We had an electric griddle when I was a kid. It had a cast iron top with bright orange trim, and you plugged it into the wall. It was hefty and unwieldy, made in the days before cheap plastic manufacturing overtook all but the most expensive kitchen tools. It lived stored sideways in the back pantry, near the cast iron frying pans and the seldom-used china set.

It was probably my grandmother who bought it. “Spend good money on an appliance,” she would say, “and it will last.” And she was right. Like the other kitchen items she purchased — the giant freezer, the beefy microwave, the sturdy bread maker — it was still in use well into my high school years. She didn’t have a lot of money, but she always seemed to find a way to buy the things that were really important.

The griddle wasn’t something we used every day, but in my childhood memories it looms large. The school music concerts, my sixth grade graduation, the closing day of summer recreation camp — all the moments designed to accept the flashbulbs of a thousand scrapbook-obsessed parents– are memorable mostly for the itchy dresses I didn’t want to wear. But I can still recall, with fondness and clarity, the satisfying sizzle of pancake batter hitting the top of that griddle.

My grandmother — we called her Gram — grew up in Brooklyn in the years following the great depression, the second youngest of six children. Her parents were immigrants and, though life was far from easy, she had none of the cautious anxiety you usually see in people who have lived through hardship.

She was warm and funny, with a serious sense of adventure that drew her to the kinds of activities that strike fear in normal people– hot air balloon rides, a cruise among the glaciers in Alaska, performances with an improvisational theater group. Quick with a smile and a laugh, she was just as happy to share the small moments in life, patiently teaching me songs on our old Wurlitzer organ, hitting the local yard sales…and making pancakes.

In the early, early morning, while everyone was still snug in bed, Gram would place the griddle on the counter and plug it in to preheat. I’d come downstairs, my feet bouncing on the icy floor, to find my two brothers battling over a bowl of pancake batter. Sometimes, if I got up really early, she’d let me help — holding my tiny hand in hers to demonstrate how to crack the eggs cleanly, without any shells.

One by one we would take turns releasing drops of smooth batter onto the hot surface, me standing precariously on a dining room chair to reach the kitchen counter. To a five-year-old, the transformation from gooey liquid to fluffy pancake is like a science experiment or, perhaps, a bit of magic. No matter how many pancakes we made, I never got tired of it.

Gram wisely left this part to us kids, never guiding our hands or planting our minds with seeds of worry about doing it the “wrong” way. We’d use a heaping ladleful to make giant pancake expanses. We’d dig out the cookie cutters and make christmas-tree shaped pancakes. We’d challenge each other to make the smallest single pancake, displaying our nearly microscopic entries proudly on white plastic plates. These are probably things that all kids do, but my grandmother would laugh and smile as if it was the first time she had seen it.

Oftentimes she’d sit with us afterwards, watching cartoons, as we ate our butter and syrup laden breakfasts. Eventually, my brothers would head out for shifts at their summer jobs, or off to ride scooters with the older neighborhood kids. I’d spend the rest of the day overturning rocks in our yard in search of beetles and salamanders, running back occasionally to show my grandmother what I’d found. She was always happy to see it.

I’m not sure what happened to that old electric griddle. My grandmother’s gone now, too, and I find myself thinking a lot lately about these memories, and how fortunate we were. It’s rare to find people who are able to give unconditional love and rarer still to find ones who can strike the right balance between nurturing and trust.

She set up the griddle, and stayed close by, but let us make the pancakes.

It all began with an artichoke. I was researching one day the various ways – stuffed, sliced, plucked, or grilled – to cook those spiny beasts of the garden, a perennial summertime favorite of mine. And then I saw it, a footnote at the bottom of the page: a reference to Cynar, the artichoke liqueur of Italy.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then clearly somebody was facing dire times indeed when they made an artichoke the mother of an aperitif. Cynar is appropriately (if unimaginatively) named for Cynar scolymus, the Latin for artichoke. It is reportedly a thick, dark brown color, bittersweet in flavor, and best paired, as unlikely as it may be, with an orange juice mixer. It sounded, in a word, horribly wonderful, and I had to try it. I had to drink an artichoke.

Unfortunately for my culinary adventures, I live in Alaska, not well known as a clearinghouse for the world’s liqueurs. My artichoke-infused cocktail, perhaps paired with a nice risotto of spring greens, was not to be. But in trying to track down the elusive Cynar, I stumbled upon four other oddities of the alcoholic variety, all the children of weird, unexpected, and/or sometimes mysterious mother ingredients. Together, these prove that a rule I’ve long suspected: that if you can grow it, you can probably also drink it.

I started with Amarula, a liqueur made from fresh cream and the wild marula fruit, indigenous to the woodlands of South Africa. Long favored by the Bantu as a source of Vitamin C, it may or may not also cause drunkenness in the animals that eat the fallen, fermenting fruit. You don’t have to travel too far into the Google-verse to find an excerpt from the classic 1974 nature documentary, “Animals Are Beautiful People,” that features charmingly tipsy elephants, stumbling ostriches, and even a groggy inch-worm, all reportedly (though perhaps not factually) blotto on marula fruit. Elephants’ antics aside, Amarula is a lovely drink. With its caramel nose reminiscent of candied apples, it’s an after-dinner drink for an autumn bonfire, to be sipped watching sparks shoot through the twilight at the shadows of bare-tipped trees.

