Food, Family and Memory

I was lunching with a friend when some woman leaned over and said, “Do you realize you’ve been talking about food for an hour straight?” “I can’t help it,” I replied. “I’m from New Orleans. We’re all like this.”

Honestly, where I come from, it’s perfectly normal to plot lunch while eating breakfast, to discuss past and future meals while having lunch, to treat every supper as if it were the last, to call friends and ask: What’d ya eat today?

Back in ’05, my dad was hospitalized – a routine procedure for a stomach hernia. Unfortunately, this resulted in post-operative ileus: his intestines refused to return to work after the anesthesia wore off. And while I too have been tempted to not return to work after a little R&R…come on, you’re intestines, you have to go back to work. Otherwise, nothing that goes in can come out.

One week passed. Two weeks passed. Slackers. I flew home to New Orleans. 

There are certain social barriers we face throughout our lives, that when knocked down, make a big impression on us.  Especially when you’re a kid.  When I was in the 6th grade at Hawthorn Elementary School my homeroom teacher whose name escapes me, but for our purposes let’s just call her Miss Pritchard, had a kickass ginger snap recipe.  Up until that time the store bought ones always burned my tongue so I just ruled them out in my cookie lexicon. They were also flat where Miss Pritchard’s were fluffy and thick. The sugar that dusted the store bought ones gave off that diamond glint but Miss Pritchard’s looked like something you saw when you opened a treasure chest.  They were also crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. Hoo yeah!

My father was a dyed-in-the-shorts Bermudian who loved to feast on all things from under the sea. Shrimp, crab, oysters, mussels, fish of all kinds, and lobsters. Five years of serving in the Canadian Army overseas in Holland and France during World War ll chewing on K rations in a trench didn’t diminish his early island jones for a crustacean or almost anything seaworthy and edible.

Relocating to the Toronto suburbs in Canada in the late Forties where seafood restaurants were almost as scarce as mermaid sightings still didn’t discourage his quest for a taste of the ocean. He did his best to pass his glorious seafood cravings on to his children, but as a toddler, I balked at the thought of sliding one of those grey slimy, pulsating mollusks down my tender young throat no matter how much tangy cocktail sauce was dumped on it.  I cringed at the thought of cracking open a giant scarlet claw to scoop the steaming white meat dripping with warm clarified butter and lemon.

Perhaps it was the slant of late afternoon sunlight filtering through the vine-laced pergola, gracing the plank of organic crudités.  Maybe it was the large grape leaves serving as blotters and platters for the abundant array of fresh foods presented that perfect June day.

Of course, it also had to be the occasion.  It was 1984.  Northern California was still new to Manhattanite me.  We were celebrating the opening of my girlfriend Jessel’s Gallery, birthed in an abandoned granary building on Atlas Peak Road down the hill from the Silverado Country Club in Napa.   Diane Jessel, an artist, author, impresario, was a patron of other female artists, and had a gallery full of gifted gals’ tantalizing take away ceramics, California impressionist canvases, and funny, functional, folk art pieces. 

But I had NEVER seen a tuna salad quite like that one...