Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (12 page)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a small bowl, beat the egg with the milk. Sift together into a second bowl the flour, baking powder, salt and tablespoon of sugar. Cut the butter or margarine into the dry ingredients with a pastry blender or two knives until the mixture is the consistency of cornmeal. Stir in the egg and milk. Spread batter in a greased pan (8 × 8 × 2 in.)
.

Press apple slices into batter in rows. Brush top with part of the melted butter or margarine, sprinkle with the combined sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg and top with remaining melted butter or margarine. Bake in a quick oven until the cake leaves the sides of the pan and is nicely browned on top, twenty-five minutes or more. Serve warm or cool cut in squares
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• • •

DECEMBER 2008

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

I’m standing in front of Fairway, a high-end market famous for its cheese and olive selection, fresh fish, fine meats, and house-made matzo ball soup, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If it’s not the Tiffany’s of food, it’s close. Aside from the high quality of their
stock, the location alone adds an extra thirty percent to your grocery bill. The people who live in this neighborhood aren’t exactly worried about money, and in the past I would have shopped here without giving it a moment’s thought. In fact, being able to do that was one of the signs I’d made good, or as Grandpa would’ve said, “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, kid.” Today I’ll be shopping there with my unemployment debit card.

The only reason I’m going in at all is for the bread and the fish. I was visiting a friend in the neighborhood and walked by Fairway—and almost kept walking because I can’t afford to go in there anymore. For a person who loves food, being in Fairway is like being a kid loose in a toy store, and now I was going to tell that kid, “You can have whatever you want, as long as it costs under ten dollars.”

But I think about how nice it would be to come home and present Nathan with a loaf of their fine, crusty French bread and for us to have fish—not the kind in our local supermarket that was inexpensive but had been farm-raised, fed pellets, injected with dye to make it look like wild fish, and shipped here from far away. I want
real
fish that has been caught nearby and
cleaned before my eyes, almost like the fish my grandfather caught for me. (Now I can add something else to the list of things that show my age: “When I was young, a plain old flounder caught out of the water wasn’t a specialty item!”) So, seduced by the lure of simple, pure food, I formulate my plan: Get in, get the bread and a cheap piece of fish for dinner, and get out.

The only thing I hadn’t counted on was the raisins.

I never thought I could be seduced by a raisin—they’re the fruit world’s version of sensible shoes—but these are unlike any raisins I’ve ever seen. The label reads, “French Raisins: No dried fruit of this quality has ever been in New York,” and I believe it. Raisins are usually small, dark, dried up, and unremarkable. But these are plump and juicy-looking in a way a normal raisin wouldn’t dare to be, still sassy with colors of gold, deep purple, and a full-bodied black. They have joie de vivre.

They’re also $5.99 for a small container. Utterly ridiculous. I’m on unemployment and have had practically no freelance assignments or job prospects for weeks. Our heating bills are up. Our health insurance costs almost as much as our rent. I’ve been cutting laundry dryer sheets in half to make the box
last longer, for goodness sake. I should be watching every penny I spend.

At this moment I suddenly feel poor. Not technically, because I have a savings account and a zero balance on my credit card. But this feeling isn’t about money. It’s why Nana always said, “We may have been broke, but we were never poor.” By monetary standards, there have been plenty of times my family came close to the definition of poverty. But now I finally understand what Nana meant.

As I stand there in the market aisle holding the French raisins, I can hear my mother’s voice telling me, from the time I was little, the stories of how our family defied poverty not of the wallet but of the soul.

• • •

DECEMBER 1890

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

When Peter arrived home from work, it took him a moment to figure out what was missing: the smell of dinner.

“Matilde?” he called. Little Carrie came running to hug him, holding baby Willie in her arms. He picked
them both up, kissed them hello, and went looking for his wife. He found her in the kitchen, but there was nothing cooking on the stove. “Where is our supper?” he asked.

“This is it,” she said, nodding toward a loaf of bread and a bowl of cooked apples she was mashing.

“Bread and applesauce?” Peter asked. “But why? I gave you money for food this morning. You said you were going to the market today.”

And Matilde had been on her way to the market with her list of what she’d need for the week. She’d had every intention of using the wages Peter earned as a stonemason to buy food for the family. And then she’d seen the vases.

The shop sold fine linens, dishes, silver, and other household goods. Matilde had passed by it many times on her way to the butcher’s. If she had a moment, she’d stop and look in the window, and then go on her way. In fact, she’d never even been in the store before—there wasn’t any money for pretty, but unnecessary items. But these vases …

“Good morning,” said the shopkeeper. “May I help you?”

