When I set a table I think of my mother. Every time. When I place the knives and forks and have a little stumble about where the spoon goes, how and why some people put it above the plate, I think about her. She grew up one of 10 children in a poor rural family. There were no table settings. I can't ask her now, but I hope there were enough bowls or plates, and enough utensils. It was the Great Depression, who knows. My mother always served herself food last, and always had the least, which I think she learned from her own mother who tried to make meals for 10 children. When I place a knife next to a plate I feel my mother learning from a book when she was a young adult, determined to be proper. To erase in the placement of a knife on a smoothe cloth the violence of poverty, the terror of her brother stealing from her bowl, the suppressed howls in bed hungry with hungry sisters.
My father was Jewish, but aside from attending my cousin's bar and batmitzvas I grew up with no practice, and little knowledge of this heritage. My first real interaction with Judaism is tied so strongly to food.
My pre-school made a Sukkot- a structure made out of willow branches and fall harvest vegetables which in the Jewish tradition harbors the sacred space of the harvest table. We all brought squash, apples, corn and chilies from our school and home gardens to decorate the structure.
Although it was far from the structured practice of this custom, I still remember feeling connected to a beautiful tradition of honoring a time of plenty. There was also something so magical about a house made of food.
My senior year of high school, I was assigned to sit next to the most popular girl in school in our concert choir. Girls wanted to be her and heteronormative guys just plain wanted her; when Anna said "Jump!" you didn't ask "How high?" because you were already six inches off the ground. And every day when Anna looked in her lunch bag and declared "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels!" ... I listened. From Anna and boys at my school and silly little comments, I became hyper-conscious of my weight. Eating ice cream was an embarrassment and skipping lunch was a triumph. My emotions throughout the day were governed by how many calories I consumed and whether or not I weighed a little less than the day before when I got home from school and stepped on the scale. When starving myself all day eventually turned into gorging myself at night, I started trying to make myself throw up, first by gagging myself with my fingers, my toothbrush, whatever I could find, and then (when I discovered I had no gag reflex) by chugging bitter coffee or salt water.
I don't have an extremely healthy relationship with food today, but I am slowly learning to appreciate and accept my body as it is. Within my imperfections, I am perfect.
Growing up poor, having candy in the house was rare, a true luxury. When I was six, I found a bag of candy my mother had purchased for an upcoming birthday party. I took the bag and ate it all. I got sick. That's what I get for stealing and over indulging! Lesson learned the hard way.
I was a sophomore in high school and teetering on the brink of anorexia. I was trying to eat under 1000, then under 800, calories a day. One day in the kitchen I made myself a round of iceberg lettuce with a blob of cottage cheese on it and some tiny bit of cheese that would melt. There it sat, in the middle of the cookie sheet and I was going to broil it a little. My father was sitting at the kitchen table watching me. He said, gently but firmly, "I think this has gone far enough." Somehow, that remark meant everything. Everything.
When I was very small, my mother prepared food for me in a heated bowl: engineered that way, it had a double layer within that could be filled with hot water to keep the food hot. I was born in a country deeply identified with its food culture---every country is, of course, but I mean food is our international identity, our most visible export, our signature. I learned at an early age to love beef tartar, and was slapped across the face when I did not take to veal. When we traveled to India, all I could bear to eat was fish and chips, cashews, and chai. Sustenance of the empire. Later my parents opened a restaurant---and my adolescence was structured around preparing food, selling it, Being It. The production of edible pleasure is not a theme or a topic or a memory: it is the backdrop against which all else transpires. That pleasure and sustenance would be synonymous, is not a question to be debated. But later, in adulthood, which is to say solitude, I found I did not *know* hunger: when apart from others, whether friends, family, lovers, or foes (or all), I forgot to know how/when I was hungry. I got slimmer---but then one evening, I felt certain without any preconception that what I wanted or needed was simply, onion soup. I had never made it myself, and it is technically of another culture, but none of this mattered. Without a recipe, I simply set about chopping onions...to find hunger again.
My friend Michael grew up in Texas, in an economy based almost entirely on beef production. As a child, Michael was repulsed by beef jerky. He felt toward it the way he felt toward peanut butter---that it was un-hygenic, and wrong. The nuns at his school slapped him for refusing peanut butter, and as an adolescent, he felt isolated by his refusal of homemade beef jerky. He has now---some 20 years later--just returned from a trip to Napa, from where he has brought: beef jerky, wrapped in white paper, with the trademark, "The Fatted Calf. " We are now sitting in our shared kitchen, ripping it up in our teeth (with no small effort), and the salty flavor quickly recalls imagined mythologies of The West. We do not fight for water, here, though; tonight, instead, we tug at the tough meat and recall the nobility of our refusals in childhood, the price paid, and erupt into belly laughs as we cherish the meat. "It's all in the packaging," he says.