Prefer not be lulled into a warm cocoon of sleep by your beverage? Fear not! Agwa de Bolivia is the alcoholic equivalent of a high-school rave, a drink that will have your nerves jumping to the naked drum-and-bass of your quickened heart rate. Made from Bolivian coca leaves (which, the distributor reassures us, are first shipped under armed guard to Amsterdam, where they are “de-cocainized” before being distilled into drinkability), this neon-green beverage smells faintly of limes and is disconcertingly, though pleasantly, tongue-numbing. Coca leaves have been brewed and chewed for both food and religious ceremonies for over 4,000 years, and Agwa de Bolivia is only the most recent in a long-line of coca-infused beverages, including Coca-Cola in its original 1886 formula and the lesser-known Vin Mariani, a popular coca-fortified Italian wine introduced in 1860 and reportedly enjoyed by Thomas Edison and Queen Victoria. Made with guarana and ginseng for an extra-caffeinated buzz, Agwa de Bolivia will give you a lightening boost of invincibility, power, confidence, and energy just like… oh, that’s right. Cocaine.

Or, maybe, you take your aperitifs the traditional way, tipping back a teaspoon of Fernet-Branca after dinner in your tweed smoking jacket to help nicely settle the rich churnings of your coq au vin. Fernet-Branca, an Italian digestif, smells like anise-flavored cough syrup and tastes like bitter, unripe green pepper mixed with dirt. It is, simply put, not good. The ingredients of Fernet-Branca are a closely guarded secret but have been rumored to include an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mix of aloe, gentian, codeine, absinthe, quinine, St. John’s wort, and fermented beets, among other mildly horrifying things. This is a drink you must approach with fortitude, grimacing as you kick back your dosage. Unsurprisingly, its most well-known use is as a medicinal treatment, apparently capable of curing everything from colicky babies and cholera to menstrual cramps. Feeling fairly hale at the moment of my sampling, I have, however, no scientific evidence to support those claims.

The queen bee of my taste-test, however, was Chartreuse, the only alcoholic beverage to have a color named after it. Indeed, this liqueur, made since the 1740s by the Carthusian monks of La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble, France, is a muted, yellow-green beverage of 132 secret “alpine herbs,” undoubtedly hand-plucked by be-robed brothers prayerfully wandering the mountainsides of the French Alps. The coloring comes from chlorophyll, and indeed, Chartreuse has a refreshing palate of grass, thyme, and mint, mixed with a roundhouse kick of spice. Drinking it is like passing out in your mother’s herb garden after gorging yourself on fermented marula fruit – peacefully sweet, until she finds you lying in the chive bed and slaps you upside the head.

Go forth, my friends, into the wild and wooly world of liqueurs and cordials, where nary a nut, seed, leaf, or fruit is beyond being soaked, pressed, fermented, and brewed for your drinking pleasure. Or horror.

An ancient mother,
the agriculture, you are
for many cuisines

Your mystique begins
in Mesopotamia
Spread by Phoenicians

Egypt loved you, Greece
sang your gospel, Rome made
you Queen beside God

Queen you still are, as
your influence succeeded
pulpit, to palate

Refreshing and plump
silky body in a tight jacket
gushes on the tongue

Squished and bubbled over
extra sugar in the pot
cooled and spread on toast

Cold and wet pucker
make a small child’s lips smack and
slurp all the goodness

Out in the hot sun
flavor condenses slowly
into a red box

To eat you fresh, dried,
juiced, or even jellied! gives
no understanding

Fermentation gave
you powers, good and evil
as all mothers have

My father likes to tell my mother that she seduced him with her cooking. When they were friends at university, before they dated, my mother invited my father to her apartment for a meal. She made her mother’s oven-gratinée recipe for sea scallops. After serving them, as my mother went to the kitchen for bread, my father devoured his whole plate. When asked if he wanted more, my mother gave my father the portion on her plate that he promptly swallowed up, and only then did he find that she hadn’t made any more beyond that–she had given him everything.

A vessel, brimming with an intangible, abstract concept called love, my mother is ever ready to give. It is a pity the world has not found a way to harness this ethereal energy to power civilization, since I’m certain it would solve most of our problems if only by virtue of its boundlessness.

My mother often displays her renewable energy in the form of food, as does my sister, as do I. Her cooking is grounded in her French and Polish roots, and we three with my father were recently together for a few evenings of delicious feasting. These nights were a tender ritual, wrapped in crispy celebration. The daughters have moved out and away, taken up companions, so there’s something mouthwateringly sweet about being just the four of us. It is a throwback to our childhood and a reminder of my mother’s younger days.

Every day at the table, my mother’s grandmother, Franciska, crossed a loaf of bread with a knife before slicing into it. This was my mother’s earliest memory of food. A Catholic family, they never said grace, but their thanks were expressed in this gesture. This respect for food – the sacredness of having it and sharing it with others – defined certain parts of my mother’s personality.

Other parts were deeply marked by her brother, Richard. My mother was not yet born when my grandmother, Hélène, was crushed by the death of her first child. Richard, my mother was told, was an infant underweight though not underfed. He was three and a half years old when he passed.

While Hélène believed a better-fed son would have lived, my mother says that daily exposure to an uncle with tuberculosis was the root cause of her brother’s death. At a time when some did not believe in bacteria because they could not be seen by the naked eye, when God would never do something as cruel as to take away a mother’s son, Hélène was left placing blame and wondering how she could have prevented her loss. She overfed my mother.

During those youngest years, my mother spent a lot of time with her grandfather, Antoine, in his vegetable garden. Taking her by the hand, Antoine would breathe in awe to come see with him the things growing in the long rows of dark soil. He grew enough potatoes to feed three families, eighteen people. In the glum, flat north of France where men were coal miners and women married at seventeen, my mother’s family ate potatoes at every meal through the winter. They were never hungry.

Later, my mother observed her mother work up a storm of a feast on days when guests shared the dinner table. Whether a matter of pride or love or both, those days were spent whirling in the tight kitchen, creating side dishes, roasts, appetizers, desserts. My father, my sister and I now laugh when by mother begins her guest-day anxiety. A caricature of herself, she exclaims in French, “It’s 11 AM and I’m already late for guests arriving at 6!”

