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Family FoodJune 16, 2010 This began as the lead-in to "Staff of Life," about my penchant for bread baking. My writers' group suggested that I separate the food part out from the bread part. Good idea. "Family Food" grew, and it pulled in two of my 1980s poems. "A Kitchen of My Own" is part of the six-sonnet "Winter Rental" series. "Sunday Dinner" stands alone and is quoted in its entirety. This is (you guessed it already) part of To Be Rather Than to Seem, my memoir in progress. Say you grew up with "New England WASP cooking" and people roll their eyes in sympathy. "New England WASP cooking" means meat, potatoes, and boiled-to-death vegetables. Sure, it also means maple syrup, cider, and cranberry sauce, but everyone knows you can't live on those. I'm suspicious of stereotypes, and averse to unfair ones, but this one's got too much truth in it. British cookery has long been similarly scorned, and for similar reasons. Fifteen months spent in mid-1970s Britain yielded few culinary surprises for one who'd grown up on classic New England fare. At suppertime nearly all the youth hostels I stayed in while traveling reeked of boiling Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts weren't the only green vegetable I ever saw in the United Kingdom, but offhand I can't remember what green vegetable I saw second most often. New England cooking was meant to keep the body going, especially in cold weather. Pleasing palate, eye, or nose wasn't a high priority. Neither was laborious preparation or exacting technique. The years have added a few frills and flourishes, but that's still my basic approach to food. If it tastes good, I don't mind eating it three or four times a week. My mother wasn't much of a cook. Neither were either of my grandmothers, and my father's culinary expertise extended no further than pancakes, waffles, and supervising the grill at family cookouts. Most dinners were divided in three parts: meat occupied one third of the plate, something white another third, and something green completed the meal. Hamburger Helper was the closest we got to a casserole, TV dinners were a treat, and boil-in-bag vegetables were OK as long as I didn't have to eat too much of them. So there are no handed-down recipes in my kitchen repertoire, and when anything is advertised as "just like grandmother used to make," my immediate thought is "I sure hope not!" Grandmummie did make fine fudge from scratch, but I don't associate any specialties with Grandma, even though I inherited her copies of Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer. The bite-size cheese cookies my siblings and I all adored were from Grandmummie's recipe, but when Grandmummie made them, they came out dry and wizened. When Jessie, who cooked for Grandma and sometimes helped out at our house, made them, they were plump, moist, and altogether superior. My mother's culinary claim to fame was spoon bread, a southern corn meal soufflé that we often requested for our birthday dinners. The recipe is tucked in my Joy of Cooking, but I've never made it: it feeds six, doesn't keep well, and is side dish rather than entrée, all of which make it less than ideal if you're cooking mainly for yourself. I've been making fun of my family's cooking and eating habits for several decades now. It wasn't till I got out in the world that I understood that the most remarkable thing about the food I grew up with was that there was always enough of it. Meals appeared pretty much on schedule. As we kids got older and took up various after-school pursuits, they appeared on two or three or four schedules. The younger kids would eat supper together at the table in our small kitchen. Sometimes I ate with them. The portable black-and-white TV sat on the dryer, just behind where brother Roger sat. Supper began toward the end of Gilligan's Island, continued through F Troop, and wasn't officially over till the final credits rolled on Hogan's Heroes. Before I had my license or when I couldn't borrow my mother's station wagon, my father sometimes picked me up at the barn on his way home from work. Then he and I would eat later , in the dining room. My mother didn't eat with any of us. She usually ate between shifts at the kitchen counter, the telephone at her left elbow, Huntley-Brinkley, Reasoner, or Cronkite for her dinner companions. In the mid-1980s, I wrote "A Kitchen of My Own," a sonnet that begins:
Of course it's about my mother. She's sitting on the yellow metal stool, the one whose two flip-out steps let it double as a step ladder, huddled over either a supper plate or a drink, usually gin and tonic, sometimes scotch and water. By the age of twelve or so I wanted no part of Mrs. Sisyphus's labors, ever. In other circumstances, I might have had little choice in the matter. When Mommy is alcoholic, dysfunctional, or otherwise absent, or when she works full-time and there are several children and a daddy to feed, it's often the eldest daughter who picks up the slack. If there was slack to be picked up, I managed to not-see it: by the time I got home from the barn, the younger kids had usually eaten and my supper was on the warming tray or in the oven. Mummie didn't slip over the line from drinking to drunk until everyone was fed. When drink loosened her tongue, though, we got a taste of her feelings on the matter. You couldn't say 'thank you' once in a while, could you. Oh no, not you: you're Just Like Your Father. And the culminating mantra, engraved in memory by ten thousand repetitions: What do you ever do to help? No matter how often Dad and I protested that we could get our own supper, supper was there when we got home. Nothing to be done but eat it, and clean up after ourselves. Unlike Mrs. Sisyphus, my mother didn't prepare "gourmet fare," and I didn't develop a taste for sloppy joes till later, when