I lie in bed and run my fingers over my ribcage. The bones are prominent, and they cage pulsating lungs. I took a study pill this morning, and sat in a cafe. I replaced breakfast and lunch with a half-pack of smokes, and waded through my homework. Twitchy, blissful, I found my way into a conversation about Foucault with a nearby caffeinated buzz-bot, greasy kid. He was holding his coffee in one hand, and he had on these crazy leopard shades. When I eventually left the cafe, my stomach was in its happy little knot, and was not ready to embark on the first meal of a day nearly through. I had a turkey sandwich, and it didn't taste great. It made me want a cigarette. Now, my body draws in, and my stomach is enflamed by my neglect. I hope for dreams of breakfast.
Sweet on wine and unexpected love, I was hungry. She fed me curry, warmed on the perfect funky kitchen stove. We spoke of puppet-dreams, tree-flavored tea, canvas in Brooklyn, and a lost set of keys. (Curry makes my nose runny.) Lemon grass and nicotine and stale human bliss... Southern memories and billows of cigarette smoke guided me home.
I didn't realize that "food" could play such an essential role in power dynamics on a personal scale.
My family moved to China when I was 8 years old. The first place we moved to was in Guangdong Province, and everyone spoke Cantonese there which I could hardly understand any. When I was in first grade of elementary school, I remembered the girl sat next to me would bully me quite a lot. I was very afraid to tell anyone because I just got here and I wanted to assimilate well into this new environment. Plus, my language barrier of not being able to speak Cantonese made it even harder to communicate with my teacher anyway. In order to please that girl and potentially stop her from bullying me so frequently, I tried to smuggle some snacks from home, and gave those to her. Of course, I had to be very sneaky about this, because I didn't want my family to know this. (Those snacks were bought from Macau or Hong Kong when we had to take connection flights there to go back to Taiwan. Also, the snacks were pretty expensive.) But, the girl didn't stop bullying me, which was not what I had expected. In fact, she became even more greedy, as she would bully me even harder and meaner if I didn't give her the exact amount or kind of snacks that she wanted.
I forgot how this all ended, but it wasn't until now that I realized this "intimate" relationship between "food" and "bullying."
My Very First Memory, Spring, 1954, Hershey, PA: I am seated in my dark green, painted, wooden highchair. I wear a bib. To my left, the window, with a view of the small, packed dirt, hill outside my grandfather's house, the hunting dogs' 2 houses & chains & dishes, & the dogs, a German short-hair pointer and an Irish setter, trees, grass. Behind me is the end of the kitchen counter & cabinets. To my right is the dining end of the kitchen, its table & chairs with wall lamp, black heat grate,the doorless opening to the hallway, and, on the wall to the left of that door, Willie's cage. Willie, the parakeet, used to fly over and have breakfast with me every morning, perching & bobbing on the edge of my bowl of sliced bananas & milk & sugar. That's a piece of another memory from that time and in the same place, but this specific, first memory is not breakfast and Willie is in his cage. Directly in front of me is my beautiful, young mother. Her dark blond hair is pulled back in a tight bun, showing off her fine features. She's wearing a white, sleeveless, cotton blouse, and a cotton print circle skirt in black & white & brown fine dot patterns, showing reindeer leaping around the hem; flat black ballet-style shoes (I can see the toe of one on her foot -- her legs are crossed) and a wide, black elastic belt w/ a gold, vertical clasp. She is smiling, holding a spoon in her right hand and trying to feed me something from the little jar that's sitting in front of me on the high chair tray. The jar's label has pastel pictures of a nursery rhyme: a fiddle, a cat, a cow jumping over the moon, a laughing dog, a dish with legs and some symbols. My mother picks up the jar, dips the tip of the spoon into the jar and lifts out some light brown paste. I know it is food. It has a good smell. My mother taps the tip of the spoon on the edge of the jar, making a clinking sound, then she raises the spoon & shows it to me & says,"Mmmmm... Meat." She puts the tip of the spoon to her lips and tastes the paste, and repeats, "Mmmm... Meat." Her voice is musical. There is a crisp pop when she says the t sound. She offers me the meat and I taste it. It is in my mouth and tastes very good, and I feel happy in my whole body and I kick my legs. My mother taps the now-empty spoon against the jar label where the pictures and symbols are. "Meat." she dips the spoon back into the jar. This ritual is repeated several times. I taste meat. I see the pictures. I hear my mother's voice. I watch her mouth make the shape of the word. The sun is shining. The dogs are barking. Something opens in my brain. The food, its taste, the sound, the symbols, emotions, all come together with meaning. A word. Meat. Language.
My father grew up in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia in the 1930s-1950s. Lean years that he never quite forgot despite the abundance later achieved. Our refrigerator was always full of 1970s foods: iceberg lettuce, parmesan cheese in a can, jars of pepperonicini, liverwurst, and cool whip in the freezer. Some of my favorite meals include: leftover spaghetti made with Lawry's seasoning salt and liberally sprinkled with the canned parmesan. Best served in a pink plastic bowl. And a before dinner treat of fried pork fat (krumblice). A simple family dessert strawberries dipped in sour cream and brown sugar. We also went through a fondue phase. Then a microwave phase. Throughout it all, my father would search the garbage after meals, pulling out and saving napkins that he deemed "barely used", scraping away scary-cheese molds to get at the "good part", finishing our plates. In the midst of our abundance he was still haunted by scarcity.
Now I'm about to become a mother and I wonder how I will balance nutrition and stories with my son, named (in part) for my father's father and my husband's father's father. Those generations of immigrants from Eastern Europe will somehow still flow through our bellies, our bones, and our hearts.
This food is breathing: all its cells alive, in this place where goats and humans and magical unknowns float along the contours of the land. We made “last year’s” soup: spawned on the eve of the new year, constantly morphing for weeks after. Pink, brown, red: seen cycles of salvaged road-killed deer, vegetables from dumpsters in town, tangy-spicy red peppercorns that pop with delight in your mouth. My first time on mushrooms I recognized chickweed in the woods, those lovely tiny leaves. Honey lavender ice cream is a very good thing, 100 piled-up crusty Krispy Kreme donuts are not. I was a vegan when I came here; the butter called to me. Months and seasons later, I see a button: “Never trust an ex-vegan.” Yeah, whatever you privileged asshole. Here I am in the co-op of beyond my wildest dreams, afraid to cook in the kitchen because it all seems too good to be true and of all the thirty-forty people who live here, why do I deserve to eat in the kitchen? Oh yeah, because I live here. I live here? I eat carrots and almonds and hunks of cheese like a tiny mouse and hope no one notices me. Time and love transpires. I enter the ranks of dumpster diving master-rats, picking locks, hiking bags full full full of produce treasures. Corporate organic food. Huh? It tastes good. I bake the same chocolate cake three days in a row, into the stomachs of transient strangers and a lover who treated me like shit until a year later, making me potatoes and eggs, eyes fixed on me like I’m the world’s biggest honeycomb and they are a bee. The happiest I’ve ever been is sitting on that porch in the sun: buzzy cells, I can taste everything around me, in the most beautiful forever.
I grew up in South Africa. One of my favourite things to eat was Marmite on buttered toast. I'd eat it for breakfast, I'd have it in the afternoon with tea, I'd make a quick snack late at night if my belly was rumbling before bed. It was something I could make. I grew up white and male, the most privileged of the privileged; I was never encouraged to learn how to cook. Marmite on toast was something I could do without burning the kitchen down.
Now I'm all grown up and living in New York City. Every morning for breakfast I have fried eggs on toast. The toast is buttered and spread with Marmite. I get the Marmite from a specialty store in Manhattan and it costs me a pretty penny. Still it's worth it. There, every morning, spread between the eggs and the toast is my childhood waiting to be tasted.
There's nothing like a ripe avocado. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you brought to work. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you brought to work and left in your backpack. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you brought to work and left in your backpack three weeks ago. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you left in your backpack three weeks ago that you have forgotten about, that has rotted and exploded and slimed all over your papers and bills and novels and pens, infusing the canvas and lining with the odor of raw bacon (yes, my vegan friends, this is what decomposition will do to your precious alligator pear), a smell that has had you wondering for days now, "Is that coming from me? Is this what they mean by the fetor of adulthood?"
The foods I remember most were cooked by or eaten with my grandmothers. When my mother’s mother, Oma, visited we would beg her to cook our favorites - usually “rainbow jello” (this was layered affair: each layer a different jello color/flavor) or any one of a number of Indonesian dishes (corn fritters, gado gado, krupuk shrimp chips, babi ketjap). She continues to send me the special spices I need to cook those foods (galangal, candle nut, kaffir lime leaf, trassi). My father’s mother, Grammy, came over most weeks for Sunday dinner. She would always have a gin and tonic before we ate. My father usually watered it down, but her dentures were usually a sitting a little more loosely in her mouth by the time we all sat down to eat. We’d often eat some kind of meat roast and vegetables (slightly overcooked to suit Grammy’s preference). In season we’d eat rhubarb pie for dessert - a New England classic. I’ve never had a better pie. It was Grammy’s recipe, but the rhubarb was grown in our yard. My grandmother’s mother died when she was young so she and her six siblings were raised mostly by housekeepers (and their eldest sister, my great aunt Mimi). The recipe came from one of the housekeepers.
When I was in the first grade, our class had a Thanksgiving celebration at which we prepared Pumpkin Bread. They passed out salmon-colored sheets of paper with a user-friendly recipe. Rather than say "4 Cups of Water," the recipe had a picture of a cup. The same went for teaspoons, tablespoons, and so forth. That Thanksgiving, I brought the bread home and shared it with my family. They loved it.
If that event had stood by itself, I probably would have forgotten it by now. In elementary school we must have done dozens of similar cooking class projects with similar easy-to-understand recipes. The reason I remember this particular project is because I brought home that salmon-colored sheet to my mother and we saved it. Now, every year, we use that same recipe to prepare two loaves of pumpkin bread - one for Thanksgiving, one for Christmas.
I am not as close with my mother as I wish I was and know I could be. As a teenager I was short with her and didn't share anything about my personal life. I viewed her as an inconvenience on my path toward independence. Despite how awfully I treated her, every year during Thanksgiving Break, I would eagerly ask her if she had purchased the ingredients for the pumpkin bread. Baking that moist, delicious bread and following that same old recipe that is now stained and wrinkled was one of the only times each year that we really shared together. I'm not nearly as closed off from my mother as I used to be, but I still look forward to baking pumpkin bread with her year round, because somehow I know that it can never get better than that.
Food is always something I associate with my mother. She took a few years off of her job as a kindergarten teacher when I was born, and I grew up with her cooking/baking every meal as a stay-at-home mom. She was born and raised in the '50s to be a housewife extraordinaire - not by fault of her own, but she grew up thinking that a woman's place was to cook for her husband. We have Betty Crocker cookbooks in our house from when she first got an apartment and started cooking for herself that have quotes like, "The way to your husband's heart is through his stomach!" and "Tips that every wife should know!"
Baking is a mother-daughter bonding activity that my mom and I have shared since I was old enough to reach the stove. We laugh and talk as we experiment with new recipes, and it wasn't until I was seventeen or eighteen years old that I realized all of the comments my mom would slip in - "When you get a husband, he'll love it if you make him this!" and "Just know to bake a lot of this for your guy." - had a deeper significance.
I love baking and cooking. For me, it's a way to share what I do and what I love with everyone around me - if I can make others smile by feeding them, I make myself smile by default. But I'll always struggle with issues of femininity and stereotypes that go along with it. Am I conforming to 1950s stereotypes by wanting to cook for a future boyfriend or husband? Am I not a feminist anymore if I don't mind being a "housewife type"? It's something that sticks with me constantly.
I was a vegetarian for three years in junior high and high school because I wanted to be just like my cousins. One day my dad and I were having dinner at my aunt's house. She had grilled a bunch of hamburgers and a couple veggie burgers for me as well. She put the veggie burgers on one platter, the hamburgers on another, and put them side by side on the dining room table. I looked from one platter to the next, turned to my dad and said, "It's not even a contest." To this day, that was the most satisfying hamburger I have ever had.
Food for me is not something I take lightly. It's not something I do without thinking, without deeply contemplating what it is I'm about to eat. Food adds to the daily cylce of my depression: always having to think before I take a bite, "Am I worth it? Why am I eating this?" Sometimes I think that if I just stopped eating, I won’t feel any of the pressure anymore. I tell myself not to eat because perhaps that will make the anxiety go away. It’s my way of establishing control over myself. I justify it by doing more: so that I won’t be a waste of air, of space, of time. When my schedule is packed so full that I cannot eat is when I feel like I have beaten my depression. It’s such a delicate balance though that it cannot last. I eat to survive which in turn makes me feel disgusting. I cannot have a normal meal with people. I feel gross when they see me eat, see me surviving when I should not be. I know that my mom and my sister would cry if I just gave up, so I cannot. Would people have been better off if I had never existed? Sometimes I think so. But now I do exist, now I must stay existing in order to not tear the fabric of all our lives apart. One life… A plate of food... A gift or a curse, I cannot tell. ~Hannah Trostle
When I set a table I think of my mother. Every time. When I place the knives and forks and have a little stumble about where the spoon goes, how and why some people put it above the plate, I think about her. She grew up one of 10 children in a poor rural family. There were no table settings. I can't ask her now, but I hope there were enough bowls or plates, and enough utensils. It was the Great Depression, who knows. My mother always served herself food last, and always had the least, which I think she learned from her own mother who tried to make meals for 10 children. When I place a knife next to a plate I feel my mother learning from a book when she was a young adult, determined to be proper. To erase in the placement of a knife on a smoothe cloth the violence of poverty, the terror of her brother stealing from her bowl, the suppressed howls in bed hungry with hungry sisters.
ReplyDeleteMy father was Jewish, but aside from attending my cousin's bar and batmitzvas I grew up with no practice, and little knowledge of this heritage. My first real interaction with Judaism is tied so strongly to food.
ReplyDeleteMy pre-school made a Sukkot- a structure made out of willow branches and fall harvest vegetables which in the Jewish tradition harbors the sacred space of the harvest table. We all brought squash, apples, corn and chilies from our school and home gardens to decorate the structure.
Although it was far from the structured practice of this custom, I still remember feeling connected to a beautiful tradition of honoring a time of plenty. There was also something so magical about a house made of food.
My senior year of high school, I was assigned to sit next to the most popular girl in school in our concert choir. Girls wanted to be her and heteronormative guys just plain wanted her; when Anna said "Jump!" you didn't ask "How high?" because you were already six inches off the ground. And every day when Anna looked in her lunch bag and declared "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels!" ... I listened. From Anna and boys at my school and silly little comments, I became hyper-conscious of my weight. Eating ice cream was an embarrassment and skipping lunch was a triumph. My emotions throughout the day were governed by how many calories I consumed and whether or not I weighed a little less than the day before when I got home from school and stepped on the scale. When starving myself all day eventually turned into gorging myself at night, I started trying to make myself throw up, first by gagging myself with my fingers, my toothbrush, whatever I could find, and then (when I discovered I had no gag reflex) by chugging bitter coffee or salt water.
ReplyDeleteI don't have an extremely healthy relationship with food today, but I am slowly learning to appreciate and accept my body as it is. Within my imperfections, I am perfect.
Growing up poor, having candy in the house was rare, a true luxury. When I was six, I found a bag of candy my mother had purchased for an upcoming birthday party. I took the bag and ate it all. I got sick. That's what I get for stealing and over indulging! Lesson learned the hard way.
ReplyDeleteI was a sophomore in high school and teetering on the brink of anorexia. I was trying to eat under 1000, then under 800, calories a day. One day in the kitchen I made myself a round of iceberg lettuce with a blob of cottage cheese on it and some tiny bit of cheese that would melt. There it sat, in the middle of the cookie sheet and I was going to broil it a little. My father was sitting at the kitchen table watching me. He said, gently but firmly, "I think this has gone far enough." Somehow, that remark meant everything. Everything.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was very small, my mother prepared food for me in a heated bowl: engineered that way, it had a double layer within that could be filled with hot water to keep the food hot. I was born in a country deeply identified with its food culture---every country is, of course, but I mean food is our international identity, our most visible export, our signature. I learned at an early age to love beef tartar, and was slapped across the face when I did not take to veal. When we traveled to India, all I could bear to eat was fish and chips, cashews, and chai. Sustenance of the empire. Later my parents opened a restaurant---and my adolescence was structured around preparing food, selling it, Being It. The production of edible pleasure is not a theme or a topic or a memory: it is the backdrop against which all else transpires. That pleasure and sustenance would be synonymous, is not a question to be debated. But later, in adulthood, which is to say solitude, I found I did not *know* hunger: when apart from others, whether friends, family, lovers, or foes (or all), I forgot to know how/when I was hungry. I got slimmer---but then one evening, I felt certain without any preconception that what I wanted or needed was simply, onion soup. I had never made it myself, and it is technically of another culture, but none of this mattered. Without a recipe, I simply set about chopping onions...to find hunger again.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Michael grew up in Texas, in an economy based almost entirely on beef production. As a child, Michael was repulsed by beef jerky. He felt toward it the way he felt toward peanut butter---that it was un-hygenic, and wrong. The nuns at his school slapped him for refusing peanut butter, and as an adolescent, he felt isolated by his refusal of homemade beef jerky. He has now---some 20 years later--just returned from a trip to Napa, from where he has brought: beef jerky, wrapped in white paper, with the trademark, "The Fatted Calf. " We are now sitting in our shared kitchen, ripping it up in our teeth (with no small effort), and the salty flavor quickly recalls imagined mythologies of The West. We do not fight for water, here, though; tonight, instead, we tug at the tough meat and recall the nobility of our refusals in childhood, the price paid, and erupt into belly laughs as we cherish the meat. "It's all in the packaging," he says.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI lie in bed and run my fingers over my ribcage. The bones are prominent, and they cage pulsating lungs. I took a study pill this morning, and sat in a cafe. I replaced breakfast and lunch with a half-pack of smokes, and waded through my homework. Twitchy, blissful, I found my way into a conversation about Foucault with a nearby caffeinated buzz-bot, greasy kid. He was holding his coffee in one hand, and he had on these crazy leopard shades. When I eventually left the cafe, my stomach was in its happy little knot, and was not ready to embark on the first meal of a day nearly through. I had a turkey sandwich, and it didn't taste great. It made me want a cigarette. Now, my body draws in, and my stomach is enflamed by my neglect. I hope for dreams of breakfast.
ReplyDeleteSweet on wine and unexpected love, I was hungry. She fed me curry, warmed on the perfect funky kitchen stove. We spoke of puppet-dreams, tree-flavored tea, canvas in Brooklyn, and a lost set of keys. (Curry makes my nose runny.) Lemon grass and nicotine and stale human bliss... Southern memories and billows of cigarette smoke guided me home.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize that "food" could play such an essential role in power dynamics on a personal scale.
ReplyDeleteMy family moved to China when I was 8 years old. The first place we moved to was in Guangdong Province, and everyone spoke Cantonese there which I could hardly understand any. When I was in first grade of elementary school, I remembered the girl sat next to me would bully me quite a lot. I was very afraid to tell anyone because I just got here and I wanted to assimilate well into this new environment. Plus, my language barrier of not being able to speak Cantonese made it even harder to communicate with my teacher anyway. In order to please that girl and potentially stop her from bullying me so frequently, I tried to smuggle some snacks from home, and gave those to her. Of course, I had to be very sneaky about this, because I didn't want my family to know this. (Those snacks were bought from Macau or Hong Kong when we had to take connection flights there to go back to Taiwan. Also, the snacks were pretty expensive.) But, the girl didn't stop bullying me, which was not what I had expected. In fact, she became even more greedy, as she would bully me even harder and meaner if I didn't give her the exact amount or kind of snacks that she wanted.
I forgot how this all ended, but it wasn't until now that I realized this "intimate" relationship between "food" and "bullying."
My Very First Memory, Spring, 1954, Hershey, PA: I am seated in my dark green, painted, wooden highchair. I wear a bib. To my left, the window, with a view of the small, packed dirt, hill outside my grandfather's house, the hunting dogs' 2 houses & chains & dishes, & the dogs, a German short-hair pointer and an Irish setter, trees, grass. Behind me is the end of the kitchen counter & cabinets. To my right is the dining end of the kitchen, its table & chairs with wall lamp, black heat grate,the doorless opening to the hallway, and, on the wall to the left of that door, Willie's cage. Willie, the parakeet, used to fly over and have breakfast with me every morning, perching & bobbing on the edge of my bowl of sliced bananas & milk & sugar. That's a piece of another memory from that time and in the same place, but this specific, first memory is not breakfast and Willie is in his cage. Directly in front of me is my beautiful, young mother. Her dark blond hair is pulled back in a tight bun, showing off her fine features. She's wearing a white, sleeveless, cotton blouse, and a cotton print circle skirt in black & white & brown fine dot patterns, showing reindeer leaping around the hem; flat black ballet-style shoes (I can see the toe of one on her foot -- her legs are crossed) and a wide, black elastic belt w/ a gold, vertical clasp. She is smiling, holding a spoon in her right hand and trying to feed me something from the little jar that's sitting in front of me on the high chair tray. The jar's label has pastel pictures of a nursery rhyme: a fiddle, a cat, a cow jumping over the moon, a laughing dog, a dish with legs and some symbols. My mother picks up the jar, dips the tip of the spoon into the jar and lifts out some light brown paste. I know it is food. It has a good smell. My mother taps the tip of the spoon on the edge of the jar, making a clinking sound, then she raises the spoon & shows it to me & says,"Mmmmm... Meat." She puts the tip of the spoon to her lips and tastes the paste, and repeats, "Mmmm... Meat." Her voice is musical. There is a crisp pop when she says the t sound. She offers me the meat and I taste it. It is in my mouth and tastes very good, and I feel happy in my whole body and I kick my legs. My mother taps the now-empty spoon against the jar label where the pictures and symbols are. "Meat." she dips the spoon back into the jar. This ritual is repeated several times. I taste meat. I see the pictures. I hear my mother's voice. I watch her mouth make the shape of the word. The sun is shining. The dogs are barking. Something opens in my brain. The food, its taste, the sound, the symbols, emotions, all come together with meaning. A word. Meat. Language.