When asked if there is one meal in the past or present that tickles her taste buds more memorably than most, my mother does not hesitate long before recounting her mother’s Sunday roast chicken. Every Saturday, Hélène would buy the farmer’s chicken, fed on grain and grubs, at the market. She would cut it into large chunks – the bones, skin and meat – and sauté the pieces in small batches in an iron casserole on the stove. The meat sizzled in the hot butter-oil mixture until my grandmother had a pile of browned pieces. She would then throw all the chicken back into the black pot, adding white wine, shallots, salt and pepper, cover it with the heavy lid, and slip it into the broiling oven. Toward the end, Hélène would remove the lid to render the pieces a pleasing gold with delectably crispy skin – the sight and scent reason enough to battle with one another for a taste, and battle they did, my mother and grandfather, Stanislas.

Along with the roast chicken, my mother remembers her mother making mashed potatoes. Hélène would boil, peel and mash the potatoes by hand, and then add one or sometimes even two whole eggs, salt, and pepper. No butter or milk, the market potatoes were rich with fresh egg. Hélène always made too much so that she could use the leftovers for kluski. Later in the week she would add flour and another egg to those mashed potatoes, mixing it well before laying ribbons of the dough on the counter. The ribbons were then cut into pieces and tossed into boiling water, rising to the surface when ready to be scooped out. Kluski was best, my mother says, when sautéed in a hot, oily skillet so that the outside – like that roast chicken – would become irresistibly golden and crispy while the inside remained delicate and creamy.

My mother does not know whether it is the oven, the oil or butter, the chicken, the potatoes, or the casserole itself, but for one or many reasons, she has never been able to reproduce that Sunday afternoon meal of her childhood.

Today, my mother’s favorite meal is not important, she says. In fact, when asked, she honestly doesn’t have a favorite. She enjoys preparing what my sister, father, and I enjoy most. On days when she is alone, she does not take the time to create a masterpiece because cooking for her is about bringing to life the love that she has for us, giving us the beauty that simmers inside of her. In talking with my sister, I have noticed that we do the same. When friends join Nathalie for dinner, she is so proud of her cooking she thinks she should marry herself. I have been developing my intuition, hoping to please eyes, surprise mouths.

My sister and I may not often cook the recipes of my mother or my grandmother, but just as Hélène and Franciska influenced Marie-Christine, Nathalie and I are the kluski to the mashed potatoes. I can only hope to be as delicate and enveloping, as boundless and beautiful as my mother.

Adage explains reality. When I do not understand a thing, I can convince myself that I actually do, usually in ten words or fewer. Sometimes, on long nights when I toss, sleepless, alone with an empty stomach and a heavy soul, I entertain the grim specter Regret. I have done things I’m not proud of. Most of them involve food. But deep in my heart, or maybe down in the pit of my stomach (which alternately growls and twists as memory plays across its membranes), I know that I can’t, or at least won’t, be held responsible for the monsters I have loosed on an innocent world. Because I know as well as you do (and as one Dr. Frankenstein no doubt did) that Necessity is the Mother of Invention – even the unwise, unholy teratogenics in which I have, from time to time (against my will, I swear!), been peripherally involved. Necessity is the mother. I am nothing more than the deranged enabling uncle whom no one warned against letting the baby play in the plutonium.

Let the catalog of my crimes begin with a mixed berry pie. It saddens me to remember how plump and ripe they were; they would have gone to better use as a lubricant for a lawnmower. It was a mythically beautiful summer afternoon between bouts of high school, and my friend and I wanted a pie to bring to a 5:00 p.m. rehearsal. It was 4:00 p.m. No problem, we thought – mix everything together and bake it for 40 minutes. Berries tossed with sugar and cinnamon: thirty seconds. Now the crust: mix flour with butter in some vague proportion; roll out. But the butter, so stiff from the cool of the fridge, was an ornery foe, and the clock ticked on. Logic presented the only solution: melt the butter. Whisk it vigorously into the flour. Pound it flat with our fists. Why had no one thought of this before? We were geniuses – pioneers. Forty minutes later we removed from the oven a small sarcophagus of desiccated berries entombed in a substance resembling carbon steel, or possibly the exoskeleton of a deep-sea crustacean. No teeth were lost but our pride bled for years.

Skip ahead several eras to a small island one cold New England spring. On the island stands an unassuming summer house, grey from sea winds, floors abraded by years of sand tracked in by children, by grandchildren, by the occasional baffled pet. Three travelers arrive. None is a resident. We have permission to be there, but with it we received a stern warning: no one has passed those doors in months; no one has carried in a bag of groceries since last fall; the fridge is long unplugged; the pantry – well, take your chances. Which we did, choosing by some perverse misapplication of optimism to arrive empty-handed and cook what we found. And somehow, whether through cruel lots or my own big mouth, I’d been appointed chef.

