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Essay of the Month: ‘On My Brother’s Palate,’ by Maikie Paje

Roly-poly, one tooth missing, and all shiny with sweat, pudgy little hands buried in bread dough on Gran’s dining room chair—you’re happy, all of five years old. It’s my favorite snapshot of you in my memory.

Those early days are all flashes and snapshots. Soaking up the essence of anise and molasses and dried squid in your skin, you thrived in that quaint black-and-white kitchen. You watched the fruitcakes baking all October and November, nose scrunched from too much sherry wine and sugar in the air. You crunched on mounds of crisp chicken skin and steamed baby prawns with bowls of white rice. The last Oreo, you stole off my post-homework snack plate.

I was over twice your age at the time, so, of course, I had to let you.

At seven, you hit a short noodle phase. You ate too-sweet spaghetti, dug out the hot dog slices first, then sopped up the sauce with the pasta. You smiled with big carbonara noodle moustaches on purpose. You spooned Sadiq’s corn and carrots over everything squiggly as often as you could. When you discovered instant yakisoba, you fell into a new obsession. I’d never before met anyone who considered the merits of rich beef versus spicy chicken so seriously. Or ate so many “testing” cups every week.

I’m not quite sure who you bribed to get your first stick of street-side barbecue, but that first bite turned you into the incinerator, the food disposal unit, the bottomless, gaping pit. Mom’s half-eaten roast chicken breast with the overflowing gravy boat on the side, the last four bites of my pumpkin ravioli at Puccini’s, maybe a third of Dad’s porterhouse steak—it all disappeared into your gut. Uni and unagi? Yes, please. Balut and laing? Of course! Escargot and frog legs? They slid down your throat before I could blink. You traded a slice of your braised pork loin for a bit of mom’s parchment salmon and a slice of my rainbow quiche in one go. You cajoled us all into ordering different entrées, explicitly to swipe forkfuls of everything. Except the steamed veggies. I’m sure you thought I was insane when I hit my salad phase. Was it you or me who called it rabbit food? It certainly threw a wrench in your dining room barter system.

You were twelve the night I found you searing sea bass in Mom’s new copper-toned kitchen. You said that you needed help with photo documentation for Home Ec and that we had to eat on the good china in the formal dining room. Normally, I hate sea bass, but what you made melted on my tongue. Through your teens, you turned hobby-cooking into an art. First appeared the seafood risotto, all creamy rice with sweet-soft scallop and shrimp in fine-diced little pieces. You did it because you were hungry and stressed, you said, but I didn’t even know what saffron looked like until that afternoon. One night I stumbled home late after a long afternoon at the gym, and Jane told me dinner would be ready at ten. You were making ramen that took six hours to cook, broth included, from scratch. And your truffled mac n’ cheese, that sharp gruyere, Parmigiano-Reggiano shavings, mozzarella, and a sprinkling of pecorino? I asked you for the recipe and you said to Google Giada de Laurentiis. Hers doesn’t taste the same.

You began waxing eloquent about food notes, flavor profiles, and the difference between smokiness and gaminess in meat. One sip and you determined if it was marsala wine or port in the sauce. One whiff and you could tell if the salmon had been cooked in a deglazed pan. One touch and you knew if the foie gras had been left out a bit too long before it was fried. No one believes me when I say, “Migs has never gone to cooking school.”

That all changed, the year of your first prom. Your cheeks hollowed out, your pants slipped off your waist, and you gave ‘dietary restrictions’ an entirely new meaning. You thought you were too fat, so you started eating rabbit food. You stopped cooking. The kitchen, the heart of the home, became a cold, perfunctory place. Visiting friends and family alike swore you’d turned into a skeleton. As for the rest of us in the house? I subsisted on protein shakes and lukewarm café sandwiches, while Mom did what she could with Eating Well recipes. Red cabbage salads, plain grilled chicken, okra in faux jambalaya—running on 1,200 calories a day was insane. Dad was only fine because, well, Dad eats anything (and he probably ate what he wanted at work). The whole house sighed a collective breath of relief when you put the suit and tie away and returned to the stove. For the next prom, you remembered moderation instead.

I learned one thing that year: I absolutely despise okra in every way, shape, and form.

I learned a lot about food from you. It’s best to dig into crab with your hands in Singapore, to suck off the chili juices from your fingers at the table. No steak tastes better than when it is served medium rare. Brussel sprouts taste best with bacon. EVOO is just olive oil, extra virgin. Slurping soup isn’t bad, as long as you do it in a Chinese restaurant, never in a French one. You must hit up every Michelin-starred and Michelin-recommended restaurant in every city you visit.

The world is your oyster, quite literally, I think. Kangaroo stew, spiced a la boeuf bourguignon in London. Fresh xiao long bao after a midnight flight to Hong Kong. A feast of wursts in a Berlin train station. Trdelník sugar highs in Prague. That unpronounceable seafood spread in that Yucatan restaurant in Cancun. Seven courses of fugu in Tokyo—does the danger of the poison make the fish sweeter? Tom-yum in a roll from that experimental place, Gaggan, in Bangkok. Real Roman pizza, one whole pie per person—you pulled me into hamster-cheeking alongside you. Can you ever forget the fresh sambal from Made’s wife—or was the babi guling your best meal in Bali? I can’t remember the name of that vegetable soup in Florence. Can you?

There was a five-foot-nine hole missing in my life when I moved to Vancouver. I heard you whispering in my ear that the mjadra at Nuba was too cold, but the salmon in that city was the freshest you’d ever had. That you-toned voice in my head prompted food lists of each city quarter, including pulled noodles, baby back ribs, poutine, and Nero’s Belgian waffles. You never got to visit me there, but the list is in my old notebook whenever you want it.

I’m now in Manhattan, full of tiny bodegas with goat meat burritos and speakeasies with five dollar-signs on Yelp. We’ve been continents away for years, so I’ve learned to cook for myself. Our Viber and Facebook chats are full of shared food pics.

You’ve come a long way from the giggly boy with snow-milk and cereal on his chin, but you’ll always be my favorite chef. You’re 21 this year, so I’m raising a bottle of Stella Artois for you.

Maikie Paje is currently earning her MFA in Fiction at the New School. She is a former English teacher and her work has been published in the Philippine Star, Home Lifestyle and Interiors, and BLush Anthology.

Featured Image via Pixabay.

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Essay of the Month: ‘Yield,’ by Rachel Knox

Just before I was married, my aunt Melanie gave me a pink three-ring plastic binder filled with the culinary history of my family. It’s essentially a cookbook, filled with recipes from the women on my mom and dad’s sides, and a few from my newly acquired family. Some of the recipes are typed; some are scanned copies of handwritten instructions; some are pages of other cookbooks with notes scribbled around the margins- temperatures crossed out, proportions adjusted. There are a few photos of the finished products on card tables and Christmas buffets. The recipes are attributed, at the bottom, to the family member who created or appropriated them in a little yellow box. Underneath the attributions are field notes: acknowledgments, serving suggestions, words of encouragement, family secrets and folklore.

I tend to read cookbooks with as much an editor’s or historian’s eye as I do a cook’s. Recipes shape-shift and rearrange themselves as they are passed from person to person, becoming something new while still attached to something old. My own writing process has always mimicked my style of cooking: a panicked session of hard-eyed study of a text. Reading, rereading, re-re-reading, researching techniques, ingredients, burying myself in the history of a reference until a plan emerges and inspiration finally rises up from my gut to my hands.

I try to make focaccia for the first time, but it’s too humid in my apartment and it doesn’t rise. The crust bakes a beautiful, golden brown like hay, but it’s hard as a brick and almost chips my tooth. Grudgingly, I make a giant pot of brothy stew so it won’t go to waste. My husband happily chews and swipes the bread through his stew, chattering lovingly, grateful just to be fed, but I know the difference and I sulk.

My own writing process has always mimicked my style of cooking.

The next day, my downstairs neighbor knocks on my door as I am writing a really heartbreaking story that makes me sweat and feel slightly feverish. He is a brewer who brews his own beer in the basement of our building and holds big, festive cookouts in the summer, grilling up Pat LaFreida steaks and corn and baked potatoes. I am up to my elbows in words when he knocks and not just a little annoyed to be interrupted. I open the door and he is holding a loaf of bread. “I had a bunch of spent grain, so I made some sourdough, and way too much of it.” He hands me the loaf, still warm. “How did your focaccia turn out?”

I mutter something about the humidity and yeast. He offers me some of his sourdough starter. “I’ve had it for a few years now. You just have to feed it every few months, but it’s pretty reliable.” I accept his offer and thank him. He’s a really nice guy. I close the door behind him, sit down, and write four more pages in a frenzy, tearing off hunks of warm, tangy bread and devouring them. I eat the whole loaf. It is maddening and perfect.

Only one of my maternal grandmother’s recipes exists in the cookbook. She did not write recipes down. She was the first of ten children, tobacco sharecroppers in Colquitt County,Georgia. Her mother, Leola, worked alongside her husband, planting and reaping whenever she was not pregnant with more free laborers. As the eldest child and her surrogate, my grandmother was responsible for waking up before everyone else and making the huge breakfast that sustained her family’s laboring. Everyone else rose hours later, after the biscuits had been kneaded and baked, the hardtack laid out and the black coffee percolated. She made them pots of greens laced with fatty ham hocks and skillet cornbread. She made all of these things from memory, from improvisation in fallow years, from what her mother or aunts showed her when she was old enough to understand and be taught. Some years later, one of her grandchildren pleaded that she write down her recipe for apple pie. When I try to follow the recipe, I’m bewildered. There are no cook times, only “until bubbling and browned,” no specifics on the thickness of apple slices – the implication being that you should know. This is knowledge we women possess.

This is knowledge we women possess.

After college, my mother had dreamed of becoming a journalist. However, my father’s infidelities became incontrovertible and at 23 years old she found herself heartbroken, divorced while pregnant, with a daughter to raise alone. Her life, as my grandmother’s, would be spent caring for others instead of writing about them. Like my grandmother, she did not complain about providing (or if she did it never reached our ears). She became an English teacher. She worked and fed and taught. I wonder what she could have written if she hadn’t devoted herself to the shaping of young minds, applying heat and fermenting ideas and allowing them to bubble up, golden.

It is impossible for me, when writing, not to consider these women and the things they wrote down and the things they did not write down. I think about a note added to a pound cake by a cousin of my other grandmother’s from Detroit in the ‘40s, the daughter of a marine merchant: “After the cake is in the oven, leave in for 45 minutes and walk softly upon the kitchen floor.” I think about my neighbor and his stupid perfect loaf of bread. I get annoyed and then I get to work. I am much older than I thought I would be when finally able to devote myself to writing. I am not as good as a lot of others much younger and better educated than me. I am not making airy pound cakes or fluffy focaccia. I’m making the dense, short biscuits my grandmother made. I am using all of the butter that is called for and drizzling them with honey.

Rachel Knox is a writer and student at The New School in New York City. She is originally from St. Petersburg, Florida and writes both fiction and nonfiction. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Featured image via Flickr.

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Essay of the Month: ‘A Cup of Coffee,’ by Lily Majteles

Each member of my family eats a different dinner at a different time. This is how it has been since I was old enough to use an oven on my own at 12. I was oblivious to how families spent mealtimes together. The way we ate was practical. With our conflicting busy schedules, different tastes and preferences I just can’t imagine how we could have all eaten the same thing at the same time. So we ate separately.

When I was 14, everything about my parents’ eating routines bothered me. My father, when told at age 40 that he was irresponsibly overweight and his heart in poor health, immediately and fully committed to a vegan lifestyle. He still eats one meal a day around 4:30 PM. Before 4:30, all he consumes is coffee. Two or three large lattes with soy milk (not almond and definitely not oat or coconut) in a mug, not a paper cup, while he works. My mother begins every single day by making coffee with her prized possession, a Keurig machine, which requires no time and even less work to brew a cup of coffee.

When I was younger, I knew my parents’ food-related preferences, quirks, and schedules by heart and questioned them. Why were they so dedicated to their identical cup of coffee every single morning? If they were so committed to their coffee schedules, why couldn’t they commit to eating with their children like every other family? I grew resentful of my parents. I felt as though they were depriving me of something, although I wasn’t quite sure what. Normalcy? Food? Love?

I was proud to be less picky than my parents.

I started drinking coffee when I was 16, in order to show the coffee drinkers at school that I was one of them. Gradually, I grew to like the taste. As I got older, I started to care less about my lack of a family mealtime, though I still rolled my eyes when my dad would complain when there wasn’t soy milk at a coffee shop or when my mom refused to use a coffee machine other than her Keurig. For the rest of high school, I drank one or more cups of coffee a day, with any type of milk and from any type of bean or coffee maker. I was proud to be less picky than my parents.

When I was 18, I decided to go to college across the country in New York City. When I moved, my dad came along to help, even though I insisted I could do it on my own. I have always prided myself on my emotional resilience, so I was shocked to find that the beginning of college was hard for me. Once I had moved into the dorms, something inside of me changed, and I found myself terrified, and, alas, crying. My dad was surprised by my reaction, but had an idea for what to do.

Every morning for my first week of college, in accordance with his routine, my father sat at The Bean on the corner of Ninth and First, drinking his soy latte, responding to emails, reading, and working from 7 AM until 10 AM. On my move-in day, he gently suggested that I leave my dorm early and join him for coffee the next morning. He said it could be for five minutes or an hour, whatever felt right. Initially, I was skeptical, but he kept repeating that if I changed my mind, I could find him at The Bean, seated across from an empty chair.

The next day, I woke up early and quietly got out of bed. I made the short trek and as promised, my dad was sitting at a corner table, across from an empty chair. I bought a small black hot coffee with room for milk and sat with him for 10 minutes. I told him about the painter I had befriended at my first hall meeting; I complained about the weather; I asked his opinion on my outfit; and we discussed our thoughts on A Ghost Story, a film we had both just seen and liked very much. It was pleasant and casual and not at all like I had just moved across the country, afraid and uncertain of the future. So I found myself at that exact coffee shop at that exact time for the entirety of his stay in the city.

They loved their coffee the way they did because they loved the routine.

My parents’ strange behavior became unambiguous to me. They loved their coffee the way they did because they loved the routine. They loved the schedule. They loved the dependability. I, too, had developed a habit of drinking coffee each day, and without realizing, was drinking it for the same reasons as my parents. Once I understood that dependence on coffee was something we all shared – not a dependence on the caffeine or the sugar, but on the habit – I understood coffee as something that could bring us closer, that could give us what I always thought we lacked without a family mealtime.

Now, my mom and I bond over a shared dream of one day upgrading to a Nespresso machine. We buy each other silly and sentimental mugs. When I am home in California, in the early hours of the morning, we make ourselves coffee and read her stack of cooking magazines, ogling the recipes we will never make. When my dad leaves the house for his lattes, I tag along without uttering a single complaint when he refuses to try a coffee shop that does not have soy milk. And in New York, every morning, on my way to class, I stop at The Bean for a small black coffee with room for milk. It‘s The Bean on the corner of Twelfth and Broadway, but it gets the job done, because it always tastes the same.

Lily Majteles is a writer and filmmaker living in New York City. She is a student at The New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.

Featured image via MaxPixel.

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Essay of the Month: ‘Dorothy’s Chili,’ by Andrea Broomfield

I was an earthy kid. I had no compunction about draining dregs from beer cans thrown into the ditch near my kindergarten bus stop. On warm days, I loved to kneel and feel the gritty, hot asphalt dig into my knees as I scraped the tough air-dried layer off an oozing bubblegum wad that someone had spit out. Once past the top layer, the gum would still be day-glo pink, green, or purple and emit a most luscious aroma. Sour green apple was my favorite.

Five was a rough year. My mother died of brain cancer the same month (January) my legs had been locked into braces to keep me from walking pigeon-toed. It was the year my kindergarten teacher tied down my left hand to keep me from becoming the “spawn of Satan.” Daddy was a state representative, away from home Monday through Thursday in Jefferson City. His small salary meant hiring the cheapest caretaker he could find. Perhaps you can forgive a girl some of the sensory eccentricities that punctuated her early life.

Because the truth of it was, my reality was miserable, save for fleeting magical weekends when Daddy was my own. Weekends when my sister and I would accompany Daddy on his date night over to Cathy Miller’s where we could try out Cathy’s array of false eyelashes, lipsticks, and eyeshadows. It meant falling asleep on Cathy’s Barcalounger while watching soft gobs in the blue-green lava lamp float up and sink down. But most of all, it meant utterly delicious, fun food.

Cathy often indulged us with fondue. We sat cross-legged on her shag carpet in front of the fireplace while we dipped hot dog chunks, bread cubes, asparagus spears, and fat button mushrooms into the fondue pot’s boiling oil, listening to Lou Rawls croon on the eight-track. Or, if not fondue, it would be Daddy bringing over filet mignon to grill out on Cathy’s tiny deck, sometimes even allowing me to eat the bacon off his, when they came sizzling off the grill. Or his newest creation: a fat minced steak patty “doctored up” with Lawry’s Seasoning Salt, perched on an English muffin half. Once the patties registered medium rare under the broiler, Daddy removed the pan and covered the patties with thick beefsteak tomato slices and crowned them with liberal dollops of Marie’s Blue Cheese Salad Dressing. Five more minutes, and the patties emerged as works of art, bubbling, oozing, juicy, with the English muffin sponging up all that glorious fat. Whatever was on the menu, it was delicious, and not only would we have a fantastic dinner with Cathy, but we would also have Saturday lunch and Sunday breakfast before the reality returned Sunday afternoon in the form of our houskeeper-nanny-cook, Dorothy.
 

The patties emerged as works of art, bubbling, oozing, juicy, with the English muffin sponging up all that glorious fat.

 
It was around age ten that I became scared of Dorothy, who took care of my sister and me during the week. I became increasingly disgusted with her, even with my love of beer dregs and the aroma of discarded gum. From a child’s eyes, she was the incarnation of Roald Dahl’s Mrs. Twit. Wiry, greasy, salt-and-pepper hair, a twitching mouth and constantly dripping nose, a dirty bra strap hanging perpetually over her ham hock arm, a fanny that hung over the sides of the kitchen table chairs, a voice that sounded like she ate gravel, and worst of all, an utter lack of skills in the culinary department made Dorothy our daily nightmare.

Sometimes, starvation was better than eating what Dorothy cooked. I dreaded her fried whiting. When I chose this golden brown, flaky gorgeous white fish and a side of baked macaroni and cheese at the Forum Cafeteria after church on Sunday, the meal convinced me that there was a God in heaven. But when confronted with the same dish from Dorothy? It left me identifying with Job and his travails as God and Satan subjected the poor man to a game of faith. Dorothy’s rendition of fried whiting was riddled with bones that stuck in my throat as I tried to get it down, usually burned on one side and raw on the other, and always swimming in a puddle of rancid bacon fat. Inevitably, the burned-raw whiting would be served with my least favorite accompaniment of all, canned peas.

I had few memories of my beloved mother, but sadly the most prominent involved a day when I was around four years old, perched on the kitchen stepping stool and helping Mother cook. She opened a can of peas, and floating lazily on top of the brine was a dead mayfly. The horror of peering at that bloated, drowned insect resulted in immediate nausea. After that, the thought of canned peas made the bile and acid rise up in my throat. Thank goodness for our dachshund Bismarck, stationed as a sentinel underneath the dinner table, eagerly awaiting scraps. With a great show of politeness, I would spoon up a mouthful of Dorothy’s fish along with it some of the puke-colored peas, tip it into my mouth and appear to chew. I would then take my napkin, carefully empty the whole mess from my mouth into it, and take it to my lap where said peas and fish emptied onto the floor and down Bismarck’s gullet. Yes, I would go to bed hungry, but at least I had my insides intact.
 

It left me identifying with Job and his travails as God and Satan subjected the poor man to a game of faith.

 
In Dorothy’s culinary repertoire there was one dish that I could tolerate and if hungry enough, find the wherewithal to actually enjoy: chili. Because it could be thrown together quickly and left to simmer, she made it often, given that her main activity was watching reruns of the Beverly Hillbillies, I Love Lucy, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction on Channel 41 while embroidering and eating a candy-like dietary supplement known as Ayds. Throwing a pound of hamburger in the aluminum stockpot, browning it with some sliced onion, adding a can of kidney beans, a couple of cans of tomatoes, and a packet of Williams Chili Seasoning was all there was to it, then back to the La-Z-boy until supper time.

One late afternoon, Dorothy and I found ourselves in an unusually social mood after the ending of Petticoat Junction put us both in good spirits. At any rate, I found myself in the kitchen with Dorothy as she began the process of making chili, asking her if she would show me how it was done. I was still small enough physically that I needed to stand on that same footstool that my mother had used when we opened the can of peas with the dead mayfly. Taking my post, Dorothy showed me how to brown the hamburger, as she nibbled it raw from time to time, how to use all the grease from the hamburger to soften the onion, how to add the Williams Chili Seasoning, which in turn soaked up a lot of the grease, and how to add the cans of beans and tomatoes. I was hungry watching her work, as the pot started to simmer. The pools of remaining grease coalesced on top like an oil slick, and the aroma started to waft through the air.

Then, Dorothy got some chili seasoning up her nose and let out a gigantic sneeze, reaching at the same time for her well-used Kleenex knotted up in her bra shelf where she always kept it. The sneeze caused her to fumble her hold on the Kleenex, just as Bismarck came trotting into the kitchen, causing Dorothy to unwittingly drop the Kleenex into the chili. She kept on stirring with no thought to anything other than the dachshund. The Kleenex got caught in the whirlpool of the motion, sinking out of sight into the depths of the chili and then like a drowning man trying to save himself, popped up to the top of the pot before being dragged down again to the bottom.
 

I found myself in the kitchen with Dorothy as she began the process of making chili, asking her if she would show me how it was done.

 
In horror and disgust, I shouted out, “Dorothy! You dropped your Kleenex into the chili!” I was devastated that we would have to throw out the pot and start again, or—God forbid—have to eat the week-old pork chops burned on one side and raw on the other that were lodged in the refrigerator. Startled by my shout, Dorothy turned her attention back to the stove, scooped up the now disintegrating Kleenex and quickly plucked it off the spoon, throwing it, dripping grease and tomato sauce along the way, into the trash.

“No harm done,” she muttered as she continued to stir.

Oh dear lord! Suddenly, even the week-old burned-raw pork chop moldering in the refrigerator seemed appetizing. Feeling like I was going to be sick, I jumped off the stool and ran upstairs to my bedroom.

I sat on my bed holding my stomach, trying to imagine sitting down to supper as if nothing was wrong. Leah was nowhere to be found, or I would have shared my information with her.

Soon enough, it was time for supper. Dorothy liked to organize the meal so that we could watch Bowling for Dollars, which was a huge favorite for all of us.

“Andrea! Leah!” she bellowed. “Time to eat!” Knowing that I had no choice but to go downstairs, and also knowing that if I protested the unsanitary nature of the meal, she would force me to eat two portions as punishment for being too “bloody fine-mouthed,” I started my journey down the hallway. I decided that my only option was to feign the flu. I would enter the kitchen doubled over and complaining of a severe tummy ache.

I came down the stairs and entered the kitchen to see the sleeve of saltines on the table and Dorothy ladling the dinner into our decorative Parkay margarine bowls that we usually ate out of. Leah was already at the table turning on the television.

“Dorothy,” I moaned, clutching my stomach and doing the most important acting job of my young life. “I’m not feeling too good! Is it okay if I skip dinner?” Hungry herself and anxious not to miss Fred Browski’s opening moment on Bowling for Dollars, Dorothy was blessedly distracted. Having entirely forgotten about the Kleenex in the chili, given that it was “no matter,” she muttered, “What’s wrong? You eat a bunch of candy after school? Go on upstairs, and I’ll be up in a while to give you some medicine.” Relieved but anguished that my poor sister, Leah, was going to ingest that chili, I turned from the table and made my way upstairs.

 

'Dorothy's Chili' is The Inquisitive Eater's Essay of the Month for March 2018.

Andrea Broomfield, Ph.D., is Professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, USA. She is author of Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History, and Kansas City: A Food Biography. She is currently at work on a new book, “The Atlantic Celts: A Gastronomic Memoir from Ireland to Iberia” with co-author, Beebe Bahrami. This is Andrea’s first foray into creative nonfiction.

Featured image via Flickr.

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Essay of the Month: ‘Cooking, Short Cuts, and Biryani,’ by Bridget Kiley

Steam rose from the pot and I inhaled a buttery whiff. I picked up the wooden spoon resting on the stovetop, its handle warm from sitting there for too long. I flicked single grains of rice, moving them around gently to check their doneness. Then I maneuvered the spoon to the bottom of the pot. I brought a single piece of chicken to the top. A drumstick. The meat hung loosely off the bone. Once the woodsy smell of saffron hit me, I felt a nervous flush recede from my cheeks.

After years at trying my hand at various Pakistani dishes, this was my first time cooking the elusive biryani. My husband was working from our dining room table as I cooked. Well, it’s a stretch to call it a dining room table since we don’t have a dining room nor do we use the table for dining. Scraps of paper with his chicken scratch were scattered all over, as were his files and packs of cigarettes. His business was in its infancy, meaning he was usually overwhelmed with work, except when food was in front of him. He was eager to try my dish, not because he knew it would taste good, neither of us was certain of that, but rather to see if I’d even get it remotely close. Were all the ingredients there? Was there the right balance of spices? The spices were essential. They could not be missed or replaced. The integrity of this dish was in its masala.

When I first started cooking Pakistani food, I often got it wrong because I didn’t pay respect to the herbs and spices like turmeric, coriander, clove, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, star anise, mace. I thought I could leave out the ones that were hard to find, or use the generic curry powder found in any grocery store as a stand in for these spices and their exact proportions. I became discouraged almost instantly. Three or four failed attempts at a basic chicken curry made me give up cooking Pakistani food for months.

Then one evening, we were invited to a family friend’s house for dinner. They lived far out in Queens, over an hour long subway ride. Darakshan was in the kitchen when we arrived, but came out to greet us. I followed Maqsood, Darakshan’s husband, and my husband into the living room. They soon began speaking in Urdu, a language I still don’t understand. They noticed my silence and apologized, but I waved it away. I went to see if Darakshan needed help with dinner. She said no. She picked up a rectangular box from the counter and said, “I just use the premade stuff.” The brand on the box was called National and the label read “Biryani Masala.” There was a packet inside with all the necessary spices to make this dish. She opened a cabinet and showed me an entire collection of these National boxes containing premade masala for all kinds of meals: Keema, haleem, kebabs, karahi, korma, nihari, gosht, and chaat.

Thirty minutes later, we all sat down to eat with their two young boys. Darakshan’s cooking was homey and good, and we all had second and third helpings. But it seemed to me like the National boxes were like Betty Crocker cake mixes, not the real deal. It wasn’t from scratch, as my mother used to say, almost like she was cursing. My mother looked down on the moms who brought brownies to school bake sales that were so obviously straight from a Costco Ghirardelli box. I figured those National boxes held the same kind of shame.

It wasn’t from scratch, as my mother used to say, almost like she was cursing.

The next time I saw a Pakistani person using the National boxes was in Indiana. My husband and I were visiting another family friend, and I was enamored with the warmth and saltiness of our friend Yasmin’s cooking. Yasmin’s kitchen had a lot of drawers and a big pantry where she had stacks of National and Shaan Masala boxes (similar to National, just a different brand). She also had a clear plastic jug next to the stove filled with ghee and a tub of peeled garlic in the fridge.