ReplyDeleteMy father grew up in Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia in the 1930s-1950s. Lean years that he never quite forgot despite the abundance later achieved. Our refrigerator was always full of 1970s foods: iceberg lettuce, parmesan cheese in a can, jars of pepperonicini, liverwurst, and cool whip in the freezer. Some of my favorite meals include: leftover spaghetti made with Lawry's seasoning salt and liberally sprinkled with the canned parmesan. Best served in a pink plastic bowl. And a before dinner treat of fried pork fat (krumblice). A simple family dessert strawberries dipped in sour cream and brown sugar. We also went through a fondue phase. Then a microwave phase. Throughout it all, my father would search the garbage after meals, pulling out and saving napkins that he deemed "barely used", scraping away scary-cheese molds to get at the "good part", finishing our plates. In the midst of our abundance he was still haunted by scarcity.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm about to become a mother and I wonder how I will balance nutrition and stories with my son, named (in part) for my father's father and my husband's father's father. Those generations of immigrants from Eastern Europe will somehow still flow through our bellies, our bones, and our hearts.
This food is breathing: all its cells alive, in this place where goats and humans and magical unknowns float along the contours of the land. We made “last year’s” soup: spawned on the eve of the new year, constantly morphing for weeks after. Pink, brown, red: seen cycles of salvaged road-killed deer, vegetables from dumpsters in town, tangy-spicy red peppercorns that pop with delight in your mouth. My first time on mushrooms I recognized chickweed in the woods, those lovely tiny leaves. Honey lavender ice cream is a very good thing, 100 piled-up crusty Krispy Kreme donuts are not. I was a vegan when I came here; the butter called to me. Months and seasons later, I see a button: “Never trust an ex-vegan.” Yeah, whatever you privileged asshole. Here I am in the co-op of beyond my wildest dreams, afraid to cook in the kitchen because it all seems too good to be true and of all the thirty-forty people who live here, why do I deserve to eat in the kitchen? Oh yeah, because I live here. I live here? I eat carrots and almonds and hunks of cheese like a tiny mouse and hope no one notices me. Time and love transpires. I enter the ranks of dumpster diving master-rats, picking locks, hiking bags full full full of produce treasures. Corporate organic food. Huh? It tastes good. I bake the same chocolate cake three days in a row, into the stomachs of transient strangers and a lover who treated me like shit until a year later, making me potatoes and eggs, eyes fixed on me like I’m the world’s biggest honeycomb and they are a bee. The happiest I’ve ever been is sitting on that porch in the sun: buzzy cells, I can taste everything around me, in the most beautiful forever.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in South Africa. One of my favourite things to eat was Marmite on buttered toast. I'd eat it for breakfast, I'd have it in the afternoon with tea, I'd make a quick snack late at night if my belly was rumbling before bed. It was something I could make. I grew up white and male, the most privileged of the privileged; I was never encouraged to learn how to cook. Marmite on toast was something I could do without burning the kitchen down.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm all grown up and living in New York City. Every morning for breakfast I have fried eggs on toast. The toast is buttered and spread with Marmite. I get the Marmite from a specialty store in Manhattan and it costs me a pretty penny. Still it's worth it. There, every morning, spread between the eggs and the toast is my childhood waiting to be tasted.
There's nothing like a ripe avocado. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you brought to work. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you brought to work and left in your backpack. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you brought to work and left in your backpack three weeks ago. Except for maybe a ripe avocado that you left in your backpack three weeks ago that you have forgotten about, that has rotted and exploded and slimed all over your papers and bills and novels and pens, infusing the canvas and lining with the odor of raw bacon (yes, my vegan friends, this is what decomposition will do to your precious alligator pear), a smell that has had you wondering for days now, "Is that coming from me? Is this what they mean by the fetor of adulthood?"
ReplyDeleteThe foods I remember most were cooked by or eaten with my grandmothers. When my mother’s mother, Oma, visited we would beg her to cook our favorites - usually “rainbow jello” (this was layered affair: each layer a different jello color/flavor) or any one of a number of Indonesian dishes (corn fritters, gado gado, krupuk shrimp chips, babi ketjap). She continues to send me the special spices I need to cook those foods (galangal, candle nut, kaffir lime leaf, trassi).
ReplyDeleteMy father’s mother, Grammy, came over most weeks for Sunday dinner. She would always have a gin and tonic before we ate. My father usually watered it down, but her dentures were usually a sitting a little more loosely in her mouth by the time we all sat down to eat. We’d often eat some kind of meat roast and vegetables (slightly overcooked to suit Grammy’s preference). In season we’d eat rhubarb pie for dessert - a New England classic. I’ve never had a better pie. It was Grammy’s recipe, but the rhubarb was grown in our yard. My grandmother’s mother died when she was young so she and her six siblings were raised mostly by housekeepers (and their eldest sister, my great aunt Mimi). The recipe came from one of the housekeepers.