“The blue vases in the window,” Matilde said, traces of the French and German territory still lingering on her words. She didn’t have to say any more; the man smiled and reached for the vases, carefully putting one on a counter and handing her the other.

Matilde could feel the smoothness of the cobalt glaze on the porcelain through her gloves. She admired the fine detail on the front of the vases, the painted scenes of a lady wearing a high white wig and a billowy dress and a gentleman in uniform, both of them in a garden. Matilde carefully held the small gold-painted handles as she turned the vase over. On the bottom in red ink was a number and the words
MADE IN AUSTRIA
. Not that far from home. Matilde had been in America for a while, but this smooth, elegant piece had pulled her back to a place she missed too much.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said the shopkeeper.

• • •

“Yes, they’re beautiful! They’re lovely!” Peter shouted. “But Matilde, a week’s wages? What were you thinking? What are we going to eat?”

Matilde sighed. Her husband’s word was law in his home, but tonight she was unrepentant. She ground a little cinnamon on the mashed apples and said, “We have this.”

“For a week!” Peter said. “Matilde—”

“We will have these vases long after our stomachs are full again,” Matilde said calmly. She pulled herself up to her full, impressive height, picked up a knife, and began carefully slicing the loaf. “So we eat bread and applesauce for a week … It will not kill us.”

• • •

DECEMBER 1961

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

“Why would you waste so much money on cherries?” Charlie asked Matilda when she presented him with a small cache of winter bings.

“Because,” she said, knowing that if she had to explain it, there was no point.

After that, Matilda shared them with her daughter, Carolyn, who understood the importance of a dark red cherry in the middle of winter: the snap of the skin, the
tart juice tasting of summers past and the summer to come.

At the time, Matilda was working in the heart of Columbus Circle at the Coliseum convention center—her business cards, which were pink, read
MATILDA E. KALLAHER, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT FOR SALES
. Carolyn had just started modeling, and she occasionally worked at Coliseum expos like the auto show. Matilda’s boss would look at the teenaged blend of Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly and say, “Mrs. K., your daughter should be in college, not draped over a car.” But Matilda was convinced that Carolyn was going to be a big star.

Carolyn herself wasn’t that hot on modeling, especially after a fortune-teller at one of the Coliseum shows said she was going to die on a photo shoot in Africa at the age of thirty-two. Matilda waved it away. “Just don’t go to Africa.”

“Okay, but if anything happens to me, promise you’ll do my makeup,” Carolyn said. “Don’t let one of those funeral home cosmeticians do it—they’re terrible.”

“Same goes for me,” Matilda said. “Nobody does my eyebrows but you.”

“Deal.” They shook on it and went for their regular visit to the fruit vendor around the corner.

For an assignment in her high school creative writing class, Carolyn had written an essay about one of these early evening trips that took place the previous spring. She described her mother as being wistful for Paris, a place she’d never been to and, though they didn’t know it at the time, would never see. The indulgence du jour was jumbo-sized prunes, and they ate them out of the paper bag as they walked—something people just didn’t do back then. Especially not ladies, whose proper attire included gloves, even in the summertime. As un-done as it was, two blond women almost six feet tall doing it attracted even more attention. Carolyn (who described herself as being the more conventional one) suggested putting the fruit away for later, but Matilda told her not to be silly. “It shows a lot of poise if we can walk along Fifth Avenue eating prunes,” she said. Carolyn laughed. “Mother, you are a hobo at heart.”

One night in the middle of December, the fruit vendor had the winter cherries. They were pricey all right, but Matilda didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t that cold
out, so mother and daughter walked to the park and sat on a bench to enjoy their extravagance.

“Is there anything better in the world,” Matilda said, “than being in Manhattan in Central Park and eating cherries in winter?”

• • •

Matilde gave the fine porcelain vases to Carrie when she got married. Carrie gave them to her daughter, Matilda. And now those vases are sitting on the counter of an antique breakfront in my mother’s kitchen.

Nana’s winter cherries weren’t as expensive as the vases, but they meant the same thing: She spent a little more to keep herself from feeling like less. And when Mom was down to her last twenty and a paycheck wasn’t coming until the end of the week, she’d sing, “We need a little Christmas / Right this very minute,” and we’d go out for dinner.

We might have Wienerschnitzel at Café Hindenburg, one of ten or so similar restaurants in our neighborhood, which was once called Germantown because of the many German immigrants who settled there, including Nana’s grandfather Peter. Or we’d go to the Flaming Embers for a $4.99 steak-and-potato
dinner. We might even get a cherry pie, which we’d take home and eat, bite by bite, over the next few days.