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Felicity LuHill

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Poetry

‘Till Death Do Us Part,’ by Jose Oseguera

There’s the animal and its flesh.
At times interchangeable, but not quite the same.
Anglo-Saxon named the beasts, French their meat
At death do they part:

Beef from cow;
Venison from deer; pork from pig;
Mutton, sheep and Poultry, chicken.
At what point does man become spouse?

Poussin is a young chicken, fowl good enough
To feed two young lovers, on not much money,
Due to be wed in a few months;
Not fully committed to a fully grown bird.

Poisson is fish, salmon we buy every other week
Whenever we have extra cash or need a breather from the chicken’s–
Butterflied in Ziploc bags– rotten egg smell:
“Throw it out and order a pizza” is her solution to these odors of married life.

Pullet is a young hen.
“Pull it, and cut the wing off,” I insist.
Even in my mood– as our love grows old and the butter, brown–
I’m reminded of when I first loved her in the Tenderloin,
Nested near the San Francisco Bay,
When the thought of being only hers first crossed my mind.

Jose Oseguera is an LA-based writer of poetry, short fiction and literary nonfiction. Having grown up in a diverse urban environment, Jose has always been interested in the people and places around him, and the stories that each of these has to share; those that often go untold.

His work has been featured in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Rigorous, Sky Island Journal, Jelly Bucket, OTHER. Magazine, TOE GOOD, The Scene & Heard Journal, Zimbell House Publishing, and Authorship by The National Writers Association.

Featured image via PublicDomainPictures.net.

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Poetry

‘An Ode to Brötchen,’ by Hazel Lin

Sweet Brötchen, swathed in dishcloth-
layered baskets, the call of your brethren
is deafening. In every bakery they coo
with the fragrance of burnt butter
neatly touching, plumping for purchase
in ardent display of crusty cleavage.

Sweet Brötchen, had it instead
been two loaves and five fish, had you
spread your recipes down the Jordan.
To every god who demands your offering,
to every pilgrim who starves in believing,
you who appear in the prophet’s dreams.

Sweet Brötchen, oh why is the bakery closed
on Sunday, but every other day, every other day,
we gather you, with hams and cheese,
for delicious breakfast food. And sweet
sweet Brötchen I confess – I never lie,
my stomach cries, (in fact) it was all good.

Hazel Lin is a grad student currently based in Germany.

Featured image via Flickr.

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Non-Fiction

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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Non-Fiction

Poet of the Month: ‘Takes on Food & Poetry,’ by Darren Lyons

Joyce Carol Oates wrote, “If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?” I don’t know about that, but most afternoons, you’ll find me at Chipotle, commenting on poems. Something about the ambience and the familiarity of a burrito bowl focuses me.

Right now, I think Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Fame is a fickle food (1702),” is the best food poem. It’s also about fame. To write a poem to be famous is, of course, ludicrous. I always say, “I just want readers,” and one of my professors once asked whether I’d rather have a thousand ambivalent ones or ten who get it, and I think I’d rather have the latter. Dickinson’s bite-sized-but-endlessly-fulfilling poem reminds us that, in the end, we all die.

Kevin Young wrote, “One of the things I think [poets] enjoy about a great meal is that it goes away….” I think one of the things about a finished, published poem is that, once it’s out in the world, it takes on its own life within and among the lives of its readers. I find this endlessly comforting and freeing. Language is inherently unstable and its meaning shifts depending on the time, place, and experience of its consumers. The transaction that occurs between poet and reader by means of the poem is one of fluidity and flux. It’s probably naive to think poetry or dinner can save the world. When I’m tired, though, or hungry, just one more line or the next bite can feel that way. Writing poetry, like finding a place to eat, for me, is an intuitive practice. My best lines come from the minutes between sleeping and waking, and as they accumulate, those can become the first draft of a poem. Likewise, where to eat, what I’m hungry for, is a daily decision that just seems to happen. Another thing I always say is, “A writer is always writing.” I’m always observing and rolling potential lines through my mind. I’m also always hungry for actual food.

After moving to New York City, Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown reinvigorated food for me, where to go in this endless city, and I began to hunt for the best Thai, the best Chinese, the best out-of-the-way hole. Bourdain is an eclectic eater, happy in both a Bellagio suite and a street-food stand in Hue. I’m like that, or I’d like to be like that. He revels in tripe and hoofs and lips and heads. I’d like to be like that.

Charles Baudelaire is quoted saying, “Any healthy man can go without food for two days—but not without poetry.” I don’t know about that, but once you’re moved by a poem, you crave the taste of the sublime that it provides. For what it’s worth, I absolutely could not go two days without food, but maybe that just means I’m not healthy.

Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.

Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.

Featured image: “Portrait de Charles Baudelaire,” by Gustave Courbet

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Poetry

Poet of the Month: ‘Today’s Featured Meal,’ by Darren Lyons

Under leaf and footfall, in the alley’s
otherwise quiet, Rat smelled the divine
sweat-reek of a corner-bistro bag.

           [Rat wrote the book on gourmet
           dumpster-diving for rodents,
           and after each meal, by his last bite,
           he’d know whether he’d write
           about it—on his blog—
           for days or not.]

And now, here, tearing in,
he found, below the bread,
moistened by a bitter juice-mix of the house red
and negroni drops, the tenderest rabbit,
braised in Oregon pinot gris and rosemary
over gorgonzola polenta. What a treat!
He ate—savored the waste—searched for words…

Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.

Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.

Featured image via Flickr.

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People

‘The Pursuit of Contenta: Profile of Luis Mota,’ by Felicity LuHill

Felicity LuHill

It’s two in the afternoon on a Thursday and Luis Mota, the owner of La Contenta Oeste, asks me if I want to do a wine tasting. Ignoring the better part of my judgment, I say yes and we spend the next two hours chatting and drinking delicious Mexican wine. Luis discusses which wines are most popular in Mexico (L.A Cetto, a Nebbiolo grape) and describes the different areas of Mexico the wines came from, how some of them come from areas close to the ocean, giving the wine a slightly salty taste. He believes that the way wine tastes is extremely personal.

One of his goals in opening La Contenta is to introduce New Yorkers to Mexican wine. “Mexican wine doesn’t have the history,” he laments. Unlike at a typical wine tasting, our sommelier pours us healthy portions.

Next, we eat. La Contenta’s enchiladas have a mouth-watering layer of a tomatillo sauce on top and tender, melt-in-your-mouth chicken inside. Luis explains that all five senses should be utilized when enjoying food, including touch. He demonstrates the best way to hold a taco, insisting that tacos should never, under any circumstances, be eaten with a knife and fork.

Felicity LuHill

Luis Mota grew up in Mazatlan, Mexico. Originally, he thought he would have a career in the army. “I wanted to be a hero,” he says, recalling Rambo as his source of inspiration. But after three years of burning down marijuana and opium poppy fields—a major preoccupation of the Mexican army at the time—he decided life in the army wasn’t for him. When he looks back at this time, he laughs at the irony of how marijuana is now legal in many parts of the US. “I almost died over there in the mountains trying to destroy the marijuana,” he recalls. While in the army, he met his wife, a New Yorker, who was on vacation in Mexico and happened to stop by his hometown. After traveling around Mexico for several months, the two decided to get married and live together in New York. It was here that his journey as a cook and restaurateur began.

Luis started out as a dishwasher at Carmine’s in Times Square, choosing the job so he could be fed and be around other Spanish speakers. “It was just a necessity, something to survive,” he claims. But after spending enough time in the kitchen and learning to do prep, he wanted to take cooking on seriously. He saw a magazine ad for Le Cordon Bleu and decided to take a 12-week course in Paris, and even spent time cooking in bistros for free after the course ended. During this time, he learned a lot about classic French cuisine and about the importance of conserving resources, from ingredients to water to electricity, an ideology he strives to pass on in the United States. “It’s the way you appreciate what you have,” he says.

Still, after returning from his training in Paris, he was only ever planning on being a cook. After working steadily as a cook for a private club on Park Avenue for some time, a manager approached him with an idea for starting a restaurant. “I didn’t have this ambition to open a restaurant, it was just destiny,” he remembers. The rent in the West Village was high but they went for it. “We had a lot of energy, so we decided we’d risk it,” he says. And so Luis’s first restaurant, Café Condesa opened in 2005, utilizing all of his knowledge of cooking up until then, Mexican, French and even Asian influences, to create a “New York Style.”

Lisa Kaplowitz

Later, in 2009, it was Luis’s turn to spearhead the opening of Ofrenda, a more traditional style Mexican restaurant—one with a menu that did not include guacamole. “That was my idea, ‘Mexican cuisine is not about guacamole only,’” he remembers, laughing at himself back then. “It was a really bad idea, because in the end, eighty percent of people order guacamole.” Luis reflects on the many lessons he’s learned through the course of his career, and how he’s still learning today with La Contenta Oeste.

As it turns out, even in downtown Manhattan, New Yorkers have very different preferences. While patrons of the original La Contenta on the Lower East Side love the flavors of the modern Mexican dishes, West Villagers visiting La Contenta Oeste seem to have trouble with the heat. “Mexican food is all about the use of peppers,” Luis explains, describing how different peppers make different dishes distinct. Today, he still strives to find the balance between making a more sensitive palate happy while sticking to his Mexican roots.

