Food, Family and Memory

You’ve heard it, opposites attract.  My parents were just about the most opposite you could find.  And, I never even thought about that until just now, while sitting down to write about their relationship.  Your parents are the only parents you have, so you don’t stop to think, “What did they see in each other?”

My mother was quiet, elegant and intelligent.  My father was loud, lovable and crass.   Taste was not exactly his strong suit except, of course, his great taste in women.

They met at a party.  He saw this stunning, very young, exotic looking woman modern-dancing.  Alone.  Seductively.   Twenty years older, he was intrigued.

Cliff Notes to get you up to speed:  They dated.  He knocked her up.  He said he didn’t want kids.  She was set to have an abortion.  Her family strong-armed him or he had a change of heart.  Or both.  She had their first child, my brother Alan but first they had a quickie wedding.  In Vegas, where else?  First meal in their home together, my mother cooked.  My father complained about the way she made the eggs.  She threw the whole pan of eggs at him.  Two years after the first child, she was pregnant with me.

“I always use a combination of cumin, sweet paprika, garlic powder (not garlic salt, it’s way too synthetic tasting), kosher salt, white pepper, and a bit of sugar. OH MY GOD! And hot paprika! I recently bought some fresh hot paprika and I can’t believe how much depth of flavor it packs with the smokiness of paprika and the spiciness of cayenne!” My spice rant had gotten me so excited I almost skidded off the leather couch of the Pasadena tapas bar we were chatting in.

I looked at the wonder and awe (shock and horror) on the faces of my friends and quickly dialed it down. I hadn’t seen most of these people in over 5 years and hot paprika was definitely NOT the most interesting reunion topic.

Last weekend, Shannon and I flew out to Los Angeles for a marathon he was competing in. I hadn’t been back in three years, and then it was only for a weekend catering job. I had moved back to New York two years before that, after living in Los Angeles for a 16 year stretch.

16 years. Gadzooks.

It’s a city that holds a lot of powerful memories for me- both successes and failures. I was terrified of what I would discover on my return. But you know what I found?

A few years ago, my sister Laraine and I were having lunch on Larchmont at one of my favorite sushi restaurants, redundantly called California Roll and Sushi Fish. (My sister is Laraine Newman, of SNL fame and a regular contributor to this website.) My seat was facing out toward the other tables and Laraine was facing me. We had ordered and were both very hungry.

Sitting alone against the opposite wall, beyond Laraine, was a young, slender, beautiful Asian woman. I couldn’t look at my sister without seeing her too. Her clothes were perfect, her hair and make-up were perfect. She was perfect. Her sashimi arrived. She slowly poured soy sauce into the little soy sauce dish, slowly picked up her chopsticks, slowly pinched off a tiny bit of wasabi, slowly mixed it with the soy sauce, slowly picked up a piece of fish, slowly dragged it back and forth through the soy sauce, and ever so slowly lifted it to her mouth. Then she actually put the chopsticks down, stared straight ahead and slowly chewed. You get the idea. She was a perfect eater. She’s not likely to ever choke on her food.

Growing up in an Italian family in Canada, meant doing everything food-related at home. Long before words like “casareccia” (home-made) gave it respectability, we were merely those kids with giant vegetable patches for back yards, whose hundreds of relatives were always coming over to can tomatoes, roast peppers, peel beans, boil fruit, bake biscuits, make cheese, cure salami, press grapes and yes, strangle chickens. Some of those activities have diminished over the past 30 years. Indeed, if any of my generation continue the practice of strangling chickens, they’ll only be doing so as a catharsis. That said, my family continues to produce homemade Italian specialities to this day. I hope that never stops.

One thing we never got into was curing olives. I mean, we love olives. There are stories about every member of my family almost choking on an olive repeatedly in infancy. It didn’t matter which: the waterlogged run-of-the-mill canned ones, the meaty, slightly bitter, crunchy ones a relative smuggled back from Italy in his luggage, the prune-sized black ones that were so oily I’d call the dog over to wipe my hands on....

So given that my family loved olives and was so adept at curing and preserving food, why did we never do olives? A quick poll of the family one night over dinner gave me a unanimous answer to the question: I dunno.