We went exploring. The basement yielded two handles of a cloudy substance claiming to be gin and a bottle of Jack Daniels so dusty that I still suspect it was Old No. 6. Either might be useful to ease the pains of death-by-starvation but we weren’t desperate yet. Back upstairs, the pantry offered several crates of mothballs, a can of Raid from the 80s, some ironically worm-infested bags of flour, a single old and doubtful onion, and a collection of canned substances that looked as though the skeletons in the bomb shelter had turned them down. We laid our assets out on the counter and I tried to ignore my companions’ complicated stares, part neglected puppy and part offended jackal. Things were getting tense.
I carved up the onion and put the less decayed parts into a pan with a little oil (we’d found oil in a cupboard by then, next to some exotic grey cumin and a yellow tub of sweetener). It was soft and translucent from the start, so I let it sit and cook until it began to char a little. (Some call this “browning” but I don’t want to ruin a good word.) I added some of the grey cumin to spice things up, tasted it, tasted nothing, then added the rest of the grey cumin. This resulted in a pleasantly chalky aftertaste. Next came the Beans. If they were beans of a particular variety, the can wasn’t willing to say so. They were roughly the color of viscous can fluid, which I tried to wash off before putting them in the pan. We listened as they began popping wetly. The dish now looked like scrapings from a dumpster near a taco truck. For color and fiber I threw in a can of Squash or possibly Pumpkin, pale yellow and surprisingly resilient. It blended poorly with the rest and jiggled unpleasantly. A lick of the spoon confirmed my suspicion that the dish tasted like an old book, so finally, desperately, I threw in a handful of the only other flavoring agent we could find – a plastic jar of instant coffee, thrust to the back of the cupboard as though to keep us safe from it. A sprinkle of salt, a dash of rust-brown paprika, and dinner was served.

We spent most of the next day finding a grocery store. Please do not try this at home.

Finally, if you’re still reading this – and I half hope you’re not – I must tell you of the second worst cocktail I have ever encountered. The place is just outside of Dublin, the date is just past New Year’s, and the time, as you might guess, is Very Late at Night, a night of endless board games and whiskey. My sister – my only sister, elder, who should know better – asked me, her demented little brother, to make her a drink. I practically skipped to the kitchen, breaking nothing on the way. Remembering that spontaneity can sometimes yield great art, I grabbed the first three things I saw and put them together in a glass: a long pour of Teacher’s Highland Cream Blended Scotch Whisky, a longer pour of filtered apple juice, and a wilted stalk of celery. “What’s it called?” she asked before she’d tasted it, and my unconscious mind christened its own horrible spawn the Newbury Frou-Frou, a drink that I advise you to avoid.

In fact, devote your life to avoiding it, along with everything else I’ve mentioned here. The effort will be slight; the payoff will be great. And when you feel Mother Necessity steering your hand in the kitchen or at the bar, remember that hunger is a respectable alternative.

As I square off with my two-year-old niece, it occurs to me that I may have gone over the edge. She sits across from me, her wispy blond pigtails and huge blue eyes barely clearing the table top. It’s lunch time, and I’ve amassed a startling array of foods – things that I never knew lurked in the back corners of my cupboards. Earlier in the day, I had confidently sprinkled dried cranberries in front of her only to have them unabashedly handed back to me in a sticky glob after she put several in her mouth, chewed for a second before her face puckered into a wince of disgust, and she just as quickly took them back out again. Now, still smarting from the rejection, I place various bite-sized items on her plate and watch anxiously as they are unceremoniously mauled by her tiny baby teeth.

When I was 19, I thought I knew what women meant when they talked about their biological clocks ticking; “I definitely want kids,” I said blithely to my friends. When I was 22, I thought, oh THIS is what they meant, as I relinquished newborns back to their moms. Now, at 26, I’m in constant battle with the ravenous appetites of my uterus. She makes me eye babies like a mother wolf who’s lost her pups. She coolly assesses men I pass on the street for their paternal potential. It’s bad, guys, and it’s getting worse.

I have seriously considered the pros and cons of different stroller models.

The cherub in front of me compounds the problem; she’s just so satisfying. Crackers, pieces of apple, cucumber slices, they all go down easily. I build my case with julienned red pepper, a small pile of walnuts, and my crowning achievement, pieces of spicy red radish. This flurry of peeling and chopping is, however, merely the sideshow that keeps her sitting in one place while I fry quesadillas, the cheese melting to a beautiful ooze between toasted corn tortillas. She stuffs one whole wedge in her mouth and coughs when it jams up against her uvula. I quickly cut the remaining pieces in half as I watch her masticate the giant mouthful, nervously running over the toddler Heimlich in my mind. She’s finished her entire quesadilla before I’m halfway through mine, and stretches out a greasy hand toward my plate. “More,” she declares, even though she’s consumed roughly six times her own body weight. I slide the last two pieces of my quesadilla over. When she’s done, we wipe her hands (“wipe!”) and head upstairs. It’s nap time, for both of us.

Is the schism between brain and endocrine system a phenomenon of women in their twenties? If so, where do I opt out? Whether or not I actually want children is immaterial, the second I scent a baby around, the red phone rings in my ear. It’s my ovaries calling. “Look how cute it is,” they say, “it’s so snuggly,” and when said infant wraps a little hand around my finger, one of them punches me in the kidney. Luckily, what can only be an evolutionary survival mechanism has kicked in. Are you paying attention, dear Charles? In an effort to appease the ferocity of my lady parts, I’ve temporarily squelched the urges of ovulation and implantation, and have instead skipped merrily into the land of grandma-dom. That’s right, come on over, young men; let me feed you.

In the early part of the month, it’s all fresh fruit and raw vegetables. I toss elaborate salads with my homemade red wine vinaigrette. I slice and quarter kiwi. I serve risotto on a suggestive bed of arugula. We are light and free, things are casual, and though I graciously describe my salad dressing philosophy, I do not obsessively check that you’ve had enough. The urge to mother is under control.

Peak fertility finds me hovering over complicated dishes with many steps and names I can’t pronounce: butternut squash and caramelized onion galette, arroz con pollo, shakshuka. I turn up the blender to drown out the knock, knock, knocking of ovaries on my frontal lobe. If my stare makes you uncomfortable, I’m sorry; it’s just that knowing you enjoyed your meal is so much more filling than actually eating any of it myself. My womb brims with happiness. I have fed you.

