A Literary Feast

Cult Classics

Posted on June 25th, 2012

I sipped my banana milk and stared up at the mural on the wall. Underneath a heading reading, “Is this progress?” was a painted chart showing the incremental evolution of ape to human, ending with a soldier armed with an AK-47. A monkey (bearing a striking resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman) looked on, extending his arms in animated gesture. Above him a speech bubble read, “Don’t blame me!”

I elbowed Mr. Max and pointed to it. “Pretty funny.”

It was eight days into our vacation and we had finally built up the courage to have breakfast at the Yellow Deli. Locals had told us that the Deli (which is really more of a cafe) was owned, operated, and staffed by members of the Twelve Tribes, a controversial religious sect that had a community nearby. I was apprehensive, but the promise of fresh, homemade bread (a rarity in rural New York) won us over.

As we pondered the menu, I nudged Mr. Max to admire the rest of the interior, which was covered, floor to ceiling, with carved wood decorations, ironwork and murals, all made by tribe members. Bearded (and, in the case of the women, long-haired and long-skirted) staff made their rounds from table to table, using a rope-based dumbwaiter system to ferry trays of food between the two floors. The hammered dulcimer music coming through the restaurant’s sound system only served to enhance the impression that we had wandered into a tavern in The Legend of Zelda.

Our waiter was polite and businesslike, dissipating any lingering fears that our breakfast would come with a side of hard-sell cult recruitment. At some point a gaggle of tourists came in and sat at the counter, chatting inquisitively with a waitress about the group’s religious beliefs. The waitress explained breezily that members of the Twelve Tribes were Christians who lived and worked collectively, and that the group originated in Europe, living on communal farms and homesteads in the countryside.

We had ambitiously over-ordered, and the table filled with plates of wholesome, homestyle food: a gooey egg and cheese sandwich, a yogurt parfait with juicy berries, something called a honey bun (a hot buttered whole wheat roll with honey, walnuts, & wheat germ), and moist, cakey muffins. Everything tasted creamy and pure — like whole milk and honey prepared by a kitchen maid from a Vermeer painting. I cut off a piece of my perfect raspberry muffin and perched it on the edge of Mr. Max’s plate, eager to share the experience. “This is damn good,” I whispered once the waiter strayed out of earshot.

My thoughts drifted to the fast-approaching end of our rural vacation, and our eventual return to offices, traffic, bills, and computer screens. As the waitress continued to describe a life spent among farms and fields, I found myself acknowledging that, regardless of how you feel about off-label religions, the lifestyle has distinct appeal.

Sated and sleepy, we prepared to make our exit. A young male tribe member in a green plaid shirt, perhaps taking a cue from my untrimmed hair and Mr. Max’s vacation beard, smiled warmly at us as we walked by.

The morning breeze hit my face like a splash of cool water. Though we shared some key characteristics (grooming habits, a feeling of societal isolation), the tribe would not be gaining two new members. We were visitors, not followers.

But that soft, sweet, earthy bread — that, I can believe in.

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A Tongan Feast

Posted on June 25th, 2012

Ano Beach, Tonga, an August night after the millennium. Our sailboat is anchored next to one belonging to a sailor who laughs out loud to himself and sings at the stars. I feel similarly wild and happy, barefooted and naked under my dress, the salt breeze tangling my hair as the dinghy rides over the waves. Every slap of the boat against the ocean bottoms my stomach out again and again, an ache that borders on hunger for this night to never end.

On the beach under the palms: a Tongan feast. We slip our feet into the shallows, pull the boat up under the trees. Here is a sailor from San Diego with his German crew and a Norwegian family of four, halfway into a three-year journey to sail around the world. We learn these things quickly, greetings exchanged like radio shorthand, because our Tongan hosts beckon, smiling. Our dinner is ready, and we are not here to chat – we are here to eat.

We sit side-by-side in the sand, and the food appears, as if by magic, from the shadows. And oh, the uncommon delight of that meal! Everything eaten with our hands: slices of unidentifiable melon tasting of honey and citrus, fish cakes, banana shoots with seafood salad. Best of all, little packages made of taro leaves, baked in the sand under palm fronds, that the two young Norwegian girls and I grab like giddy beggars, steam blushing our cheeks as we unwrap them to dig our fingers into thick coconut cream filled with octopus, lamb, and lobster. Guava and passion fruit are picked straight from the jungle trees, and I press chunks of ufi, the Tongan yam, against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, trying to prolong the way its earthy sweetness is faintly salted by the smell of the ocean lapping the shore a few feet away in the twilight.

We all eat slowly, the way you can only after a day listening to the wind snap the mainsail and letting the South Pacific rock your bones. The conversation starts slowly and comfortably as the sunset fades across the water and the first stars appear, shifting among the sailors from sea stories to shark stories to island stories. The Tongans pull each of us up to dance in the firelight, and the Norwegian girls giggle at my name, vaguely similar to the Norwegian word for “stomach.” I laugh too, because I am all belly tonight and sticky fingers, drunk on Oceania. And on kava, which the Tongan men pass around in a hollowed root. Whatever taste it has is lost in the sensation it leaves me with: tingly, numb lips and the feeling that I am floating just a few inches above the ground, swaying along to the drummers even though I am sitting perfectly still.

Twelve years and a hundred lifetimes later, I remember this night with perfect clarity. I remember that I had tears in my eyes when I licked the last bit of coconut from my palm, that afterwards I danced with a small, shy Tongan girl who couldn’t look me in the eye but smiled all the while, that the boat captain from San Diego closed his eyes and lay back on the ground when he’d finished eating, one hand patting his stomach as if to make sure it was still there.

What I don’t remember, though, is how it ended. We must have eventually all hugged solemnly and motored through the dark sea back to our respective sailboats, where we slept deeply and dreamed of the ocean. Later, there were other meals in Tonga and elsewhere in the South Pacific, each transformative in their own ways. Yet, this is the one that has stuck with me: one perfect meal that was, in the way the best meals are, a seamless melding of unexpected fellowship and pure flavors that seemed entirely born of that island and that night. By their very nature, meals like this are brilliant flickers in the darkness, never to be recreated. And yet, I often think that, if only I could be transported back to that beach, with my toes in the sand, licking warm taro leaves under a sunset sky with two tow-headed, teasing Norwegian children, then I would be simply, magnificently happy.

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Nothing But Some Beans And Rice

Posted on June 25th, 2012

I once made the perfect bowl of rice and beans. Big deal, right? Well, it kind of is, mostly because I’ve never made it again since.

I’ve been squarely within the rice and beans income bracket for a long, long time. In college I’d try to smear my summer earnings across the year, a thin sheen of solvency that usually lost its luster by the first round of midterms. And since graduation my general aversion to anything even approaching a living wage combined with the lingering after- effects of the liberal arts/vegetarian educational complex has kept things tight and legume-oriented.

So I’ve made and eaten a lot of beans and rice. Figure at least once per week for the past 14 years, for a grand total of… somewhere around 728 batches? Repetition might be the key to expertise, but when it’s a result of limitations instead of dedication, it can be a real bummer. And as much as the dish itself has become a badge of honor to the artsy, academics and broke people everywhere, that’s not necessarily because it’s always good: it’s more because it’s efficient, economical fuel for humans.

If great meals are symphonies, my beans and rice is “Smoke on the Water.” It’s basically just chop, sizzle, crank, plop, stir and eat. I’ve kept things pretty basic for the most part: a can of beans, sautéed onions and garlic, maybe some chili flake, a bit of cumin, and cayenne pepper all mixed in with some brown rice (for extra nutritional weight). At some point, though, things started to get a little weird. I don’t know if I was blissed out on my primary source of sustenance that summer — staff meals at two very good restaurants — or if it was boredom or just the lack of consistent access to staple ingredients thanks to extreme transience (I was like a Bedouin when I lived in Portland, OR), but some deviation from the norm had left me standing in the kitchen of a house just off Alberta street, shirtless in the August heat, pulling a pot of perfection off of the stove.

What was it? I had been messing around a little, playing spice rack roulette, but what did the trick? Coriander? Turmeric? An extra-generous pour of olive oil? The thoughtless rhythm of routine had robbed me of the details and I stood there dumbfounded, like a blacked out college kid trying to unforget the origins of an ill-begotten black eye. Somehow, just that once, the ordinary had reconfigured itself into the essence of the earthy goodness inherent in the two primary ingredients — something rich, savory, and hot but not blisteringly so.

I was used to moments of transcendence like that in low-lit dining rooms, usually the result of some artfully-plated amalgamation of delicate flavors and textures. This was entirely different: it was an ugly mess, a mud of simple sustenance, calories configured in a familiar, shameful state of dishevelment. But the flavor was as beautiful and pure as a newborn babe, a brief flash of light in an otherwise drab procession of the necessary — spontaneous and spectacular in spite of itself.

In the moment, I possessed an unusual presence of mind – I knew that what was happening, this happy accident, was a once-a-decade, maybe once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment. I could see myself hunched over other ranges in different kitchens in faraway cities, flailing away, trying to recreate the moment but never quite reaching the apex again. So before it was back to beans and rice as usual — next week, and the week after — I tried to savor every bite, and I scraped the bowl clean.

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Making Pancakes

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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.

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Strange Mother Tongue: Unexpected Stories Of Unusual Liqueurs

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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.

Ode To Mother Grape

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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

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Marie-Christine

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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.

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The Mother Of Invention: A Reluctant Confession

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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.

Categories: Uncategorized

The Womb Of My Discontent

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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.

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Open Kitchen, Be My Mother

Posted on May 13th, 2012

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.

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