Stories

I’m a middle-aged step-dad with a bad back. I’m unable to jog. But I have a better shot at qualifying for the one-hundred-yard dash in the next summer Olympics than I have at getting my thirteen-year-old to voluntarily eat a vegetable. Any vegetable. And the same can be said for fruit. “I hate them,” he insists, decrying, at one fell swoop, all means of natural nutrition. “Hate is a strong word, pal,” I tell him, trying to lend some perspective to this same conversation we repeat night in and night out. But if this isn’t hate, I think to myself, what is it? The smell of broccoli makes him nauseas. The sight of a mushroom incapacitates him with fear; one found its way on to his dinner plate a couple of weeks ago and he yelled out, panicked “Get it off of there!” as if it were some alien species about to attack him.

Complicating his life, not to mention mine, is his mother, who insists he eat, at the very least, one serving of a vegetable at dinner. After negotiations rivaling the Geneva Talks in intensity, we have agreed to let him eat the vegetable of his choosing – peas, peas, and occasionally some peas – at the very end of his meal, and on a separate plate – his vegetable plate. This is the only way he’ll consider, in his words, “giving it an honest attempt.”

Vintage tales of hardship and survival:
Grandad crushed when the tractor toppled
On Brier Hill. How Uncle John lost his arm
To the picker. Samuel smothered
In the silo, lungs full of harvest.

Thus reads a stanza of the poem Farming – One of the most dangerous occupations. It is representative of the twenty-six poems in Dead Horses, poems of struggle and suffering, loss and death. These are poems of memories, especially memories of horses:

Now that they are dead or gone, the dream
Is always of a field where horses
Flash past, hooves catching and echoing light,
The grass lush, milkweed or Queen Anne’s lace
Along the fencerows. Then suddenly it’s winter,
Snow is falling, shapes are haloed, the sky is bleak.

And another stanza, from the same poem:

…..You want them now, those horses
Crashing the earth with sound as if light
Had been surpassed by speed, as if the laces
That bind you to your bones gave way to winter’s
Blast…..

I don’t know another food that seems to inspire stronger emotion—passion, even
—than that most humble of desserts, pie. — Joyce Maynard, "Labor Day"

I’ve been thinking about pie a lot lately. It’s only now, as I’m preparing to leave the college where I’ve taught for the last 15 years, that it occurs to me how many works I’ve taught that have included pie. In the early years of my women’s film class, I used a clip in which Snow White sings about her prince while crafting the perfect pie for the seven little men that she lives with. Pie can be a metaphor for comfort, for domesticity, for nurturing and for accomplishment.

Those very suggestions are what also make pie such a successful weapon in the arsenal of slapstick: to be attacked with a pie, otherwise a symbol of warm inclusiveness, is to be shamed, reduced (just ask the British Prime Minister’s pie thrower his intention).

Last night my cookbook club got together. We meet once a month, taking turns hosting at our homes. Our host chooses a theme and each member finds a recipe from a cookbook, usually a recipe they haven't yet tried. We show up for the gathering with a dish to share, a copy of the recipe for each member and the cookbook it came from. Thus, the name Cookbook Club.

Our theme last night was "Farm to Table." We started the evening with two appetizers. Watermelon Salsa was one of them. Pat didn't get the recipe from a cookbook, but from a friend in Arizona. She used a carved watermelon half to serve the salsa and garnished it with fresh flowers from her garden. Can you tell she's an artist? It looked beautiful and tasted wonderful. I've shared her recipe below.

The other appetizer was a delicious pizza made using a recipe from fine cooking magazine, Salade aux Lardons Pizza developed by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough.