“This was the beginning of my love affair with food”
My mom first became interested in food through her grandparents. My great-grandparents, on my grandfather’s side, owned a grocery store in Brooklyn when my mother was little, and she remembers the stainless steel refrigerator cases, the sawdust-coated wood floors, and the marble deli counter where her grandfather made salami sandwiches for my mom to sneak into the movies. My mother’s favorite part of the store however, was the pickle barrel, where her grandmother Fannie would make her own pickles and sauerkraut. Fannie once told my grandfather that while she was growing up in Russia her family had a cellar where they would hide from the Cossacks, preserve fruits, and pickle watermelons. My mother once pickled a watermelon so my grandfather could finally have what had intrigued him all these years. It was disgusting. But, my mom says she had fun trying to recreate old family recipes.
In addition to owning a grocery store, Fannie was also a fabulous cook. My grandfather often said that she could make a feast out of flour and water and potatoes. My mother remembers how Fannie used to make blintzes, knishes, potato pancakes, and perogan for the whole family. In contrast to Fannie, my mother told me her other grandmother, Ethel, was a terrible cook. Ethel would make mayonnaise sandwiches, “pizza” with catsup and American cheese, hamburgers like hockey pucks, and tuna with miracle whip, which Ethel forced my mother and aunt to finish. It was through her two grandmothers that my mother, as a young girl, established a dichotomy between good food, and bad food.
When my mom was in junior high school, she began cooking in her home economics class. It was in this class that she discovered Gourmet Magazine, and as she put it: “this was the beginning of my love affair with food.” After discovering Gourmet, my mom remembers trying out new recopies from the magazine throughout high school. The next leg of my mother’s adventure with cooking came after college when she took a Chinese cooking class and began to cook “heavy duty.” Chinese cooking lessons led to my mother taking cooking classes at The New School where she decided she wanted to cook professionally. While taking classes, my mother worked as a bartender and became a cooking assistant at a local restaurant. Unfortunately, my mom found cooking professionally to be “too isolating” because she worked irregular hours and did not get to see much of her family or friends. While she decided against working as a chef, my mother still took cooking classes and became the teacher’s assistant so she did not have to pay.
One year, my mother went on a trip to Paris with her cooking school, where she remembers “walking around outdoor markets, touring fancy restaurants, taking cooking classes in France, and going on campaign tastings.” Best of all, my mother’s class got to eat at Le Tour d’Argent, a famous restaurant overlooking the Seine and Notre Dame de Paris, where she had (among other things) pressed duck. She speculates that today, the meal she had there would cost around four hundred dollars. When she returned from Paris my mother cooked for her grandmother Ethel’s fiftieth anniversary, where she made a Baked Alaska, a desert consisting of ice cream, cake, and meringue, that gets set on fire.
My great-grandmother’s cooking created a passion for food in my mom that transferred down to me, although it has manifested itself differently. I have the bizarre passion to track down and eat the strangest food (relative to my American upbringing) that I possible can. In addition to many other things, I have had brain, eye, kangaroo, antelope, stingray, and sea urchin, which I have acquired the ability to butcher and prepare. Recently, I helped my mother cook spareribs in black bean sauce, a relic from her Chinese cooking classes, for my grandfather who loved the dish and had not had it in years. Fortunately he was able to have eat it one last time before he passed away in April. Like my mother, like my grandfather, and like my great grandmother, food is one of my favorite things in the world; while exotic foods excite my taste buds and fuel my sense of adventure, nothing compares to the well of memories a simple dish from your past can bring back.
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