Mere days later, I crouch over a medium-rare burger, the bodies of those who dared to offer me stir fry strewn in my wake. Fallopian tubes take no prisoners on the hunt for iron. When my uterus realizes that I have yet again failed to impregnate her, she takes a swift and vicious revenge. I get out butter and sugar and flour in between waves of pain, trying to distract her from her endometrial loss with banana chocolate chip muffins. In this, the autumn of menstruation, I go for the highest fat content. If I can’t gain baby weight, well by God I’m going to gain other weight. Frosting is the only salve for this wound.

Food is not merely a diversion, however. I derive a deep sense of fulfillment from creating meals that are delicious, beautiful, and healthy. I gather friends and family purely to try new recipes and sleep soundly at night after particular successes. Cooking and eating transcends the base biological need for calories and instead satisfies the human social drive for community. Having joined their ranks before my time, I understand our grandmothers now. Divested of the demands of dependent children, they – we – are simply trying to regain the closeness of family. As young people, struggling through the phase between leaving our own childhoods and becoming parents ourselves, my friends and I create family with each other. We are a chosen family, and we eat together. When I’m feeding you, when we are cooking and eating together, we are all mothers, just as we are all children. This garnish? This garnish is pure love.

My niece wakes up from her nap, sweaty from sleep on this summer afternoon, and I take her outside, two popsicles in hand. She sits on my lap and we drip juice on each other. I may not be able to keep her, but at least I’ve fed her, as she has me. So, until such a time that I find myself hanging onto my maternal membrane, my embryonic pudding, you’ll find me in the kitchen. I’ll say, are you hungry? and the answer had better be yes, or I can’t be responsible for the consequences. Unless we’re baking with the baby oven, get out your potholders ‘cause I’m makin’ a casserole. Man or woman, adult or child, one way or another I will nourish you, body and soul.

I don’t remember when I went to Mao’s Kitchen in Venice Beach for the first time. It might have been during college or just after. I’ve probably only been once or twice since, because I never lived closer than 300 miles away from it, but that’s not really important. What is important is that on that first visit, either with my brother or friends who moved to LA for grad school, I ate some life-changing green beans.

It’s my understanding that Mao’s serves “Chinese country-style cooking” with something referred to as “red memories.” That probably means lots of vegetables, because The Chairman oversaw some pretty lean times. Red or not, these green beans definitely smacked of the countryside. They were simply prepared, seared to the point of blistering, patches of blackened skin blooming out of the grassy hue of taut, crisp vegetable flesh. Here and there a chip of red chili flake flamed away, flares in a sea of grease-spattered soy sauce.

Where I’m from, this is not how Chinese food looks. Take out spots in small town New England veer more toward Tso than Mao — the General, not the Chairman — a man who I can only guess made a name for himself with a campaign of horror waged against a population of unsuspecting chickens. On top of that, I’m Irish, which means that the green beans I grew up eating were boiled into limp, gray wands in an effort to subdue any unsavory, unpotato-like qualities inherent in their natural state. The flavors I encountered that night in L.A. were basic, but together they were far from recognizable to my palate. Smoke from the pan, garlic simmered in the kind of oil that doctors waggle their fingers at, soy, and a little heat, all stitched together seamlessly, like crisp new sheets on that old bed of veggies from my childhood.

The experience was brief, and I resisted the urge to order more for further inspection, returning to the meal and my friends. What followed was probably pretty good, and then we probably went out and got pretty sauced, because that’s sort of what I was doing then. So I forgot about those crunchy little soy-garlic-chili delights for a long time. Even if I had had my shit together back then, which I definitely didn’t, I wouldn’t have dared attempt the type of alchemy I assumed was involved in their preparation. I didn’t grow up around things sizzling over high heat in hand hammered pans, so I lacked even a basic frame of reference for how something so delicious could come to be — nevermind in my own kitchen.

It wasn’t like I could just call home and be like, “Hey Mom, how do I make some spicy green beans that don’t wilt flaccidly into a frown when lifted with a fork?” Corned beef? Mom would have had me covered. “Oh honey,” she’d say, wondering how I survive day-to-day in such a state of ineptitude, “you know how!” And I would, too — at least sort of, from all of those years of wiping my nose on her apron in the kitchen. But I seriously doubt that at this very moment there is any soy sauce in my parents’ house. Or garlic. Or a wok. Or any of the rest of the shit that you need to make dry fried green beans, because my mom is an Irish mom, not a Chinese mom. The special nook reserved for innateness in my brain, the place where acting comes before thinking, is not occupied by things like proper noodle slurping technique (nor by a chart that plots aioli whipping speed by barometric pressure, for that matter). Those details, the really important ones, are reserved for the kids who grow up in the tradition: Learning by osmosis, with the occasional elbow nudge or smack to the back of the head from mom, is a privilege and a potent recipe for the keeping of any flame.

For me, like most American kitchen geeks, just playing witness to all that goes unspoken when other people cook is almost enough. To go out and get the occasional glimpse, in a tiny plate of green beans or bit of braised something or other, takes some of the sting out of not growing up eating these things on a daily basis. Really tapping any given source would probably mean getting yourself adopted by someone else’s mom, which, unless you possess the foresight to marry strategically, is a long shot.

Had I not moved to San Francisco a couple of years later, the green beans would have ended up as just another morsel stuck in the teeth of my memory. Fortunately my chef buddy’s friends from work shared their obsession with the dry fried wings at a hole-in-the-wall place in the Inner Sunset. Being inclined to trust their instincts, I forded my way through three neighborhoods and found parking on a nondescript street. The place itself, which I think has since fallen prey to the steep local novelty/hipness curve, was unremarkable aside from its diminutive size and blaze orange walls. It was basically just a tiled room with an open kitchen at the back, and a few tables — sturdily built, as if to accommodate both the weight and gravity of the foodstuffs at hand. At the end of the day they could have literally hosed the place out if they wanted to, and it would have been no worse for the wear.

We got our mountain of wings like everyone else in the joint, but someone had slipped in a little something extra on the order. There they were again; a small bowl of lovingly burnt green beans, kicking back in a shallow pool of soy sauce. Salty and fiery from tip-to-tip — I was suddenly seeing through the sands of time, to Venice a few years earlier. Somewhere wind chimes rang, a sitar sounded a single, wringing note, and a hawk cried. Then I was back in San Francisco, just a few feet away from the kitchen that had birthed this delicious doppelganger into the world.

I decided there and then that this kitchen, with its open front and busy industrial innards, would be the surrogate mother I had wanted for without knowing. Every time I came in, I’d choose my seat carefully, sometimes jockeying awkwardly with friends to secure a direct line of sight. Back to the door, eyes on the rapid motions of the one-man line, a bus could have driven through the window of the restaurant and I wouldn’t have noticed. Trailing off mid-sentence, neck craned, furrowing my brow, and generally acting like a crazy person, I learned by watching, albeit from afar — a second-rate method for internalizing anything, but my only option.

Slowly, piece by piece, I put a rough approximation together: wok, oil (lots of it), super hot/borderline smoky, a handful of beans, a few flicks of the wrist, add garlic and shitloads of chili paste until the pan belches hot, caustic smoke like hell’s own breath, then blast with soy and plate steaming. I’m sure that the real deal is a lot more nuanced than that, but if you’re coughing at the end, feeling pretty certain that breathing chili oil will one day kill you, you’re pretty much there.

A few months before leaving the city, I moved into a new place with an old friend and a Chinese guy named Terry from Southern California. Terry and I didn’t share much in common, least of all in terms of a schedule, but on the odd night he’d be coming home late from work when I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. On one such night I had just finished quelling the fire alarms after blanketing the apartment with spicy, salty soy smoke and he came in. “Mmm,” he said, peering into the pan and pinching a blackened nub between his thumb and forefinger, “I could smell these from the street.” He popped it in his mouth, raised his eyebrows and didn’t slap me in the face for insulting his heritage: A good sign I guess, although I guess it’s his mom’s opinion that would really matter.

Is there a phrase more overused, more cliché, more pre-loaded with meaning, and ultimately more misleading than “just like mama used to make”? (“I need that report by five o’clock” comes close.) The phrase, when uttered, (usually in a booming, “here ya go” manner with an army of fat invisible exclamation marks following) brings to mind red-and-white checkered tablecloths, huge steaming pots of spaghetti, plates of mashed potatoes and creamy sauces and sweet/spicy sausage served by a larger than life individual who is either (your) mama or a generic version of Mario Batali, unto you – a rapt tween who has yet to experience heartbreak, unemployment and endless traffic jams. Mama cooked out of love, not duty (and through exhaustion and sleep deprivation). Chefs were kind kitchen Santas, not psychopaths yelling obscenities at line cooks. The good guys never lost. Everything was for you. You never thought that time would come again, until… you were served THIS DISH, which surprisingly, incredibly, tastes Just Like Mama Used to Make.

The Mama in question is, undoubtedly, your mama. The assumption is that your mama knew how to cook, and no one could ever cook better than her. (The logic instantly becomes flawed when you consider that if everyone’s mama was the best cook in the world, then no one’s mama was actually a better cook than the rest.) The assumption never goes: “And while mama slept on the couch, passed out and snoring from an evening of shooting smack into her big toe and drinking a bunch of 40s, and papa sat in the basement with the shotgun, contemplating ending it all because the hallucinations were too horrible to withstand, I would take little sis and off we’d go, into the freezing hell of Alaskan winter, not a car in sight, thin layers of ice covering potholes in neglected roads, until we reached Timmy’s house, and Timmy’s mom would heap our plates with roasted chicken and grilled veggies and for that, at least, we were grateful”. To this person, Timmy’s mama would be the Mama who made tasty things; thoughts of her own mama might bring about memories of salty mac and cheese from a can and a glass of Kool-Aid, on good days.

Furthermore, the phrase’s nostalgic nature carries with it a darker undercurrent. “Used to make” means that the Mama in question probably no longer makes it, whatever “it” is. Is she deceased, or did she simply figure that you are now old enough to cook for yourself and stop exploiting her, and papa can make himself a sandwich, thankyouverymuch? In either case, something happened – the line of goodness, of sustenance, of unrestrained gluttony has been irrevocably interrupted. Things will never be the same again. Good thing this plate of frozen, microwaveable slop is here to set the world right for you.

Let us suppose, for a second, that the diner in question did not grow up in a Harmony Korine movie and never went to the funeral of anyone more important than an ancient pet hamster. How often, really, does the food actually live up to the promise? When do those bowls of spaghetti taste divine, and not like something that emerges as an “entrée” from the back of a questionably clean local pizzeria? When is that filet of fish bursting with the flavor of the sea, instead of the fryer? How often does that chicken noodle soup need to be nuked into oblivion with salt and pepper in order to have any kind of flavor at all? Contents of the plate frequently appear better than they actually are.

Here’s a perfect example of how two people can have very different interpretations of the same phrase, ripped from my own family history. As a child, I sometimes stayed with my paternal grandparents for a week or two. Like any old school Eastern European grandma, mine fussed around the stove endlessly, cooking for gramps and me as she did for my father when he was a boy. I didn’t want to eat her food; I was spoiled. I should mention here that my mother is an amazing cook, and I never want to hear “just like mama used to make” because she always has, and still does, prepare perfect, simple comfort food when I am over, and while I have eaten food that was great in other ways, I have never been served something “like” it that was just as good. In other words, grandma didn’t stand a chance. It did not help matters that her food was genuinely subpar: heavy, oily, with the flavor just a little off from what you’d expect. (Good thing she doesn’t speak English well enough to read this.)