I got over my dislike of tomatoes. Gourmet I wasn't, but picky I was. Not only did I disdain tomatoes, I wouldn't eat fish of any kind. I turned up my nose at reconstituted potato flakes, but this may have had less to do with taste or authenticity than with hearing my father express a preference for real mashed potatoes. If my father liked something, that predisposed me to like it too -- my father's preference for tea over coffee set me on the road to being a lifelong tea drinker -- but there were significant exceptions. My favorite ice cream was never strawberry, and my father's passion for fish and shellfish was nowhere near enough to overcome my revulsion for anything that smelled fishy, a visceral disgust that memory dates to a sixth-grade field trip to a Gloucester fish-stick factory. My kitchen repertoire was likewise limited. I learned to make hamburgers, hot dogs, and grilled cheese sandwiches. I could boil water for spaghetti and macaroni, pull the pot off the burner, and strain the pasta before it got mushy. I could heat frozen vegetables and add water to and stir anything that came in a box. I even made banana nut bread by following the recipe in Joy of Cooking; this was one of the few baked goods that my mother ever made from scratch. Before I left home, I didn't learn much about how the rest of the world ate. In high school, my Jewish classmates did introduce me to bagels. Bagels were a wonder. Bagels slathered with cream cheese, I thought, might be the secret to solving the Arab-Israeli crisis, in which I maintained a keen interest. College greatly expanded my gastronomic horizons: I discovered such wonders as Spam, Velveeta, and Franco-American macaroni and cheese in a can. What else had my mother been holding out on us? During my Georgetown University years in D.C., after long meetings or bull sessions several of us might link arms and skip up 35th Street, singing antiwar songs or "We're off to see the Wizard," heading for the all-night bakery on Wisconsin Avenue. Around 1:30 a.m. fresh doughnuts in several varieties were borne out from the kitchen on big trays, to a salivating crowd that could include students, professors, parents with young kids, and anyone with a compelling case of grass-induced munchies. The honey-glazed doughnuts were ambrosia, and the late-late-night social scene made them taste even better. After transferring a couple of years later to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I snacked and sometimes breakfasted or lunched on hot pretzels from the pretzel vendors' carts: mustard took on new significance. As a kid I devoured unadorned hot dogs and hamburgers. I didn't care for ketchup or anything else with tomatoes in it, and didn't see the point of relish or mustard. I still don't like ketchup. Salsa, barbecue sauce, and mustard, however, have long been staples in my refrigerator. My sister, Ellen, and I are eight years apart in age, but our coming-home experiences were similar after we went off to college: we'd volunteer to fix supper, nothing fancy -- omelets or stir-fry -- then have to make a run to the Star Market in Auburndale when we discovered that there were no onions or garlic or fresh vegetables in the house. My mother made do quite nicely with onion flakes, garlic salt, and frozen veggies. She did have a taste for hot and spicy food that the rest of us didn't share, so she usually kept a bottle of hot sauce on hand. This affinity I attributed to her birth in Mexico City and her upbringing in Spain and other European countries. My own taste for food just this side of fiery developed gradually, and only after I outgrew my determination to have nothing in common with my mother. Sundays, holidays, birthdays, and other special occasions we'd eat together in the dining room. Each of us had our place at the oval dinner table: Dad at the head, with his back to the kitchen; Mummie at the foot, with her back to the chimney (the fireplace was on the other side, in the living room); Ellen and me with our backs to the plate glass window and sliding door that separated dining room from screened-in porch; John and Roger opposite, with their backs to the sideboard where the rarely used silver service items were displayed. Once out in the world, when we returned for a special occasion, we all invariably gravitated to the exact same places. When Grandmummie, any of the uncles, or any other guests joined us, one leaf or two could be added to the table, but this meant very tight quarters because the room was small; the tall, skinny table behind Dad where current magazines were spread out had to be moved into the hall. Here we learned basic table manners. Hands had to be washed before we came to the table. No one sat till Mummie (or Grandmummie, if she was present) was seated; we passed plates and waited till everyone was served, whereupon Dad said grace and none of us lifted a fork till Mummie had taken her first bite. "Please" and "thank you" were expected, cloth napkins were used (we each had our own engraved silver napkin ring), and if anyone rested an elbow on the table, my mother would say, "Coude," the French word for the errant body part, to remind us that one's elbows belonged at one's sides. My father carved the meat -- usually roast beef or roast chicken -- and my mother served the green stuff and the white stuff. Here we also caught up with each other's weeks, and talked about current events. No topic was taboo, but my father and I regularly dominated the political discussions, mainly because the others couldn't keep up or didn't especially want to. We were a quick-witted and good-humored bunch, and we laughed a lot. But the family dinner table could turn dark and dangerous with little warning. It often did. When terrorism was much in the news in the mid-1980s, I wrote "Sunday Dinner" about it.
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