Every night after dinner and cleaning up the kitchen, Yasmin took about twenty minutes to replenish her garlic supply. She sat on a stool with her elbows on the kitchen counter, shelling garlic from their sleeves and tossing them into the tub. No Pakistani dish is complete without ginger garlic paste, made by grinding the two ingredients in a mortar and pestle or a food processor. It usually comes in early on in the cooking process, just after the onions have been browned and the salt has been added. It is the earth to many Pakistani recipes, while chopped cilantro and mint are patchy clouds.

I talked to Yasmine while she shelled. I told her that I wanted to learn how to cook desi food better. I said I could never find all of the right ingredients to make masala in the grocery store. Mace isn’t a well-stocked item. She looked at me almost concerned. No, maybe annoyed.

“Just buy the mixes. The National mixes.”
“I can do that?” What I really meant was, that still counts?
“Obviously.”

She even tried to push some of her boxes of masala on me, but I declined. I’d buy my own back in New York.

I started driving out to Jersey City or take the subway to Jackson Heights, Queens (both have extensive desi communities) to stock up on National mixes for chicken curry, kebabs, and keema. It changed everything. The essence of Pakistani food was finally alive in my cooking. The smell was right. Our apartment smelled like Pakistan, my husband told me. I made chicken curry over and over again. It was my favorite thing to make. I used a recipe I found on YouTube. Most of my Pakistani recipes come from there. I watch them three or four times to get the method right.

But something else I learned that elevated my cooking was that I had to stop trying to emulate these cooks on YouTube 100 percent. That realization was the beginning of my effort to stop trying to master Pakistani cooking but instead stay open to learning and experimentation. I ceased trying to “figure out” Pakistan and just be present for individual experiences of enlightenment.

While learning to cook Pakistani food, I had to institute the methods that I had at my disposal in a very tiny New York City kitchen. I accomplished the art of stacking and tessellating the plates, bowls, pots, pans, blender, mixer, whatever, so that I could always fit more and keep pushing the boundaries of my kitchen. Although its size made it appear inefficient, I carved out a way to make it do the work necessary to deliver incredible food. I used my Magic Bullet to whirr tomatoes to a soap bubble consistency and I used it to make the onions into a paste that would disappear into the gravy of a curry. Going less by the book, and traditional cooking methods, actually made my Pakistani food taste more authentic.

Going less by the book, and traditional cooking methods, actually made my Pakistani food taste more authentic.

I made chicken curry about once a week and potato curry on the weekends for breakfast. I made lamb and beef kebabs that we ate with store-bought rotis or leftover naan from a restaurant. More rarely did I make keema, a ground beef dish, one of my least favorite Pakistani dishes, but one of my husband’s favorites.

I had just one box of National brand biryani masala. It was in the back of my cupboard, and I was almost afraid to even touch it. Biryani is the peacemaking food of the Indian subcontinent. It is so rich and delicious; it is a household staple holier than the American hamburger or Brooklyn style pizza. Its flavors are complex, just like all desi food. It is warm, yellowed rice, cooked together with chicken and potato, or any other meat of your choosing, topped with fried onions, cilantro, mint, and lemon slices.

Actually, that last sentence is highly controversial. Everyone, it seems, has a different definition of what biryani is. Cooking, I’ve learned, is a language. It is not straightforward but rather full of dialects. How one person cooks biryani is not how another person would cook it. Hyderabadi biryani is different from the biryani my mother-in-law makes in Karachi. Persians wouldn’t dream of putting some of the ingredients in biryani that Pakistanis use. I even read in the comments section of a YouTube tutorial on how to cook biryani that onions should never be used. Onions? I’ve never made a single desi dish without them. That seemed not only ludicrous, but blasphemous. And blasphemy is usually on the minds of those who see biryani made in a way that is different from what they’re used to, that defies their vision of what this dish is. One can understand my hesitancy towards making biryani.

My husband kept asking for it though. His reasoning wasn’t what you’d expect. He didn’t have complete faith in me that I would get it right. Really, he was just curious to see what would come out of that big Cuisinart stock pot of mine. The night I decided to make biryani, I didn’t tell my husband until I’d begun the process. I didn’t want to get his hopes up or put unnecessary pressure on myself.

I took the container of chicken thighs and drumsticks out of the refrigerator and began separating the skin from the meat, keeping the bones intact. I tossed the washed chicken into a white mixing bowl with four to five hefty spoonfuls of plain yogurt, some salt and pepper, red chili powder, and about four shakes of turmeric powder, before putting it back in the fridge. Then I chopped four red onions, unlike the way I learned from Martha Stewart or Ina Garten. I halved them, and then cut them into long, thin, strips along the cut side, wearing sunglasses. I always put on sunglasses when I chop onions because I’m so sensitive to them. I threw them into the stockpot where I had vegetable oil already sizzling my whole spices (4 cloves, handful of cumin seed, 2 whole cardamoms, a bay leaf, half stick of cinnamon, and some whole peppercorns and coriander).

Cooking, I’ve learned, is a language.

The onions made a loud hiss. I stirred everything with a wooden spoon and shook the pot a little. I added salt, by eyeball. I let the onions cook until they turned barely golden and then added ginger garlic paste. Next is when the masala is added: just after the ginger garlic paste, but before the tomatoes. I’ve seen it done other ways, but this way has always lent me the best results.

I picked up the box of National Biryani Masala*. I removed the silver plastic baggie and snipped off one of its corners. I dumped all of its contents into the pot and stirred to combine.

That’s when things became really fragrant and the dish went from standard ingredients found in lots of cooking to distinctly Pakistani. I let the spices toast and cling to the onion and ginger-garlic mixture, then I added the tomatoes. Instead of throwing them in a food processor like I usually did to save time, I diced them up as small as I could. This way was of course more authentic, but I also wanted to do it so that the red streaks of tomato skin would end up running through the rice when the dish was complete.

The tomatoes sizzled as they released their water. My husband walked in the door to our apartment at this point and I told him what I was up to. I read excitement in his eyes. I let the mixture sit for about two minutes, and then I took the chicken back out of the fridge. It was tinted yellow from the turmeric. I nestled the chicken pieces into the gravy one by one. Some of the yogurt floated to the top. I also added a good handful of chopped mint and cilantro. I put the flame to medium-low and placed the lid on the pot. I gave it just enough time for the gravy to penetrate the meat and infuse it with its flavors.

Then, I added roughly two cups of water. I replaced the lid and turned the flame to medium. I set the timer for an hour, but I had to set it for another thirty-ish minutes before the chicken was done and the gravy the right consistency. When making a standard curry, you want to get as much of the water evaporated as possible so that it resembles a thick, slightly chunky soup. However, when making biryani, you should leave the curry mixture slightly runny because it will get cooked again with the rice.

