Food, Family and Memory

On December 24th, 1963, Philadelphia was hit with a rip-roaring blizzard.  I’ll never forget it.  By evening, the drifts were well past knee-high.  Snowflakes swirled in the halos of streetlights.  Driving anywhere was out of the question.  Wrapped up in coats, boots, gloves, hats and scarves, and loaded down with bags of presents, my girlfriend Bonnie, my mother and I set out on foot for Aunt Tilda’s house.  What would have been a 7-minute drive turned into an hour trek.   I remember laughing so hard we could hardly walk.  We knew we were crazy to be slogging through such a storm, but we were determined to reach our destination.  It was Christmas Eve, and Aunt Tilda had prepared the traditional Italian Feast of Seven Fishes.

Tilda’s house was decorated to the rafters.  Twinkling lights outlined every window.  Tiny red and green Christmas balls hung from each curtain ruffle.  Swags of tinsel garland draped the mirrors.  The huge tree was covered with hundreds of ornaments she had been collecting for decades.  At its top perched a gossamer angel.  And beneath its bedecked branches, nestled the white and gold 30-piece Nativity set that Tilda had stayed up into the wee hours painting on many a sweltering summer night.

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.

My ideal breakfast is baked eggs, a nice thick ham steak and wondrously high popovers, this is the food that makes Sunday mornings so special and different from the other 6 days. Sundays are the time to slowdown and reflect on your week and your loved ones in your non formal pajamas for hours. A nice and slow day...

When we were kids my Mother always made baked eggs, that is what she called them. The English like to call them shirred eggs, but the concept is exactly the same. Because it is a dish based in the 60’s we start with a Pyrex custard cup, you know the clear glass cups that hold 7 or 8 ounces, cups that were basic kitchen equipment before we all got so sophisticated.

Many years ago, more than 30, there was a little boy who loved apples. On sunny autumn days, he and his mom would each put on a warm, cozy sweatshirt. They would get in the car and take a short drive to their favorite apple orchard.

The sweet fragrance of fresh apples would meet their noses as soon as they walked into the barn. The big red apple barn at the orchard always felt cool inside. On each visit, the little boy and his mom would taste each of the varieties of apples. They already knew which was their favorite apple. But the little boy would watch as his mom carefully cut a slice from each of the apples so they could have a taste. Some were sweet, some were tart, some were soft and some were firm.

The blonde little blue-eyed boy and his mom always chose the same kind of apple. Red and juicy. Crunchy and tart. Firm, not soft. As they wound their way to the place in the barn where they would pay for their small basket of apples, the little boy would stop at the freezer case. He loved the frozen apple cider sticks and he knew his mom did, too. He would stand on the tips of his toes, stretch his arm and try to reach down to pick up two of the frozen sticks of cider. But, he couldn't reach them. So, his mom would scoop him up in her arms and hold him just close enough so that his little hands could grasp the chilly bars of frozen cider.