Food, Family and Memory

Once upon a time in a kitchen far, far away, I was often babysat by my grandma in our fairy tale of a family deli in downtown New Haven, Ct. I could have done worse. She, a sorceress of superb taste, made ruggelach fresh daily, with me assisting, eating fistfuls of walnuts that 'just happened' to fall from the dough, licking the battered bowl of elixir from the cake preparations, eating crumbs that magically broke off the babka. My mouth was as busy as my hands as I ingested the mysteries of grandma’s cuisine.

We were major meat eaters in those innocent days, breakfast, lunch, noshes, suppers and snacks. How could we not be, with kosher creatures sticking out their tongues or lolling seductively about in grandpa's display cases? Lunches of exotic fare like liverwurst, baloney, pastrami, corned beef and melt-in-your-mouth scoops of the Chartoff chopped liver filled my plate. Pieces of the ubiquitous Hebrew National salamis were served in challah sandwiches, on toothpicks, fried up with eggs or put on my grandpa's homemade pizzas. Grandma's brisket was to die for, and she and grandpa left the earth from heart disease far too soon to prove it.

Naively, I asked for larks. The grocery clerk seemed perplexed.
      “You know,” I added …  “song birds? And, laurel branches, please.”  

Armed with my shopping list from my 1954 edition of the Alice B Toklas cookbook  (the Hashish Fudge recipe was expunged from that edition) I was beginning life as a newly wed.  I didn’t realize that Alice B Toklas was not Betty Crocker; that our local grocery store in Fort Worth, Texas was not a wildfowl and gourmet food purveyor circa Paris 1920’s; and that I wasn’t cooking for Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse or Braque. I was a recently graduated art student and lookin’ to live La Vie Bohème.  Anything that associated delicious food and painting was what I most wanted in life.  Since I was a woman and not a man-with-a-wife, if I wanted it, I was going to have to do it all myself! And, so … arm in arm with Alice, I started my career as a would-be painter/chef.  Never made Alice’s Larks. However, the super impressed clerks at my market thought I was an authentic epicurean, and I never dared tell them otherwise.

I grew up in a family in which manners extended well beyond “please” and “thank you,” and the placement of one’s napkin on one’s lap. I answered the phone “Graham residence, Ann speaking” and said “excuse me” before I interrupted adult conversation. I was also expected to recognize adult conversation, and to refrain from interjecting my own opinions or anecdotes unless they were requested. I was never encouraged to believe that I had the same rights as adults in the household, and consistently taught to consider “the other person” in matters which ranged from sitting through dull stories told by old people to expressing great joy upon receiving a(nother) knitted hat for Christmas.

My brother and I were not allowed to chew gum, yell or play loud music in the house, or to thump up and down the stairs. We wrote thank-you notes, ate what we were served as guests and held doors for people. My mother disapproved of containers (milk, catsup, salsa, soda bottles) on the table, and required that condiments be decanted, and that we knew which forks and spoons were used for what purpose. We could sit through a concert or lecture without getting up or rattling wrappers, and we could eat at a nice restaurant without disturbing other diners. If we had to, we could sit still while the adults drank (endless) cups of coffee after dinner  and discussed people we didn’t know. We were not allowed to use the words “fart” or “butt” or to comment in any way about the passing of gas.

Back in 1990, rice and love became forever entwined in my mind. A man I’d gone out with for ten years broke off our relationship...and my response to grief was to learn how to make risotto. After I taught myself to make proper risotto, I went on a blind date with an Italian, and some time later found myself in Florence, seeking the approval of my future mother-in-law, whose favorite dish was risotto. Rice and love. From a distance of twenty years, the emotion and the starch wind around each other with all the choreographed beauty of ballet.

The year of my great misery I was living in a tiny apartment in the graduate ghetto of New Haven, Connecticut. Most of the space was in the kitchen, which I found inspirational. I spent my free time cooking, crying and reading. My favorite cookbook was Paul Bertolli’s Chez Panisse Cooking, a tome with long fervent essays that included a long piece on risotto. I would stand over the pot, stirring as Paul instructed, reading a romance borrowed from the public library, and crying every now and then when it seemed the heroines had a better life than I did. After a month or two of this, I was quite good at risotto and I started to think about men in a more cheerful manner, which led to a blind date with Alessandro, a graduate student in Italian with loopy black curls and a swimmer’s body. He liked my risotto. It wasn’t until years later, when I ate his mother’s creamy, delicious risotto, that I understood how important it was.