Tag

family recipes

Browsing

by Sheila Squillante

For the Batter
6 eggs
Pinch salt
6 heaping tbsp flour
1 ½ cup milk

For the Filling
1 lb ricotta cheese
½ lb mozzarella cheese, shredded
Fresh parsley or 1 tsp dried
3 or 4 eggs
Salt & pepper to taste
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

Start with the recipe—a dingy yellowed index card transcribed in your own hand at some point in the last—what?—fifteen years, probably. Place it on the counter, read it over, and realize that what you have is only the ingredient list, not the instructions for putting the dish together. Tell yourself you watched your grandfather stand at the stove and make these enough times that you can easily improvise. Remember, though, that he had your grandmother as his “wingman,” so call your husband in and ask him to stand by.

First, make the batter. Beat the eggs in a gleaming silver bowl with your mother’s red silicone whisk. Add milk and wonder if it’s too much—it’s not. It’s supposed to be loose and thin. Add salt and flour, a little at a time, so as to avoid making a mess of lumps.

Or, dump in all the flour at once and curse when you see tiny islands of white floating on an eggy-milk sea. Whisk and whisk and whisk. Decide islands are nice and make the filling. Combine all the filling ingredients and stop yourself from adding dried oregano and garlic powder, even though you are certain it would complement the cheese. Stop yourself because you want to honor your grandfather to the letter even though you are certain he wouldn’t give a hoot, darlin’. He’d just be happy you’re having fun in the kitchen.

Think now, about the kitchen. This one belongs to your mom, who lives on the east coast of Florida, three hours straight across from your grandparents’ home in Port Charlotte, on the west coast. This one is white and red and bright with new appliances. That one is seventies-yellow with worn linoleum and butterfly dishtowels, pilled from years of use.

Or, it was.

The kitchen is still there, of course, but your grandparents are gone two years now and you are making this most iconic dish of theirs in tribute, through some tears and some shame. Tears are easy to come by—you are an easy cry. Shame, though, is new. Shame came unexpectedly a few days ago when you and your husband drove past the abandoned rambler on Quesada Ave. You needed to see it, you told him, and he understood. The only home that had been in your life for your whole life, mortgaged beyond its value in a terrible market, no one to take it on, gone now back to the bank that is too busy to deal with it.

Shame came when you got out of your rental car and walked through the scraggy grass to the screen porch and peered in to find the walls still adorned with your grandparents’ things: a portion of the rubber inner tube your son used as a baby near the now-drained and scummy spa; a wooden sculpture of the California Raisin someone made for them in the 80s (which you always hated); the Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs you gave them for their sixtieth wedding anniversary—one says their names and wedding date, one says “God Bless This House.”

*

In the Fantasy of What Could Have Happened Next, maybe you felt a proprietary impulse rise like spa bubbles from the hollow of your chest and you pressed the button on the flimsy door handle and pulled. Locked. Rage and need. Maybe you pulled again and this time maybe it opened. This time maybe you forgot yourself, forgot you were not coming in to your grandparents’ home like you had for thirty years, but were instead trespassing on bank property. In the Fantasy of What Could Have Happened Next, maybe you found yourself standing on the porch, stumbling past the spa and yanking on the kitchen slider. Open. In.

Maybe you stood in your grandparents’ kitchen—empty and moldy now—and tried to remember everything that ever happened there. The phone call you took from the financial aid office about your college scholarship. Your mother making coffee. Your grandmother lifting her skirt up to her knee to show off her “great gams” to your husband while the video camera recorded. Your grandfather standing at the stove making crepe after crepe after crepe, filling them with cheese, layering them with tomato sauce in Pyrex pans. Hours on end.

And that last November: holding his soft, weak hands at the Formica dinette (in the kitchen he swears your father still visits him), while your mother talks to hospice. Telling him his love of sixty-six years is gone.

In the Fantasy of What Could Have Happened Next, maybe you grabbed one of their juice glasses—the red, blue and yellow striped ones they used to take their pills every morning—off the counter and fled back to your rental car, hoping that anyone who saw also saw your sobbing, remembered your grandparents, put two and two together and forgave you your trespasses, even in your shame.

*

Leave the screen porch, the scraggy grass, Quesada Ave, your grandparents’ and father’s graves just up the road at Restlawn.

Leave the Fantasy and go back to your mother’s kitchen.

*

Be sure to let the crepe batter come to room temperature before you attempt to cook. Pour a cup of tomato sauce into the bottom of a square baking dish. Heat an 8-inch non-stick pan over medium high heat and brush generously with olive or vegetable oil.

Ladle ½ cup of batter (possibly less) into the bottom of the pan and swirl to coat. Cook until the wet top looks dry-ish. Carefully flip (they shouldn’t be browned) and cook five or so seconds on the other side. Remove to a plate or clean prep surface.

Understand that you are probably going to ruin several of these at the start. The pan will either be not hot enough or not oiled enough or you will rip them upon lifting and will have to fling them, cursing like your grandfather—Yer sister’s got a big one!—into the sink.

Now it’s a dance: put a tablespoon or slightly more of the filling in a line down the middle of the crepe and roll it up. While you are doing this, ladle some more batter, oiling the pan as necessary—which will likely be often– as you go. Place the manicotti into the baking dish as you make them. Resolve that you will be standing at the stove, thinking of your grandparents, Rocky and Jo, for a long time.