I was also already becoming a bit of a neat freak, and somehow, grandma’s kitchen didn’t come across as very sanitary, though it was not particularly filthy either. The problem was that her hair occasionally, i.e. about 40% of the time, made it into the dish. And as Lucinda Williams (or Eddie Vedder, depending on the version you hear) once sang, that which you fear the most will meet you halfway. And boy, did the hair meet me halfway. More often than not, I would be the only one at the table to find a fuzzy surprise in my dish. “What, not again?!” grandma would exclaim and clasp her hands in exasperation, and the family would laugh as I sat there coughing up a hairball.

My father was now used to finer things in life, too, but grandpa had no choice but to eat his wife’s masterpieces. One day, as I tried to hunt down yet another hair that was hiding behind a piece of chicken somewhere, he said, “You know, that’s nothing. When your grandmother’s mother was alive, we all lived in the same apartment and she was the one who cooked all the meals. That woman – she shed like a damn cocker spaniel.”

“What are you talking about?” grandma protested.

“Oh yeah, say, you’re eating soup. An innocent bowl of soup. You’d plunge the spoon in there, and come up with a spoonful of hair!”

“That’s not true! I never got any hair in my soup. He’s making it up.”

“Hair soup! Hair soup, that’s what we had every night!”

Somehow, this did not inspire me to keep eating my grandma’s dish. But whereas my grandmother enjoyed her mother’s cooking (or pretended to), grandpa had a very different opinion of his mother-in-law’s creations. When the phrase “just like mama used to make” is synonymous with “hair soup,” the frozen dinner doesn’t sound so bad. At least there’s quality control at the factory, and machines don’t shed hair.

In light of the aforementioned, I propose that we put the obnoxious phrase to bed. There are plenty of other clichés to be used, like “hearty Italian” and, you know, “artisanal.” The phrase has long ago lost all the meaning it was intended to carry. In fact, can you imagine someone cool – say, Paul Newman in his prime, or Clint Eastwood in the Sergio Leone trilogy – saying this to anyone? Exactly. Neither should you.

The opening credits of “Jane’s Journey” show a nearly 80-year-old Dr. Jane Goodall first packing and then enjoying Johnnie Walker Red Label on a plane to Africa. She holds a Collins glass containing a generous pour of the whisky while reading an academic paper as the clouds rolls by. That’s how Dr. Jane rolls. Even if all you do is read the Wikipedia article on Dr. Jane, you’ll quickly realize you are learning a little bit about a genuine badass. She is the only human to have been accepted into chimpanzee society (she was kicked out in the end, which is badass in its own right). She earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University without having a B.Sc. (her undergraduate education started with a self-funded boat ride to Tanganyika at age 23). She’s a humanitarian, a great orator, and just straight-up wise. Dr. Jane probably doesn’t have a lot of time to visit craft cocktail bars, but she would make a wonderful guest.

Her mentor, Louis Leakey, believed that women have superior observational skills and make for natural naturalists. Upon becoming the founding member of “Leakey’s Angels” Jane’s bravery and patience rewarded the world with intimate knowledge of our closest phylogenetic relative. Of course other (probably male) academics of our species criticized her observations as being less than scientific due to her personification of the chimps she studied. When you see the swollen genitals of, get punched in the head by, and are in turn studied by extremely intelligent animals, how can you not assign them names? It’s what humans do. But Dr. Jane’s critics have been stifled by her tremendous achievements, and really I’m just here to offer her a drink.

Agricultural rum, or rhum agricole is distilled from fermented fresh-pressed sugar cane juice instead of the molasses and syrups that lead to “industrial” rums. The resulting spirit is more complex, and when unaged its fumes are heavy with some of the most interesting molecules. Typically rhum agricole comes from Martinique, but I recently tasted the only stateside agricultural rum whose terroir is Southern California: Agua Libre from St. George Distillery. It is a primal rum. When I spotted a bottle of it high up on the shelves of a bar in San Francisco and asked the bartender if she’d ever had it, she said she had but her tasting notes caused my friends and I to furrow our collective brow. Instead of the typical pleasantries such as “floral,” herbal,” and “vanilla,” she ticked off “funky,” “dirt,” and “mushrooms.” Then she climbed up onto the backbar and nimbly edged along the ledge to retrieve the bottle (there was a library-style ladder nearby, but she didn’t use it). She poured a bit in a small glass and the smell of gently burning tires wafted up. The first sip was undeniably loamy. My friends added “burnt teeth” and “distilled mulch” to the tasting notes as I accepted the bartender’s offer of an Agua Libre Ti’ Punch.

It wasn’t the most pleasant drink at first, but with the the melting ice and sugar softening the spirit it became exciting and enjoyable. My friends still carried on finding “notes of burning hefty bags stuffed with bison hair,” but I was lovin’ it. Agua Libre really does taste like mushrooms and dirt, and that’s pretty special. Remarking on the sensory experiences triggered by congeners is probably as close as most people get to doing science on any given day, so why not be bold and really challenge yourself? You’ll end up tipsy after a typical Ti’ Punch no matter what crazy esters and aldehydes the rhum is bringing to the table.

From what I’ve come to learn about Dr. Jane, I would urge her to give Scotch a little break and commingle her adventurous spirit with another: agricultural rum. After tasting them straight, one should always ask for a Ti’ Punch if it hasn’t already been suggested. For a drink that is essentially three ounces of rhum, they go down smoothly indeed thanks to the sugar and touch of lime. These “condiment” ingredients can be added to taste to skew the balance whichever way you choose. Like an Old-Fashioned, the simplicity of Ti’ Punch allows the spirit to be softened and showcased for one’s consideration. And for Dr. Jane’s Punch, I would recommend the Agua Libre just to see if she is able to pick up any sweaty chimp notes. I mean that in the best way possible.