When I was happy with the consistency of my gravy, I began to delicately layer on the rice. I put one thin layer of rice on top of the curry and made sure it was spread evenly across the chicken and gravy. Then I added the rest. When I was done with this process, no chicken or curry was visible, nothing was leaking through. Top with fried onions, chopped mint and cilantro, and a few tablespoons of warm milk infused with some saffron threads for color. Some people also sprinkle extra ghee on top. Finally, I replaced the lid and set the flame to medium and cooked for a remaining ten minutes.

When the timer sounded, I didn’t announce to my husband that dinner was ready. I wanted to check it on my own, alone. I was more nervous than I thought I would be. It’s a labor-intensive process, and I would be discouraged if I mucked it up (also we wouldn’t have anything to eat for dinner that night).

Everything smelled right though. When I removed the lid and spooned to the surface that first drumstick, I had a vision of my mother-in-law’s kitchen back in Karachi. It isn’t as small as mine, but still very humble. She rarely uses any kitchen gadgets like I do. Maybe a tiny, outdated food processor and sometimes a peeler, but she often peels things like potato and ginger with just a small paring knife. Her cooking has a simple elegance to it that I envy, and I thought I actually got a whiff of her own homemade biryani when I unveiled my own.

Her cooking has a simple elegance to it that I envy, and I thought I actually got a whiff of her own homemade biryani when I unveiled my own.

Food is one way for my mother-in-law and me to talk to each other without language barriers. We share what foods we like and dislike, we share recipes, we share our methods. I got to know her through her food, and she learned to like me by the interest I displayed in learning to cook Pakistani food. The way I make biryani is imperfect and influenced by my non-Pakistani upbringing, which I can’t help, but it doesn’t diminish my drive to try. It’s all about instinct, I’ve learned, and a person must submit themselves to trial and error. There is no perfect dish, and that certainly applies to biryani.

The biryani I prepared for my husband and I was absolutely delectable. He didn’t ask me how I cut the onions or at what point did I add the masala, he just ate, spooning it into his mouth with his fingertips. I started out with a spoon but then switched to hands. This is traditionally how the Indian subcontinent eats, and learning to eat this way was more difficult than I thought, almost like learning to use chopsticks. One would think eating with your hands is instinctual, but it’s more technical than you’d think. The rice stuck together in a warm clump between the tip of my thumb and the rest of my fingertips. I pushed it into my mouth using my thumb. It was easy to massage the chicken from the bone – the meat was so tender. My husband put his mouth around the top of a bone and sucked off some cartilage. I shivered. Cartilage isn’t my thing.

When we went up to the stove for seconds, we paused to take pictures. My husband held his plate forward so I could get a good shot. I also took a picture of the contents inside the pot. I sent these to my mother-in-law in Pakistan. At 10:43 am her time, 11:43 pm my time, she wrote back, “This is the traditional colour of biryani successfully obtained by you … Savoury.” She was happy for me – happy that I’d tried and it at least looked right. I’ve found that it is the effort that gets the most appreciation, such as when I say a word in Urdu and everyone in the family starts cheering.

I used to go in circles analyzing my husband, his family, his friends, other Pakistani people, in an effort to understand centuries of tradition and culture. But the way to understanding is accepting that total and complete knowledge is unachievable. Rather, there is respect, there is intrigue, there is tasting and trying; there is an effort to find out more and to let yourself be changed. All of my Pakistani cooking forays have led me closer to this realization. All of my instincts to keep trying are a way for me to put emphasis on learning, rather than mastery, which, as I knew all along, does not exist.

* Chicken Biryani Masala: salt, plum, red chilli, ginger, onion, garlic, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, mace, nutmeg, mango powder, clove, bay leaf, black pepper.

** Rice instructions: Bring water to boil in large pot. Add one whole bay leaf, a few whole cloves, salt, a couple of whole cardamom, sprinkling of cumin seed, and a little oil if you like. Add the rice and cook for about 7-8 minutes. Then drain the water in a large colander. 

'Cooking, Short Cuts, and Biryani' is The Inquisitive Eater's Essay of the Month for February 2018.

Bridget Kiley is a writer and editor based in NYC by way of Vermont. She is a graduate of The New School MFA program in creative nonfiction. Her other work can be found on Fjords Review, The Culture Trip, The New School Blog, and more. Follow her on Twitter @bridget_kiley and Instagram @brightyhiney.

Featured photo via Max Pixel.

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Essay of the Month: ‘Against Food,’ by Mika Bar-On Nesher

I

I hate going to restaurants, especially ones with dim lighting. I like food that tastes like cardboard, preferably just rice. I know it’s an art form for some. I watch my partner read every single ingredient on whatever product she buys, handling her sharpened knife like a serial killer. Going to the supermarket with her means I’ll be waiting by the cashier clutching rice and avocados for twenty minutes as she goes on scheming, pacing up, down, and around all the aisles. I get it. Her brother is a cook. They like discussing different body parts of fish, different degrees of dark chocolate, and so on. To me, food tastes good if it’s made by someone I love, and that’s the only criteria. Having worked in too many restaurants, I assure you the employees don’t wash their hands, the chefs are mentally strained, the servers are underpaid. It’s a terrible industry and I don’t understand what’s wrong with just wanting to eat rice twice a day until I die. The phrase “food porn” makes me uncomfortable. I do not find food in itself sensual—fruits, vegetables, raw meat. I have a hard time decorating my hunger. It’s not the food that’s sensual after all, but the appetite. Often my lack of participation in food pleasures makes others defensive, or they criticize me, diagnose me, show concern. I ate my first strawberry at age twenty-one. I didn’t like it. An entire short lifetime of resisting peer-pressure ended in one anticlimactic bite into that fuzzy, red triangle people will not give up. Food is emotional. Food is expensive. Food keeps us alive. It’s complicated from every angle.

 

II

Food and femininity are painfully aligned. I see my grandma frying schnitzels in sweatpants. She has been preparing the same meals for over fifty years. She’s obsessed with feeding us, haunted by night terrors about our stomachs. She’s brilliant—without finishing high school in Poland, she was able to climb up and manage Israel’s leading hospital. She did this in her thirties after giving birth to my mom when she was only nineteen. Her dream was to become a lawyer. She texts the members of my family daily to check when was the last time we had eaten, and what we want her to make us next. She is the food giver. It’s her channel of love and care taking. My grandpa is very fat. At seventy-six he can’t eat anymore. He’s finally full. On the verge of tears, he screams at her to stop making him chicken, but she, like many brilliant people, tends to be obsessive and thorough in her misplaced mission to ensure none of us will starve. Food no longer depends on a women’s imprisonment in domesticity alone, but someone somewhere is always carrying the weight, paying the price for this cavernous industry.