When all the manicotti are made and snug in their pan, pour some good red sauce over them and top with some shredded mozzarella. Cover pan with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for 30 minutes, removing the foil in the last ten minutes so the cheese can get all melty and nice.

Let stand on the counter for fifteen minutes before serving to your mother, who cared for your grandparents in the eighteen years of their life between your father’s—their son’s—death and their own, and to your husband, who is very glad you are not in Fantasy Jail.

 

This essay is part of a book-length memoir, Dead Dad Day: A Memoir of Food and My Father. Sheila’s essays and poems have appeared most recently in places like Brevity, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Thrush Poetry Journal, Superstition Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Penn State.

by Ann Jaramillo

Here is my mom’s recipe for apple pie:

2 C. flour
2/3 C. shortening
1 tsp. salt

Mix 1/3 C of the above flour with ¼ C water.
Makes 1 double pie crust. Can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled.
Mix a mound of apples with heaping ¼ C of flour, 1 tsp. of cinnamon, 1 ½ C. sugar.
Bake at 450 for 15 minutes. Then 350 for 45 minutes.
 
Here’s what the recipe does not say:

  1. It really doesn’t make quite enough for a big glass pie plate. You sort of need to double the recipe. Roll out the leftovers, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar, and bake with the pie.
  1. About 90% of the time, an extra dab of shortening helps with the roll-out. I can’t tell you how much. It just has to feel right. The pie gods also have to be smiling down on you.
  1. Oh, yeah, you cut the shortening into the flour, then mix in the flour/water paste.
  1. Shortening means Crisco. Maybe it used to mean lard, but Mom never said it did.
  1. If you’re snooty about Crisco, go ahead and use part butter. You’ll get a different crust. It might, or might not, be better.
  1. The recipe might have come from someone in Kansas, or the old Joy of Cooking, or from my Grandma Petie. I don’t know now where Mom got it, and she’s gone, so I can’t ask.
  1. Sometimes you have to throw the dough away and start all over. This can happen if the weather is funky, or you’re crying because your brother died, or if you over-salted, or you wonder what the tiny crawly things are in the flour only to find your entire cupboard infected with tiny crawly things.
  1. One can eat a lot of uncooked pie dough. A lot. Be careful.
  1. Use your hands. Forget pastry tools. Feel the dough. When it’s right, you’ll know.
  1. It’s okay if the dough breaks and you have to do some patching. Some of the best tasting pie doesn’t look that pretty. “Pretty is as pretty does,” Mom always said. That applies to pie, too.
  1. After the first 15 minutes of cooking, take the pie out and put foil under it, unless you prefer a big smoking mess of bubbling pie juice on the bottom of your oven.
  1. Not-quite-ripe Gravenstein apples, picked straight off the tree in the backyard in the morning when the grass is dewy, make an awfully good apple pie. You can throw in a couple of golden delicious if you’ve got them. When I was little, Petie would ask Grandpa J. W. to peel and slice the apples. He’d do it quietly and perfectly, a white dish towel tied around his ample middle. I could sample as many as I wanted. He’d just do more.
  1. Don’t bother with ice cream. It doesn’t need it.
  1. By the way, this dough also makes a killer blackberry pie. Use only wild blackberries:  not the big-as-your-thumb dusty, seedy ones found next to any old road or ditch, but the small-as-your-pinkie-nail ones that only grow on the logged off areas on the mountain sides, in far-flung patches known only to a few. If you don’t have your own secret spot, you’ll have to meet a guy named Mitch up on Route 29 by the giant downed fir tree next to the abandoned U-Haul place, and you’ll have to pay a lot for a gallon of them, but they’re worth every cent. Use a pinch of lemon zest, and way more sugar than you think you’d need.
  1. When you serve the pie, cut good-sized pieces. This is not “just a sliver” pie.
  1.  Make two or three extra pies and put them in the freezer. You can be snooty about that, too, if you want, and insist only on fresh. I’d rather have the taste of those gravensteins in the deep of December when it’s rained for eight days non-stop, and the only apples to be in the store had are mushy cold-storage red delicious which make nasty pie and only passable sauce.
  1. Give the recipe away, over and over.  I’ve never kept it a secret, because there’s no reason to.  Fruit pie lovers often ask for the recipe, but most just look longingly at the flaky crust and oozy sweet filling, and say, “I just can’t make pie.”  Of course, that’s not true.  Anybody can make pie.  The key is practice, and more practice.  But I know good cooks with plenty of persistence who won’t make pie.  It doesn’t have to do with a good work ethic, or even skill in the kitchen.What’s hard to take is the disappointment. No matter how much you practice, or how closely you follow the recipe, pies very often disappoint. You can’t count on them to turn out.  The crust will be tough, even though you’ve barely handled it.  The filling will be watery, refusing to thicken up, despite the usual amount of flour or cornstarch or tapioca. The apples will be rubbery and stubbornly hard, or mushed into a goopy mess, though they’ve been baked just as always.

    The disillusionment of pie making can be too close to real life. We do all the right things, we follow the recipes, and for what? See how things turn out, despite our best efforts? But here’s what I know happens if I keep on baking.  I get, when I least expect it, a perfect pie. It feels like a gift I don’t deserve. The serendipity of its perfection gives me hope, and sense of continuity.  It’s happened before. Here it is now. It will happen again.

Ann Jaramillo is the author of a novel, La Línea.