Food, Family and Memory

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.

Okay, I admit that I have read Patricia Wells' Food Lover’s Guide to France so many times that the pages are no longer glued to its spine. My copy smells old because it is old. It isn’t all that accurate anymore but there is still some relevant information, just less. This book is the reason I have had so many treasured memories of France.

The most memorable one in the whole book for me was finding the walnut oil man - Patricia Wells wrote that he had a water wheel that aided in the extraction, used no electricity, the farm was difficult to find and beware of the dogs. All true, but so much more...

I was the navigator, not the driver that day. I was responsible for finding all the tiny little roads on our paper map to the mill. Half the roads weren’t on the map and any signage was obscured by overgrown trees. It was very rural and our afternoon was turning into either a treasure hunt or wild goose chase. I could feel we were near. When my boyfriend asked if I found the road on the map, I nodded. Not true, we were lost.

You can guess what the driver said as we drove threw the same intersection for the fourth time. “How can we be lost if you are reading the map? You know how to read a map?” “Yayyyy”, I replied - you could cut the tension with a butter knife. One more try, then I would agree to give up the goose chase. Suddenly, I saw it - the faded yellow sign covered with ivy and grown up trees like Patricia had described, only more overgrown.

When I was growing up, my parents took me and my sister to all kinds of restaurants but rarely ones with "kid's menus." We regularly came into San Francisco to eat Chinese food, tried sushi long before it became popular, and celebrated birthdays and school graduation at fancy French restaurants. Unlike many kids who probably longed for Taco Bell or McDonald’s, I enjoyed eating at The Good Earth, a casual restaurant near my house. The menu had a mix of salads and sandwiches and some very unique entrees. It wouldn’t necessarily be considered “health food” by today’s standards but there were quite a number of vegetarian dishes.

At The Good Earth, pretty much anyone could find something they would like to eat, and that made it perfect for dining out with everyone from my teenage girlfriends, to my grandmother. The Good Earth was famous for it’s spicy cinnamon tea which you can buy to this day. Although the restaurant chain was sold and very few restaurants remain, I remain haunted by the memory of Walnut Mushroom Casserole. It was my go to dish.

It took me half my life to realize that when Guadalupe Contreras says “Gadaymee”, she means to say, “Goddamn it”. I thought for years that she had been referring to my sister, whose name is Amy, with a level of stifled frustration that I found hard to account for. I told a Spanish-speaking friend about this misunderstanding a while back, and he in turn informed me that my Spanish pronunciation of “I’m scared” (tengo miedo) sounds a lot like “I have shit” (tengo mierda). I relayed this conversation to Lupe. She claimed to disagree.

There are some things whose very greatness lies in the fact that they can’t be translated, or imitated at all, without some diminishment of their essence. This is often the case with poetry in translation, but I believe the phenomenon extends to other things, like bed-head, or fans of the Boston Red Sox. We read translations anyway, of course, secure that what we find in them will still be more than enough, that the meaning of a word, a palabra, can transcend language. Recipes can be like this for those who collect them, more than a list of ingredients, or a formula for the cook. Cooking from a recipe, or merely writing it down, is itself an act of translation, and so the closer that recipe comes to the source, the better. I feel this way about Albondigas soup, which is why my sister and I decided to take a lesson in preparing it from the true master, a woman who takes her own sources seriously, kneading raw beef like bread dough, and starting her meat stock with a pile of scary, dull white bones: Guadalupe Contreras.