On Food as Memory
From my earliest memories, my mother described me as someone who was a good eater.
This was in contrast with my older brother, who was identified as a so-called picky eater. No such problems with me. I have always loved food with relatively few exceptions. Years after earning this reputation at home, I was told by multiple people that I would be too busy to eat at my own wedding. I suspected they were wrong but I hadn’t been married before. It turns out, yeah, they were wrong. I had no problem enjoying food at my wedding. It was delicious and I helped to plan the menu. Why would I avoid it? Was it tacky or gauche to eat? I didn’t care then and I certainly don’t now. Also, do you know there is a tradition of pushing cake in your new spouse’s face at a wedding? I warned my husband that he’d better not do this but he assured me that he would never consider such a thing. Not only would it mess up my makeup and embarrass me, it would waste cake, which is no laughing matter.
Food and I go way back. I have often thought that if an angry rhinoceros were stampeding through our home, nostrils flaring, I’d at least grab a sports bar or a couple squares of chocolate as I dashed out the door. I mean, I’d need sustenance for survival, right?
Years ago, I heard a diet culture maven claim that people don’t really like food, it’s just a crutch we delude ourselves into believing we enjoy to avoid the big things. I am sure this is true for some of us and on some occasions. I thought about her assertion, really turned it over in my mind. No. I really do objectively love food. It’s not fraught like it would be with an addiction. Food is one of life’s pleasures and I am no exception to loving it.
I have written before about my grandmother and how much I felt my problems dissolve at her kitchen table. Her toast was the best toast, the perfect ratio of cinnamon to sugar, cut on the diagonal because everyone knows that it’s just better that way. Stirring and inhaling bowls of soup as the little Zenith played As the World Turns with that strangely eerie piano-turned-poignant orchestral strings in the opening credits is embedded in my DNA. Baking cookies with her was magical, especially because I had the important responsibility of placing little dabs of jam in the indented middles, like placing belly buttons. My grandmother was an excellent cook, but it is always more than the food, isn’t it? It is how it makes you feel. Loved, protected, known, seen.
I’ve been thinking of food as memory lately, and the relative few meals that stand out in my mind as more memorable from thousands of others. They’re not always great memories; some are quite sad. They are just distinct enough to have stayed with me in some way.
Sometimes they are clusters of memories, like for the entirety of sixth grade, I ate crunchy peanut butter on bread for breakfast every single day, and then for seventh grade, I had cinnamon frosted Pop-Tarts every morning because I’d discovered at overnight camp that summer that I liked those more than raspberry.
There are also memories of food rituals. I haven’t had a Ho Ho, Ding Dong, Twinkie or Hostess Cupcake in more than 40 years now, but the ceremony of eating them is burnished in my brain and my muscle memory: With Ho Hos, the chocolate was picked off and placed on the foil, the sponge cake was unrolled and it was eaten on my fingertips like flatbread, then the chocolate flecks were eaten; with Ding Dongs, same picking off of chocolate, then eating the cake, so it was two treats; with Twinkies (sorry if this sounds weird, I was a weird kid), I stuck my tongue up the little filling injection dots on the underside first, and, oh, with the Hostess cupcakes, the most indulgent of all their range, I pulled the thick, squiggly-lined chocolate off the top first, ate the cake, and then ate the reserved chocolate. None of this seemed strange at the time. It all felt like part of the whole dining experience.
There is also one long memory specifically around boxed stuffing because the first year I lived out of the dorm at 20, that was what I made for dinner most nights because I had no idea what else to do. A $3.00 box would last three or four dinners. I think those stuffing dinners stick out in my mind because it evokes such a time and a place in my life — technically, an adult, but childlike in many regards and facing some very grown up decisions with as much maturity as I could muster — but also because it was the first time I turned on a stovetop with the intention of feeding myself. It was with that box of stuffing that I first noticed that carbs were a salve for many of life’s problems.
It was also in college, the next apartment, that I made dinner for some nearly-forgotten boyfriend but he wouldn’t try the raita, a yogurt condiment for the chana masala I made, and he had no qualms telling me it looked weird and gross. He wasn’t long in my world and I certainly did not cook for him again.
It was in that same tiny basement apartment that I leafed through the Tassajara cookbook, a hippie-ish throwback written by monks that I’d bought out of curiosity and began my first experiments with baking bread. Before I even knew how to cook beyond opening a can and heating up its contents, it made perfect sense to my impulsive, restless brain to try to dive right into testing yeast and developing gluten, punching, folding and stretching dough until I got a feel for it being just right. I did most certainly develop a love for baking bread in that humid kitchen, though, and felt an almost maternal pride at shaping and patting smooth dough into the loaf pans I’d splurged on for my new habit. It was rare that I bought anything but drinks and art supplies at the time but there you go. If the process of baking — and evoking that memory of baking with my grandmother with the bowls, the measuring, adding and stirring — was unexpectedly satisfying, it was nothing like the divine smell and taste of homemade, whole grain bread. There is something to diving into the deep end of the pool because you don’t know any better.
