family food traditions – The Inquisitive Eater

Non-Fiction February 6, 2013

Hot Pepper Memories

by Gloria Panzera

Peperoni-cruschi — Photo Credit: “Calabria from Scratch”

Every week, when I lived in Boca Raton, Florida, I would go to the local farmer’s market to get tomatoes, apples, and a melon. Sometimes I splurge and buy a pineapple or strawberries. It’s my time to plan my meals for the week and to mingle with the vegetables. Some people exercise. I cook.

During one of my visits, as I pushed my shopping cart, I ended up in the herbs, spices, and roots aisle. I was about to take a jalapeño when I saw it there, the glorious, red, and wrinkled hot pepper. The chornicchio, or as some call them, peperoncinos.

It brought to mind my childhood, the six months of the year when Papa Nonno and Nonna Rita would live with my family in Florida and the summers I’d spent with them in Montreal. I remembered how Nonno would hang the peppers to dry on the patio and then fry them up, and they were so spicy.

I remember my introduction to the pepper. My family and I had been visiting my Nonno and Nonna in Montreal. My youngest sister hadn’t been born yet, so I couldn’t have been more than eight. The retro orange and green 1970’s tile, the tall, wood chairs, and the crocheted tablecloth covered in plastic and then covered again with an old tablecloth that probably came with them from Italy. I remember being able to feel the bumps of the crocheted tablecloth through both the plastic and linen. The smell of my grandmother’s homemade sausage wafted through the house. At the table was a large pan with oil and fried peppers. My parents, younger sister, and grandparents sat at the plastic covered table ready for lunch. I reached for a pepper and stopped.

“Gloria, those are hot peppers,” my mother warned me.

“No. No. They’re fine,” my dad assured her.

So I took one, the deepest reddest one. It was gorgeous, the salt sparkling and the oil dripped off of it leaving a glorious sheen. Biting into it, I knew–I knew my father was a cruel, evil man who wished to inflict pain on his daughter. I pushed my chair back and flayed my hands.

“Oh my God, Phil! I told you they were hot,” my mother chided.

Now my taste for spicy food is insatiable, despite my traumatic introduction. I relish in the sizzle lingering around my lips. I enjoy the flush that reaches my cheeks.

I added two chornicchio to my basket.

I tried to decide how I’d cook them. I’d fry them, cover them in salt and dip some bread in the oil when I was finished, just as I had seen Nonno do time and again.

I heated the olive oil in the frying pan. Once the oil was hot, I placed the peppers into the oil, generously salting them. I put the lid on the pan to steam the peppers as well. They would be soft on the inside and crisp and salty on the outside. A delightful combination. As the fragrant smell of the olive oil, chornicchios, and salt filled the kitchen, I stood there thinking of Papa Nonno realizing how much I missed him.

Gloria Panzera is an English teacher living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her writing has appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul: NASCAR and Chicken Soup for the Soul: Campus Chronicles.

Non-Fiction October 29, 2012

The Whistle of the Pressure Cooker Brings Me Home

by Carmella Guiol

I never knew I felt a connection to the pressure cooker, until yesterday. I’m an ocean away from where I grew up, visiting my dad on the sailboat he calls home. Over our typical lunch of bread and cheese, we wondered what to do for dinner (in true European style, always thinking about our next meal). I suggested the stew; it was an easy meal, and it would feed us for a few days. We both agreed it would be a good way to use of some of the random vegetables we had floating around our kitchen.

Growing up, my father would make some incarnation of his famous “stew” at least once a week. Whatever vegetables were on hand got tossed in, a handsome amount of liquid to cover them, some meat or sausage thrown in for good measure, a dusting of herbs and salt, and that’s all there was to it. It is the perfect one-pot dish, one that my dad learned while sailing and having to cook in tiny galleys. Plus, it made this terrific racket, as if we had a steam engine chugging through our kitchen, or an airplane revving its motor on the runway. “Fasten your seatbelts, we are ready for take-off!”, it seemed to scream. My sister and I would dance around the kitchen with our hands covering our ears as it wailed plaintively for as long as my dad deemed necessary.

As kids, we were taught to eat what was in front of us with no complaints, though we always managed to find something in the stew that was not to our liking. “Why is there a leaf in my dinner?” my sister would ask, fishing out a bay leaf. “I don’t like these round things,” I would whine, lining up capers on the side of my plate. But it was the best way to get us to eat our vegetables and we usually went back for seconds, regardless of our protests. Today, I’m twenty-five and a veritable vegetable enthusiast. The stew is one of my favorite dishes, although I’ve never attempted to create it without my father by my side.

In the tiny kitchen aboard the boat, I set to work. I searched around the cupboards and in the depths of the fridge to see what I could salvage, understanding placidly that no matter what I did, it would be delicious. I found a few sturdy carrots, three old potatoes with shoots blossoming from the eyes, some limp celery, a lone leek, and several perfectly respectable onions. I cut them up and threw them into the pot. There were some dried herbs in a bag on the counter that he must have picked up at the market a few weeks ago: oregano gone to flower and a bunch of rosemary, both of which grow in wild abundance on the dry coastal hills nearby. I crushed a handful of each and sprinkled them on top of the growing mound. Then, I poured in some dry lentils and let my dad do the rest; the mechanics of the pressure cooker scare me and I never know how much liquid to put in.

