Food, Family and Memory

This is an excerpt from the book "Clothing Optional: And Other Ways to Read These Stories"

We had just started Saturday Night Live, I was an apprentice writer, 24 years old and I felt intimidated.  Chevy was hysterically funny. So was John and Danny and Gilda and Franken. And Michael O’Donoghue, well, Michael O’Donoghue simply scared the shit out of me. So I stayed pretty much to myself. One day I came to work, and on my desk was a framed cartoon. A drawing – no caption – of a drunken rabbi staggering home late and holding a wine bottle. And waiting for him on the other side of the door was his angry wife, getting ready to hit him with a Torah instead of a rolling pin. I had no idea who put it there. I started looking around and out of the corner of my eye I saw a white-haired man in his office, laughing.  He had put it there. That was the first communication I had with Herb Sargent– which was significant given that he never spoke and he gave me a cartoon that had no caption.

I had seen him years before. Or at least I think I did. When I was a kid. My father manufactured jewelry and he had his shop on 52nd Street between Fifth and Madison. I used to come into the city from Long Island and run errands for him during the summer. And no matter where the delivery was supposed to go, I made sure I got there by going through the lobby of what was then called the RCA Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, with the hopes that maybe I would see Johnny Carson (whose show was upstairs) or some of the people from That Was the Week That Was: Buck Henry, Bob Dishy, David Frost – or Herb Sargent, who was the producer. I knew his name from the credits. As a young boy who wanted to be a TV writer some day, this was like hanging around outside of Yankee Stadium waiting to see the players going through to the clubhouse.

From the time I was in nursery school until I graduated from high school, I never spent a summer in my home state of Michigan. Most summers we went to Maine, but for three summers, we headed not to the rocky, Atlantic coast, but across that ocean to Europe. The middle summer when I was fifteen, we explored England, Italy and France deeply and passionately. My mother, possibly the best trip planner ever to draw breath, spent nearly a year before the trip selecting the perfect bed & breakfasts,  auberges and pensiones for us.

The things we wanted to see were an odd mixture of The Things One Sees in Europe (The Coliseum, The Louvre) and things my father wanted to see (the famous “Black Madonna” of Urbino). A consummate networker long before the days of the internet, my mother communicated her charm and enthusiasm via weightless, pale blue aerogrammes that appeared in the mailbox all year, one memorably addressed to “La Famiglia Graham;” by the time we boarded the plane for Frankfort in June, deposits were made, and an assortment of feather beds, duvets and hand-embroidered pillow cases awaited our travel weary bodies.

We fell hard for Florence, so hard that my mother cancelled our reservations in Venice and booked an extra week. Our “insider” guide was a colleague of my father’s, an Italian professor named Bob (and a “real” Italian), the leader of a group of Michigan State University students studying  in Florence for the summer session. Bob had rented a villa at the top of an impossibly steep hill lined with Cypress trees to which we ascended one afternoon for bread, cheese, olives, and a plate of salami, soppressata, and prosciutto.

Last week, I had the extreme pleasure of cooking with my Great-est niece and nephew, Lauren and Max. The question of what to make was easy, it had to be simple and memorable. My goal was for them to remember what we created together forever like my memories of cooking with my mother. Forever means to me that they will think of our afternoon when they eat any of the three things we made: butter, strawberry jam and cinnamon bread. Everyday food, so basic but rarely handmade anymore and if you want to interest kids in cooking you need to show them ‘food magic.’

We first started with activating or blooming the yeast- Not so interesting to them at first until I explained that yeast is a plant and like all plants it blooms in it’s own way. I didn’t have their attention yet, but I knew I would shortly. The yeast started to bubble and swell minutes after it came in contact with the sweetened warm water. They were watching-ish. I explained the process of bread making and my basic formula. How was I to explain gluten development to a 3 year old and 6 year old well enough for them to understand, much less care? I could hear the mantra repeatedly in my mind- DON’T TELL THEM, SHOW THEM. So, I did.

We added the liquid including the yeast to the flour/oats mixture and those small hands dove in without any prompting. I explained how cooking is visual and how important it was to watch minute by minute because magic happens instantly. As soon as I said that ‘fingers’ of dough started to form in bowl as they massage with their small hands. The gluten was forming, the magic was happening! Once the dough pulled away from the bowl, I dumped it out onto the floured granite counter-then the messy fun began.

As my daughters will attest, I am not a cook. 

Indeed, the only thing I have ever cooked is brown rice and boiled eggs (you notice I said boiled and not scrambled or poached or anything remotely requiring any cooking skills) so it was a testament to my attempts to be fearless, that the first time I cooked anything more complicated than brown rice or a boiled egg, was on national television on Martha Stewart’s show...