Ti’ Punch

A slug of your favorite agricultural rum (I prefer unaged)
Preferred amount of cane syrup (most places, like my apartment, use demerara simple syrup)
Preferred amount of lime
A big ice cube (preferred but optional if you’re going to shoot not sip)

Squeeze the lime, anywhere from a small disc to half the fruit, into the other ingredients assembled in an Old-Fashioned glass and mix to incorporate the syrup.

People who move to New York claim a variety of reasons for relocation; among them are culture, diversity, career opportunities, culinary adventures, the art scene, fashion forwardness and anonymity. All of these are, for the most part, lies to mask the real reason people come to live here: the 4am closing time. In London, you can cultivate a beer gut until only about midnight; in Boston, you can curse the Yankees over a pint until a more reasonable 2am; but for the unadulterated joy of entering any of the one trillion bars, lounges, pubs and dives scattered across the five boroughs and proceeding to pound your mind and body into alcoholic stupor until 4am – perhaps later, if the bar is off the beaten path and you are lucky enough to get lost among the regulars after the shutters are officially drawn – New York can hardly be topped.

So imagine my surprise when, while drinking craft beer at the cavernous, echoey, moderately full Boreum Hill establishment Local 61, I heard the bartender sound last call at 12:30am on a Friday night. I looked at my watch, just to make sure. Then I asked my friend if it was daylight savings time. This didn’t add up: Why would a busy bar, trendy in all the right ways, situated in one of Brooklyn’s top neighborhoods for going out (right off the terminally hip Smith Street) shut off its taps a full three hours before the law postulates it so? Don’t they want to make money? (Surely, rent in this area cannot be cheap?) Why would they potentially turn off their customers? Talk about a black sheep among the Brooklyn booze-slinging herd.

“A little early to be closing, isn’t it?” we asked one of the bartenders, of whom there are typically around three on weekends.

“Yeah, you know how the quality of the crowd gets after about 1am…” she trailed off. “But we’re one of the few bars with food around here that are open for lunch, so we do our time and make our money, you could say.”

You could, but you probably wouldn’t. Smith Street does brisk business at night, but on weekday afternoons, diners are scarce. The Starbucks may be filled with stroller moms, high school kids and a few laptop-wielding freelancers, but even bars with low-priced food that would be mobbed in Union Square struggle to reel in the pre-duty bartenders and various independently wealthy types in Brooklyn. And even if Local 61 could get a chokehold on that market, there are very few businesses that would opt out of serving thirsty, paying customers into the night in exchange for a few spilled beers and perhaps an occasional call to the NYPD.

Local 61 almost looks like it doesn’t belong in New York; Portland is more like it, though Maine or Oregon is up for debate. The cavernous space is very stripped down, with large wooden communal tables arranged as if it were a picnic ground. The ceiling is high, and whatever art adorns the walls is sporadic and blends in rather than screams for attention. Browns and greys are the colors of choice; brick lines approximately half of the wall space. On one side, you can just make out the outline of what was once a chimney, starting mid-wall, just over the remnants of a platform pointing to the space’s more industrial past.

Heritage-clad locals wander in, sometimes with dogs, sometimes with strollers (this is Brooklyn 2012, after all) and sip on a stellar selection of East Coast microbrews; no large scale once-indies like Brooklyn Lager, no embarrassing grabs at local cred (ahem, Coney Island Lager). Instead, Portland ME’s excellent Allagash White and the always welcome Pleasantville, NY brew Captain Lawrence Liquid Gold hold up the lighter end of the beer spectrum while the rich burgundy of the surprisingly relatively light-bodied Bulkhead Red Amber Ale (Oceanside, NY) provides a darker alternative that is nevertheless appropriate for summer. That there is no Guinness on tap is no blasphemy either, not when Baltimore’s Existent Black Saison offers a sweeter, less creamy, more aromatic alternative. There are no spirits, but New York State wines – generally blends – nicely round out the drink menu.

Food at Local 61 echoes its drink selection: the ingredients are locally sourced, with delicious hard and soft cheese platters, two kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches (one vegetarian, one with ham), charcuterie, hummus, and sweet and spicy peanuts that will make you sweat like Rick Santorum at Rachel Maddow’s house party.

Along with the bar’s many charms, then, comes its one fault – its closing time, completely uncharacteristic of NYC. Sure, a barkeep in a pub on the outskirts of Staten Island may wish to shut down by 2am, when the customers have all gone home and the two old drunks left at the bar are nodding off, but there have been countless times when my friends and I wished for a craft beer spot late on a Saturday night, when the other bars in the neighborhood are still overcrowded and obnoxious. In that light, one can accuse Local 61 of being pretentious. But let’s look at it from a different angle.

The quality of the drinker after a certain late hour does, indeed, start to dwindle. There are always exceptions, of course, but almost anyone still chugging beer at 3am is not looking to go to bed sober. On weekends, Smith Street – like the rest of NYC – is overrun by the Bengal-stripe-shirted, greasy-haired set. One cannot sit at the bar and have a beer in peace without a guttural call for shots from right over your head thwarting any semblance of enjoyment. What ensues is a pickup scene, complete with occasional violence and frequent vomiting. Agitated bartenders clench their teeth and reconsider business school. In most cases, there is not much point in sticking around long enough to hit last call.

Local 61 clearly considers itself above the fray that most bars find themselves in at night, and sure, some will consider it a turnoff. But can you really blame a bar that wants to be known as a certain kind of establishment – one where relaxed locals can drink craft IPAs, the staff does not get agitated and there is never a need for a bouncer? Besides, as I am now firmly in my 30s and no longer have any days to waste on nursing hangovers, perhaps going home at a more civilized hour isn’t such a bad idea anyway.