But La Contenta is about more than its modern take on Mexican food. One of Luis’s biggest goals is for his restaurant to feel connected through all of its moving parts. When he first started cooking, there was always tension between “the front of the house” and “the back of the house,” the waiters and the cooks. During his experience as a pastry chef for Union Square Café, he learned how it could be different. There, everyone was friendly with one another because, as he learned, everyone in the restaurant was a team working towards one goal: to make the customer happy. “We work for the people,” Luis reflects. “We try to create an experience, to create something you can enjoy the moment you are in the door.” To make this happen, it’s important that everyone in the restaurant is comfortable with one another and working together. La Contenta’s logo is based on this idea of bridging the divide between the different parts of the houses. In the logo, the back of the house, the front of the house and the bar are represented as a cook, a maitre d and a bartender, coming together in one being.

Lisa Kaplowitz

The team mentality is very apparent as we chat. Even as he talks, he consistently checks up on guests, waiters, the bartender, the hostess. He greets the employees that are starting their shift and teases the waiters. He talks about how for family meal, he makes sure that everyone’s needs are accounted for. A waiter named Victor prefers egg whites, so he makes sure he gets egg whites. After seeing him interact with his employees, it’s not surprising to learn that Luis participated in the “Day Without Immigrants” last year by closing La Contenta for a day in support of his immigrant employees.

In addition to standing in support with his staff, Luis also supports local elementary schools by hosting cooking classes for the kids from PS41 across the street and students coming down from the Bronx, teaching them how to make tortillas, chocolate, and churros by hand. This, he says has been one of his most gratifying experiences as a restaurant owner, “because it’s the most honest,” he says.

From @lacontentanyc on Instagram

So what’s next for Luis and La Contenta? “What I really want to do is go to another country,” Luis says. Now, he’s looking toward international destinations to open his next restaurant, places like Berlin or Dubai. By the end of our conversation, I’m pickled and full of food. When I ask for the check, Luis says not to worry about paying, yet another example of his generosity.

Felicity LuHill

Learn more about Luis and La Contenta here. Follow their gorgeous photos on Instagram.

Featured image by Lisa Kaplowitz.

Felicity is a Second Year Creative Writing MFA Candidate at The New School. She is also the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. Along with The Inquisitive Eater and The New School Creative Writing Blog, her writing has been published with Barbershop Books, Healthy Materials Lab, and Enchantress Magazine, where she was also an editor. Felicity enjoys writing in all forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

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Poetry

Poet of the Month: ‘Missed Connection,’ by Darren Lyons

I bought a Zinger at that bodega
over there, and I swore, still swear, after
I thanked him, the salesman said, “I love you.”
Mid-turn, I stopped, whipped back, and considered
his eyes, wet with wasted days. I
swallowed down hard my “I love you, too” and left.
Could it be, I thought, as I downed my cream-
filled center, that I’d found, in the least, my
soulmate there? He wouldn’t dare, and I should
certainly not presume, but lingering
on, at least till the next day, that snack cake
had a specific zing, I’m telling you.

Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.

Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.

Featured image via Flickr.

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Art & Text

‘Grave You Will Never Find,’ by Jiaranai Apaipak

Blurring the boundaries between traditional modes of painting Jiaranai Apaipak transforms still-life objects into sprawling landscapes. Jiaranai creates a world from food, candy, and desserts that are colored by her rich cultural background. While her relationship with color is directly a result of her early years living in India with its vibrant colors, her compositions draw from influences ranging from the old masters, abstract expressionism to Japanese Animation.

Born in Thailand, Jiaranai grew up in India, New Zealand, the United States and Canada. She received her BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2013 before moving to Toronto, Ontario to work as an art teacher and manager of a small art school. During her time in Canada, Jiaranai has also worked as a freelance portrait artist. She graduated with an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2017. Her paintings and sculptures are in private collections in Thailand, Canada, and the United States. Jiaranai has been a part of several group exhibitions in Nova Scotia and New York. She lives in New York and works in Jersey City. Website: www.jiaranaiapaipak.com Instagram: @Wookiepuff

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Poetry

Poet of the Month: ‘The Problem with Eating Late,’ by Darren Lyons

Sebastian’s
            garlic sour-pickle muse
floats down
            in little hours, when he’s mute
with doze,
            babbles inner-ear, his ill-mate
of wicked dreams,
            demon songs, hints a mite
or louse,
            might just, with pinch-mandibles, bite
him to death-
            by-a-thousand-cuts, his bile
rising like fire
            or Harley motor-bike
climbing
            Pike’s Peak, bed-crumbs the sun’ll bake
in a human heat,
            claiming nothing jake,
fool’s bane,
            third-eye cuke spins joke after joke.

Darren Lyons is The Inquisitive Eater's Poet of the Month for April 2018.

Darren Lyons is currently earning his MFA in poetry at the The New School. His work has been featured in Chronogram, Stonesthrow Review, and on The Best American Poetry Blog.

Featured image via Flickr.

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Non-Fiction

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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