I left on my jog just as my dad turned on the gas stove to start simmering the soup. I know exactly what came next; I’ve seen him do it a million times. While he waited for the vegetables to soften and the juices to mingle in the pot, he fried up the sausages in a skillet, being sure to cover his pan with a grease screen to avoid the inevitable splatter. In went a can of diced tomatoes, several cups of water, and a dash of red wine. Finally, the sizzling sausages were speared and stirred into the pot. When all that was said and done, he secured the lid tightly, turned up the heat, and went back to whatever he was doing while he waited for the magic to happen.

As I approached the glowing boat, I slowed my pace to a halt. In the dark night, the smell of onions and sausages wafted out to greet me, the familiar whistle of the pressure cooker floating out from the galley window – music to my ears! All of a sudden, I was eight years old again, dancing around our yellow tiled kitchen, being of no help at all while my dad put the finishing touches on our dinner.

Carmella Guiol is a community food activist and writer from Miami, Florida. Read her blog: renouncerejoice.blogspot.com.

Non-Fiction August 20, 2012

The Athenian Room

by Amy Neiman

Growing up in downtown Chicago, I was surrounded by restaurants and markets of countless variety. From my house, we had the tastes of the world in walking distance. While my mom cooked dinner most nights, we also ordered takeout more than the average family. We had a handful of favorites; places that knew us by name and where menus were unnecessary because, after time, they just knew what the Neimans ordered. Two blocks from my home (or one and a half if you cut through the alley), was one such Greek restaurant. Established in 1975, The Athenian Room was one of those secret neighborhood gems appreciated only by those in the immediate locale. With the famously popular Greek Town just two miles south, there was no shortage of fabulous and authentic Greek cuisine in the city. But this particular family-run joint, serving traditional Athenian cuisine, was unique to our particular neighborhood. Its white stone façade imparted a rustic old world charm that contrasted quite dramatically with the more contemporary buildings of most nearby eateries. If not for the dancing, flame-fueled spit warming the signature gyros meat just beyond the darkened front windows, you’d barely be able make out the brick walled interior, stained wood tables and red cushioned chairs inviting you to come share a meal.

In my family, it was a given that Sunday nights were “Athenian Nights.” On these evenings, there were two main tasks: someone was delegated the role of placing the order over the phone, and another the job of walking to pick it up. The phrase “Who’s going to get the Athenian?” was a predictable inquiry in our Sunday evening repertoire. In the dead of Chicago winter, walking two blocks after sunset can be painful. Whoever braved the cold was viewed as taking one for the team.

Despite our consistent patronage to the restaurant, I never developed a love for the food growing up. I didn’t enjoy the taste of meat, which was indeed their specialty. In fact, as an insult I would often tell my brother that he “smelled like the Athenian Room” when he would return from being out on a humid, sweaty summer day. Nonetheless, each member of my family was committed to their “usual.” Mom savored the two-inch thick feta burger on a red sauce stained sesame seed bun, for dad it was the oregano-crusted Greek chicken dripping in olive oil and lemon, and for my brother, always the gyros shaved straight from the spit and into a freshly warmed pita, saturated with extra red sauce and tzatziki. Then, there were, of course, always two additional side orders of Greek fries specially crisped to a deep golden brown. I must admit that I did enjoy the fries, but grease laden starch didn’t seem a substantial meal for a growing girl. On any other occasion, this sentiment would have been shared by my parents. On Athenian Nights, however, fries were a fine substitute for a complete meal, the argument strengthened by my brother’s notion that that red sauce was a vegetable.

After 18 years in the same brownstone home on Fremont Street, I left my neighborhood and Chicago to study Anthropology in Boulder, Colorado. This transition quickly made clear how deeply my Chicago roots had been sown. The diversity of my home town did not exist in Boulder where I felt young, white, pseudo-hippies dined exclusively on hummus, vegan burritos, tofu stir fry and barbequed tempeh. While I myself was trying to be vegan at the time, I quickly grew tired of the aroma carried by the “trust-a-farians” whose dirty dreadlocks chronically emitted scents of garlic and over-priced craft beer. I missed all the unique tastes and aromas of my city. The smell of Chicago classics like stale Old Style beer and boiled hot dogs squished between a steamed S.Rosen poppy seed bun felt so far away. Boulder seemed void of both authenticity and culture.

That year, I returned to Chicago to celebrate Christmas. On my second night back, I convinced my dad to walk with me to The Athenian just a few blocks away. It was particularly cold; we cut through the alley. We walked with our hands stuffed deep in our pockets, keeping our breath shallow to lock the cold out of our lungs and hungry bellies. And then, my nose was filled with smells overwhelmingly familiar. Almost immediately, I could decompose the symphony of aromas. Greek fries, freshly lit saganaki, warmed pita bread, and that gyros releasing its juices while roasting over that pit of flames. I stopped in my tracks. I lifted my hunched head, putting my nose high in the air to take a big, freezing cold whiff of the moment. Beginning to cry from what would have appeared to be out of the blue to any outsider, my dad stared at me with eyes that scolded, “Amy, It’s way too cold for an Amy meltdown.” In that precise second, the true significance of the Athenian Room to my life experience was revealed. Much more than Sunday nights, it was my daily walks to school, it was my neighbors, it was my brother, it was my family and it was “taking one for the team” on the coldest of Chicago nights.

Currently living in Los Angeles Amy Kingson Neiman is working to incorporate her past experiences as a farm-to-table educator with her interests in the larger food world.