 

III

A few years ago I tried dating a man. It was a short, exhausting failure. What struck me most about that experience was discovering that men complain about their appearance and weight even more vocally and less shamefully than women do. When men express these food anxieties, they are not usually judged or diagnosed, they are answered seriously, laboriously, by the ear at hand. I asked my three straight friends for confirmation, and they agreed this was common. Some of them are unwell, but their masculinity will not allow visibility of their vulnerability. Many women are doing just fine, but their individuality is threatening to the long-held gender roles, specifically those regarding food and the female body. The boundaries of our bodies in space seem to be controlled so painfully by food. The relationships between space, gender, and food are inevitable. I remember sitting on a stool in a kitchenette during my freshman year of college, legs crossed, hand under chin. Suddenly, someone remarked how feminine I was, like a revelation. Surprised, I objected defensively. In my experience, I had always felt neither feminine nor masculine, just a gaze. Others joined in, and the more I objected to this intrusive adjective and the way it rang, resonating the gestures of my mother, the more they insisted. I won’t deny it if that’s what people see, but why does such an arbitrary binary allow for boundaries of my space to evaporate? Coded a femme woman, what I eat or don’t eat becomes a public forum for discussion. Anything a woman does that does not align with the social codes of expectation becomes a platform for diagnosis.

 

IV

I cannot think of anything more private than my intestines, so why are we constantly searching for external authorities on food: how to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, and so on. In reality, it’s a lawless, genderless realm based purely on self-knowing and adjustment. In a privileged society, it’s possible to say each body is different, we all react differently to different ingredients, we all feel strong at different weights. The shallow aspects, the symptoms of food, are carried so publicly and insensitively while the burning core is completely ignored. Instead of policing each other’s plates and discussing diets while surrounded by nauseating abundance, why aren’t we asking how to treat our food givers with the respect they deserve and have never received? The funds surrounding food are mysterious. The amount of money that goes into branding those awful frozen pizzas or food reality TV shows could feed at least one of the nine million who die of hunger each year. I’m not that naive. I grew up in the 1990’s when there was a lot of talk about world hunger, cheesy all-star celebrity music videos, and intense anxiety over the ozone layer. Food is intoxicating. The most complex aspects of our lives end up being institutionalized the most easily. I’ve been too fat through one eye and too thin through another eye. These unstable calculating eyeballs of ours are misdirected in their informational fevers. For such smart animals we can’t seem to figure out our own hunger. Perhaps we could be kinder when trying to understand one another’s hunger.

 

Mika Bar-On Nesher is multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Brooklyn & Tel-Aviv, she studies creative writing at the New School.

Featured image by Mika Bar-On Nesher.

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TIE Essay of the Month: ‘Eating & Not Eating’, by Holly Rice

When I was thirteen, my mother and father bred Berkshire pigs. We kept a few for the freezer and sent the rest off to be packaged and sold. The first time our sow had her litter, my father woke me at five in the morning to watch her give birth. The piglets and their mother had a run of their own. They ate feed supplemented with table scraps: melons and old scrambled eggs and stale bread. They rolled in mud made fresh by the rain and rooted around in the straw when they were brought inside. They taunted our Newfoundland from their side of the fence. They let my brother and sister and me chase them around in our rubber boots. They let themselves be caught and scratched under the chins. When they grew old enough, they were put on the truck and the next time I’d see them they were pink and juicy on the plate. Eating meat was easy.

Now that I’m twenty-four, my parents don’t breed pigs anymore. The hobby farm I grew up on was packaged and sold. Our Newfoundland died years ago. My mother and father aren’t married to each other and I don’t eat meat. Growing up while watching animals carted off for slaughter wasn’t the reason I became a vegan. If anything, it was the reason I ate meat for as long as I did – my family watched those pigs grow up full and happy and lazy in the sun. Their existence, while whose purpose was eventually to become food, wasn’t dark or marred with cruelty. What I knew of farming meat was from the acre of land that ran between the barn and the forest that claimed the rest of our property.

In early January, I watched a Yarmouth fisherman torture and mutilate a seal pup on the deck of his boat in a video he posted online. Hunting seals is a common practice in Canada that I accept, even as a vegan, as an important part of culture and industry when it’s done with a hand of empathy. As the fisherman kicked the pup in the head, and dragged its squealing, bloody body across the floor, I had to look away before the inevitable end. The fisherman laughed at the animal’s terror and the man behind the camera egged him on. The seal wasn’t threatening that particular fisherman’s livelihood. The man wasn’t fishing cod, or halibut, or salmon. He was fishing lobster.

In January, Donald Trump was sworn in as President. I couldn’t seem to escape the cruelty of the everyday: the Muslim ban, attacks on Planned Parenthood, and the denial of the state of the physical earth. But each time I went to the grocery store and skipped over the dairy aisle and ignored the cases of shining, pretty meat, I felt like I was doing my part to negate some of what is wrong in the world. I couldn’t save that seal pup. I couldn’t stop Donald Trump from becoming President. But I could invest my money in Gotham Greens and So Delicious and Beyond Meat, companies that are cruelty-free and operate with the environment in mind. Veganism has forced me to try new things: lentils, white beans, cashew cheeses, non-dairy milks. Cooking with these new discoveries exercised my creativity when I couldn’t seem to get words on the page. My veganism became synonymous with my activism.

It is not the animal that dies, but rather, the type of hand that feeds it. We ate pork once it was ready because it was farmed without dark, cramped pens, without mass-production, without forgetting that while a life might have a purpose, that it must be sparkling and bright while it lasts. I would eat meat again if my parents were still together, if they still had that hobby farm, if they still raised animals with the love that comes with keeping something alive.

Holly Rice is a creative writing MFA candidate at The New School and the Deputy Editor of the Inquisitive Eater. She is the 2015 recipient of the Nova Scotia Talent Trust’s RBC Emerging Artist Award and lives in Williamsburg. Her book reviews can be found in Boog City and on PublishersWeekly.com.

featured image via Farmers Weekly.

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TIE Essay of the Month: ‘The Seventh Wish’, by Thais Vitorelli

New Year’s is my absolute favorite holiday. I love to dance around all the different superstitions between families and cultures. I guess most of it has to do with the energy that predominates the last day of the year. It is the only day in which everyone is wishing for the same things as you are, even if they have different names for it.

When I was a child I used to spend New Year’s at the beach, always in the same house, always with the same people. Everyone was dressed in white, the most popular New Year’s tradition in Brazil. A wish for peace. My mom would cook a northeastern dish called Shimp Bobo, a manioc cream with lots of coconut milk and dendê palm oil and, of course, shrimp. Mom’s best friend, Silvia, used to make cod fish sided by potatoes, bell pepper, and black olives. Some of my parent’s friends liked to eat lentils on New Year’s for good fortune. Others kept pomegranate seeds inside their wallet for money.

I was in charge of the lime mousse, the easiest dessert you can assign to a child — blending together lime juice, heavy cream, and condensed milk. The trickiest part, though, was when Silvia’s son and I did our best to write the year in the mousse using lime zest. Most of the time, it didn’t turn out beautiful, but the taste was always good.

Then, we would go to the beach and watch the fireworks and hug each other after the countdown. The dads would come along with the children to the sea and watch us while we hopped over seven waves, another massive Brazilian superstition for the Réveillon, making one wish for each wave, the high point of the night. One of my wishes every year was to still be friends with my best friends.