Other snapshots of my food memories: the revelatory meal at the old Mama Desta’s Ethiopian restaurant on Clark Street in Chicago as a teenaged vegetarian who was always just a little hungry; a lunch at Gandhi India with spices, beans, vegetables, grains, flavors and complex aromas I’d never experienced before, also as a young herbivore still in high school. I feel like I walked into those restaurants one person and I walked out an fundamentally altered person.
There’s the sandwich I ate at the Bourgeois Pig, a painfully slow, post-c-section walking distance from the the Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, which was filled with tender roasted vegetables, crisp spinach and hummus on sun-dried tomato bread. All I remember is it was the first time I actually tasted anything since my son was born a week prior. I was able to eat — and it was so comforting and perfect — because we had just been told that our son was able to come home with us that afternoon. It tasted like a sandwich worthy of a queen, and I savored it like the luckiest woman alive.
Most food memories for me are not so momentous, but like snapshots in a photo album: There was Indonesian night at the old Logan Square Beach Club, close to our old apartment, that made me consider and start using peanut butter in a whole new way. There was how excited my mother got when she moved in with and I gave her homemade minestrone soup and she declared it was soup season. Speaking of, there was the eggplant bisque in that warm café with frosted over windows as a snowy January did its thing and I couldn’t believe how delicious it was and how cozy I felt. There were the many pillowy pierogi at Busy Bee under the train tracks, dishes clanging, coffee pot hissing, at the huge lunch counter with punks and retired Polish regulars seated elbow to elbow. There was the time John thought he could use any oil to make pancakes, so he used sesame oil. There was eating a breakfast of tropical fruits picked right off the tree in Negril. There was my son’s first solid food; bananas and avocado mashed together. It was bittersweet that he wasn’t solely consuming what my body produced anymore but he loved it immediately. He’s always been a good eater, like his mother.
Also, though, these are memories that stick with me: Hiding food in my napkin as an eating disorder raged through me at 13. The time a friend marched over to the man who’d raped her and squirted ketchup and mustard all over him, screaming at him as he sat there in shock. (She and I promptly walked out together, arms wrapped tight around each other.) Falling drunk in love for the first time over shared fries at a Perkins booth. I haven’t been to a Perkins in many years, but they always remind me of impending heartbreak.
In M.F.K. Fisher’s vivid “Borderland” from her essay collection, Serve it Forth, she teaches the perfect way to prepare a tangerine.
As Europe was moving toward war in the 1930s, she and her new husband, both from the States, were residing in France for his academic job. She describes how she would peel tangerines while looking out the window, delicately, so as to not bruise the fruit. She would look from her perch out the window as her husband worked at school and she did her careful peeling, watching the soldiers passing, then she would separate each tiny crescent. From there, Fisher would then painstakingly pull off the thick, velvety strings and the thinner strings before she’d place the crescents on yesterday’s newspaper (she was nothing if not resourceful, a true woman of her era) and let them dry on the hot radiator. After they have had some time there — no specifications on how long, but presumably a few hours — she would place the segments outside on the windowsill, ideally in new, ample snow. After a few minutes of cooling, the segments would have a beautifully crisp, papery exterior and a juicy, plump, refreshing pulp. Then they would be perfect for eating with her husband, she assures us.
This simple recipe is so evocative. Not just the flavors, contrasting textures and bright scent, of course, but the heady early days of being married, of being in France as the drive to WWII escalated, of feeling safe but scared, excited and homesick all at once. Of knowing that as she peeled the tangerines and looked out the window at a world that was rapidly changing, she was living the material of her own future nostalgia. (I’ve prepared tangerines à la Fisher before and they are indeed worth it.)
M.F.K. Fisher also wrote about a train trip with her uncle when she was an adolescent. In the dining car, she was blasé about what she wanted to eat and her uncle admonished her, letting her know that being indifferent to your preferences or unknowing about your appetite wasn’t acceptable, and his sternness forced her to look at the menu again with curiosity and self-inquiry for the first time and then order with confidence.
When we talk about food, we talk about so much.
I can’t ever forget going to a party with my grandmother when she was in her 70s. It was an outdoor party of a family friend. My grandfather had recently died after a difficult period of senility and my grandmother was so lost. She didn’t believe in going anywhere empty-handed, though,. so she baked and brought a foil package of raspberry rugelach, an Eastern European rolled cookie. Nobody made it better. It was buttery, crispy on the outside, tender inside. Her secret was cream cheese in the dough and whatever her magic kitchen skills happened to be. A man that neither of us knew took a cookie and was in instant revery. He clutched his heart, smiled and closed his eyes as he chewed. Then he kissed my grandmother’s cheek.
“Thank you,” he said. My grandmother blushed, always a flirt.
He was remembering his mother, maybe, or a grandmother, an aunt, an uncle who owned a bakery, the deli down the street from where he grew up. We all have hungers and sometimes food satiates those cravings even if we don’t know we have them.
If you were to think about a collection of food memories, what would they be? The beautiful ones? The earliest ones? The funniest ones? The saddest ones? The fondest ones? The weirdest ones?
What would be in your food memoir?
Marla Rose is co-founder of VeganStreet.com