When I was in the first grade, our class had a Thanksgiving celebration at which we prepared Pumpkin Bread. They passed out salmon-colored sheets of paper with a user-friendly recipe. Rather than say "4 Cups of Water," the recipe had a picture of a cup. The same went for teaspoons, tablespoons, and so forth. That Thanksgiving, I brought the bread home and shared it with my family. They loved it.
ReplyDeleteIf that event had stood by itself, I probably would have forgotten it by now. In elementary school we must have done dozens of similar cooking class projects with similar easy-to-understand recipes. The reason I remember this particular project is because I brought home that salmon-colored sheet to my mother and we saved it. Now, every year, we use that same recipe to prepare two loaves of pumpkin bread - one for Thanksgiving, one for Christmas.
I am not as close with my mother as I wish I was and know I could be. As a teenager I was short with her and didn't share anything about my personal life. I viewed her as an inconvenience on my path toward independence. Despite how awfully I treated her, every year during Thanksgiving Break, I would eagerly ask her if she had purchased the ingredients for the pumpkin bread. Baking that moist, delicious bread and following that same old recipe that is now stained and wrinkled was one of the only times each year that we really shared together. I'm not nearly as closed off from my mother as I used to be, but I still look forward to baking pumpkin bread with her year round, because somehow I know that it can never get better than that.
Food is always something I associate with my mother. She took a few years off of her job as a kindergarten teacher when I was born, and I grew up with her cooking/baking every meal as a stay-at-home mom. She was born and raised in the '50s to be a housewife extraordinaire - not by fault of her own, but she grew up thinking that a woman's place was to cook for her husband. We have Betty Crocker cookbooks in our house from when she first got an apartment and started cooking for herself that have quotes like, "The way to your husband's heart is through his stomach!" and "Tips that every wife should know!"
ReplyDeleteBaking is a mother-daughter bonding activity that my mom and I have shared since I was old enough to reach the stove. We laugh and talk as we experiment with new recipes, and it wasn't until I was seventeen or eighteen years old that I realized all of the comments my mom would slip in - "When you get a husband, he'll love it if you make him this!" and "Just know to bake a lot of this for your guy." - had a deeper significance.
I love baking and cooking. For me, it's a way to share what I do and what I love with everyone around me - if I can make others smile by feeding them, I make myself smile by default. But I'll always struggle with issues of femininity and stereotypes that go along with it. Am I conforming to 1950s stereotypes by wanting to cook for a future boyfriend or husband? Am I not a feminist anymore if I don't mind being a "housewife type"? It's something that sticks with me constantly.
Saw this chalk drawing in NYC this weekend, and it reminded me a little bit of your post:
Deletehttp://instagram.com/p/QI0zSCvdTW/
This photo of the drawing didn't capture the caption which reads: "I'm patriotic as can be/And ration points won't worry me"
I was a vegetarian for three years in junior high and high school because I wanted to be just like my cousins. One day my dad and I were having dinner at my aunt's house. She had grilled a bunch of hamburgers and a couple veggie burgers for me as well. She put the veggie burgers on one platter, the hamburgers on another, and put them side by side on the dining room table. I looked from one platter to the next, turned to my dad and said, "It's not even a contest." To this day, that was the most satisfying hamburger I have ever had.
ReplyDeleteFood for me is not something I take lightly. It's not something I do without thinking, without deeply contemplating what it is I'm about to eat. Food adds to the daily cylce of my depression: always having to think before I take a bite, "Am I worth it? Why am I eating this?" Sometimes I think that if I just stopped eating, I won’t feel any of the pressure anymore. I tell myself not to eat because perhaps that will make the anxiety go away. It’s my way of establishing control over myself. I justify it by doing more: so that I won’t be a waste of air, of space, of time. When my schedule is packed so full that I cannot eat is when I feel like I have beaten my depression. It’s such a delicate balance though that it cannot last. I eat to survive which in turn makes me feel disgusting. I cannot have a normal meal with people. I feel gross when they see me eat, see me surviving when I should not be. I know that my mom and my sister would cry if I just gave up, so I cannot. Would people have been better off if I had never existed? Sometimes I think so. But now I do exist, now I must stay existing in order to not tear the fabric of all our lives apart. One life… A plate of food... A gift or a curse, I cannot tell. ~Hannah Trostle
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