Today, you see fewer and fewer people wearing white. My mother’s best friend spends New Year’s at the countryside. Silvia’s son now has his own son. I haven’t cooked lime mousse in over ten years. I haven’t talked to my friends from that time in a long while, either. People around me are always wishing for the same things now: losing weight, quit smoking, a new boyfriend, a good promotion.

I still spend New Year’s at the beach with my family, only a different one. But I still dress in white, and so do they. We have now a beautiful new tradition. We set little wooden sailboats, along with all the families around us, with a candle and a white rose in it. An offer to Iemanjá, the queen of the sea. Instead of the mousse, my job now is to write the letter we send along with the offer, initially addressed to Iemanjá but meant for nobody in particular. My intentions are always the same, anyway. I wish for my family to remain close, and for my friends to be happy. I wish for more love to deal with things that I hate. I wish for strength and fulfillment, and I swear to God that sometimes, a few days during the year, I am heard.

I still skip over the seven waves. Six of my wishes are small resolutions I most likely won’t even remember in six months. But my seventh resolution never fails, as I always wish for me to remember the traditions I once had, keep the traditions that still matter the most and never to stop looking for new ones. Then, we watch the fireworks while the flames of the candles float in the ocean.

Thais is a second-year Writing for Children and Young Adults student at the Creative Writing MFA program at The New School. She is a Brazilian New Yorker currently working on a Young Adult novel and still on the hunt for the best pizza in the city.

featured image via Today

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TIE Essay of the Month: ‘School Lunches and Other Notes about My Mother’, by Honor Moore

In Jersey City, where I went to school until fifth grade, we came home for lunch.  My mother had grown up with cooks but was of a postwar generation of privileged women who prided themselves on doing their own cooking, a rebellion against their mothers’ feudal dependence on kitchen help – their small revolution was eventually aided by the introduction of dishwashers, Waring blenders, and the like. My mother’s lunches were utilitarian – Franco-American Spaghetti which came in a can, tuna fish salad on Wonder Bread, iceberg lettuce.

Once a week, when my parents went to New York on their “day off,” Agnes Weickert, whom we called “Gagy” and who was Norwegian, came to take care of us.  She made much better lunches – my favorite was something she called “an egg pancake,” crepe-thin, all egg and cooked in a cast iron skillet, not turned but folded when done. She also introduced me to the pleasures of spinach: while my mother threw frozen spinach in boiling water, Gagy chopped the fresh leaves and creamed it.  She taught me how to make a roux, and more important, how to flavor it with just the right amount of salt and pepper – the pepper was key.

At the time I thought my mother was constitutionally a bad cook, but now I realize that in Jersey City, she was a working mother. She was part of the team, along with my father and two other Episcopal priests, who ran the inner city parish and all its mission projects. She didn’t have time to cook for us—she had to keep soup on the stove for the homeless men who came to the door, supervise the women’s club, the girls’ club, and call on families in the neighborhood, “a baby under one arm, cabbage in the other!” a 95 year old woman who had known her recently told me.  She also continually read, books, the New York Times, the Saturday Review, the Catholic Worker and the Village Voice.

In 1957 we moved to Indianapolis, where my father was dean of a cathedral. He commuted to his office from the enormous house the church gave the dean and his family. It was in this house that my mother joined the 1950s, becoming what we now call a “stay at home mom,” the transition compelled not least by the islanded kitchen with its matching beige fake wood cabinets, its double wall ovens, its formica surfaces and electric burners embedded in the counter across from the refrigerator. Because of my father’s new position and because we were now a family with seven children, my parents decided to hire a cook.  Mrs. Pendleton, a middle-aged African American woman who wore a white uniform, cooked well, but my mother soon realized that she hated being banished from her own kitchen. Mrs. Pendleton left and my mother set her mind to cooking seriously.  

Jersey City had been a kind of commune, a gang for supper each night, and simple fare, enough for everyone. But in Indianapolis she was the wife of the dean. She would be giving dinner parties, and feeding a mob of children. The two babies were one thing, the five who came home from school at lunchtime were another. How to manage? She bought a freezer and began to buy in bulk, hamburger patties and hotdogs and their appropriate rolls; she and Mrs. Lee, who cleaned and took care of the “middles” and “teenies”,  deployed our lunches from a wall oven set to broil as we sat crowded into the adjacent plastic-upholstered, formica-tabled breakfast nook. My mother’s lunch masterpiece was something she called a “cheese dream,” an open-face sandwich made with orange cheddar. She toasted the Pepperidge Farm bread first, buttered it, and laid on the cheese.  I loved to jump up and peek through the oven window and watch the cheese dreams cook – six or eight to a cookie sheet.  Take them out too soon and some of the cheese would still be hard; too late and it would be too brown and too crisp. Perfect was a condition I call “just about to bubble.”  Was adding paprika my idea or my mother’s?

The Indianapolis years made my mother a great cook.  The dish I really remember was crème brûlée, which she never made for family suppers and certainly never for a school lunch.  The layer of broiled sugar on top was more a lid than a glaze, so it was possible for me to lift it and spoon out the custard from underneath – without leaving evidence, I could taste part of the world my mother considered adult. By the time I was an adult, my father had become a bishop and the family lived in Washington DC; the era was just after Kennedy’s assassination and my parents’ dinner party guest lists were often a glamorous mixture of their friends who were apt to be liberal journalists, peace and civil rights activists, and Cleveland Park neighbors. I never went to one of those fancy dinners, but she still made cheese dreams when the kids came home for lunch.

I moved to New York and then in with my boyfriend; we had an apartment in New York and a weekend house, and my mother sent me a source of recipes she’d just discovered, the gourmet newsletter Craig Claiborne published after he retired as food editor of The New York Times. I remember being on the phone with her the morning after I’d cooked a spaghetti Amatriciana or Maryland corn beignets, talking about what I might do next. When Claiborne announced the newest French gadget, the salad spinner, in 1971, my mother sent me one posthaste.  “You can’t believe how dry the lettuce gets!” The brand was Peugeot, like the car.  My mother died in 1973, but the salad spinner lasted until I sold the Connecticut house in 2001.

It’s September and I’m back at school. The days I teach, I get to work at 4 pm and teach at eight. How to eat?  I’m not going to warm up ramen, the present-day equivalent of Franco-American Spaghetti, and you can’t make a cheese dream in a microwave. I do like the odd sandwiches that they make at the Brazillian inspired coffee bar at the corner of 12th Street, and I can always race down to Citarella for soup or salad. I recently learned that on those days off when Gagy made egg pancakes in our Jersey City kitchen, my mother took a course at the New School.  I think the class was some kind of philosophy, or maybe Spanish literature, but I have no idea what she had for lunch.

Honor Moore’s most recent book is The Bishop’s Daughter, a memoir, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year and her most recent collection of poems, Red Shoes. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, Salmagundi, The New Republic, Freeman’s and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah summer readings pick which is featured in the current documentary about American feminism, “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.” She has been poet in residence at Wesleyan and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When she was still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in poetry about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway and won her a fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and just reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book. She lives and writes in New York where she is on the graduate writing faculty of the New School.

featured image via The Gentleman from Indiana.

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