was a big jar of Tang, which my father carried with him at all times and stirred obsessively into the bitter purified water.
In spite of everything we managed to haul back, the first meal we ate after returning from India was always a modest affair. My mother prepared the simplest of things: rice, some quartered potatoes, eggs if she was motivated, all boiled together in a single pot. That first meal was never an occasion to celebrate but rather to mourn, for the people and the city we had, once again, left behind. And so my mother made food to mirror our mood, food for the weary and melancholy. I remember thinking how strangely foreign our own kitchen felt that first night back, with its giant, matching appliances, water we could safely drink straight from the tap and rice which bore no stray stones. Just before we ate, my mother would ask my father to untie the ropes and unlock the suitcase. A few pappadams quickly fried and a drop of mustard oil drizzled over the potatoes would convert our survivalist meal into a delicacy. It was enough, that first lonely evening, not only to satisfy our hunger but to make Calcutta seem not so very far away.
My parents returned last August from their thirteenth visit to India in their thirty-odd years abroad. When I asked my mother what foods they’d brought back she replied, with some sadness. “Nothing, really” My father observed matter-of-factly that most everything was sold here these days. It’s true. Saffron and cardamom grace supermarket shelves, even in the small towns of Rhode Island. The world, the culinary world in particular, has shrunk considerably. Still, when my cousin’s mother recently visited New York City, she packed several pieces of fried ruhi, the everyday fish of Bengal, into her bags. Of course, the Indian markets of Jackson Heights, Queens, were only a subway ride away, but the fish had been sliced, salted and fried in Calcutta. This was what mattered.
Today the Food Suitcase sits in our basement, neglected, smelling of cumin. When I opened it on my last trip home, a few stray lentils rolled around in one corner. Yet the signs were still visible, in the cupboards and the refrigerator, that my parents have not abandoned their pirating ways. You would know as much, were you to visit them yourself, by the six kinds of dalmoot my mother would set out with tea and the mustard oil she would offer to drizzle on your potatoes at dinner.