Naively, I asked for larks. The grocery clerk seemed perplexed.
“You know,” I added … “song birds? And, laurel branches, please.”
Armed with my shopping list from my 1954 edition of the Alice B Toklas cookbook (the Hashish Fudge recipe was expunged from that edition) I was beginning life as a newly wed. I didn’t realize that Alice B Toklas was not Betty Crocker; that our local grocery store in Fort Worth, Texas was not a wildfowl and gourmet food purveyor circa Paris 1920’s; and that I wasn’t cooking for Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse or Braque. I was a recently graduated art student and lookin’ to live La Vie Bohème. Anything that associated delicious food and painting was what I most wanted in life. Since I was a woman and not a man-with-a-wife, if I wanted it, I was going to have to do it all myself! And, so … arm in arm with Alice, I started my career as a would-be painter/chef. Never made Alice’s Larks. However, the super impressed clerks at my market thought I was an authentic epicurean, and I never dared tell them otherwise.
Three years ago my father remarried, had a baby and moved to the suburbs. He went domestic in a way only my father could. He is from Israel; his wife is from Poland; and the suburbs previously mentioned are Harrow, right outside of London. She has a brilliantly Goth 16 year old daughter from a previous marriage, he has three cynical Los Angelian children (including me), and the baby, as of now, speaks only Polish with a slightly British accent. Last weekend I went to London for my birthday. On my last night there, his wife and her daughter baked me, of all things, an apple pie. We all sat at the table and I stared out the window past my post-nuclear family to their white picket fence as Don McLean played in my head. Bye Bye Ms. American Pie. The pie was fantastic.