Life From Scratch (3 page)

“OK,” she said, “Write down what we need to do.”

“But I don’t know how to write—”

“Nonsense,” she said and handed me a slip of paper and a pencil.

I filled the small sheet with graphite waves—my first recipe. Mom sat behind me and jotted down the basic instructions. To pay for the ingredients, we collected change in an old jelly jar, Michael helping me scour the sidewalk for pennies. A few months later, once we had enough, we bought the lamb and a one-ounce jar of mint jelly just in time for Easter.

I don’t remember Julia’s recipe any more, or if what we ultimately cooked even was her recipe—and perhaps that was never the point. The point was to get creative in the kitchen, and that’s what Julia Child inspired—what she
always
inspired. With Mom’s guidance we rubbed butter and fresh rosemary over a rack of lamb, pressed fat knobs of garlic into slits throughout the flesh, and blasted it in a 500-degree oven. We didn’t have white paper caps to keep the exposed bones from burning, or a fancy roasting pan like what Julia might have used, but we shaped the rack into a crown and the rosemary-encrusted meat came out tender and juicy all the same.

“Great work,” Mom said with a serious nod as she drew her knife between the bones through the buttery flesh, releasing a puff of gamy steam. Her words made me grin, showing the gap in between my two front teeth.

The three of us devoured the feast at the living room kitchen table silently, alternating between the soft meat and bright bursts of mint jelly. We hadn’t trimmed the thick, white fat from our roast; Mom said it was the best part. She showed us how to chew it and drink the blood pooled up on our plates. As she tipped the porcelain to her mouth, we watched in rapt horror as the swirling, red juices slid between her lips. The brine tasted faintly of metal.

“Waste not, want not. It’ll help you grow,” she winked.

After that Mom let me cook at her side whenever I wanted. She sewed me an apron from a scrap of bright orange fabric, and I paraded through the kitchen in that simple cloth with regal swagger, a wooden spoon for a scepter. And with Mom as my royal counsel, I learned that food never had to be pedestrian.

Instead of serving up plain hard-boiled eggs, Mom tucked whole raw eggs in a braided nest of challah dough; after it finished baking, Michael and I clamored to excavate and peel our edible treasures. And instead of feeding us uninspired bowls of Jell-O, she drilled into raw eggs and taught us how to blow out the insides. After we washed the shells, Michael and I took turns pouring Jell-O through a funnel, into the cavity. Peeling back the cold shell to find a quivering raspberry egg was magic we could create.

Fueled by Mom’s inventiveness, my imagination grew unchecked. No meal was beyond the realm of possibility. As time went on and I learned to write, I’d record recipes for such unlikely delicacies as Julia Child’s
pâté en croute
. If we lacked the time or the means to make a dish, Mom would hand me a pencil and butcher paper.

“No reason to go without,” she’d smile. “Draw it—make me hungry!”

When I was done, she’d feast her eyes on my crude illustrations as though the graphite lines formed an edible banquet. Her inevitable approval always came with one word, exclaimed loud enough to make me jump: “
Yum!
”

CHAPTER 2

A Lifetime P
a
st

O
VER THE YEARS
, Michael would occasionally ask about our father. “Oh, what do you want to know about him for?” Mom would say, ruffling his chestnut mop. “That was a lifetime ago.”

But the two of us spent many afternoons swinging side by side at the park across the street, trying to imagine what our father might look like. Michael said he was probably a firefighter or cop, like Ponch on
CHiPs
. I secretly hoped he
was
Mr. Rogers.

In the absence of a flesh-and-blood father, Michael became my de facto protector. If someone suspicious wandered too close to us while we played, Michael would whack a stick,
rat-tat-tat
, along the underside of the swinging bridge until the offender wandered off. And if the neighborhood kids teased me during a game of kick ball, he’d give them what for, even if it meant he got kicked out of the game.

Though Mom continued to be tight-lipped about her early life, children absorb more than adults might like to admit. This much we knew: Our mother had once had it all—the American dream. And our father was the con artist who ruined everything.

Of course, I now realize that life is never so simple. There are many dreams in a lifetime—dreams that flourish or flounder for reasons much more complex than can be pinned down to any one person or situation. Such is the case with my mother.

Mom was raised in a Catholic immigrant home in Boston, with three generations and several branches of the family tree under one roof. She speaks of her Italian Grammie’s bubbling, sweet-sauced kitchen with the sort of giddy admiration some scholars have for the Roman Empire: Through her young eyes, that kitchen arena was as wildly entertaining as any amphitheater and filled with equally staggering feats of acoustical engineering.

On Sundays, Mom and her best friend, Patricia—a tall, redheaded cheerleader from the tenement apartments down the road—often convened around the kitchen table to watch Grammie make the kitchen sing. With a
“click-click-click,”
the stove would start the show, followed by hiccuping pots, a humming refrigerator, and the bombastic babble of a language the girls would never learn.

The ingredients were the true stars, wheeled home from the market in Mom’s old wicker baby carriage. Every time Grammie unloaded bagged fowl or severed artichoke heads from that unlikely chariot, my mother was thrilled. Not to be outdone, Grampie brought home the daily catch, wrapped in brown paper parcels from his tavern on Atlantic Ave.—fish so fresh it seemed to leap into the pan on its own. By lunch, the table would be a cornucopia: stuffed artichokes; a batch of “zucchini pie,” a crustless slapdashery of eggs, thinly sliced zucchini, Parmesan, and parsley; Grammie’s homemade ravioli; spinach with a wisp of nutmeg; or soft nubs of boiled potatoes tucked in nests of spaghetti. (This last was made by Mom’s magpie aunt Fina, who’d eaten the dish in Genoa as a young girl.)

And then there was the
torta di riso
.

I like to imagine the scene: Grammie frying onions in lard, dancing around the grease until the onions mellowed and she could beat them into day-old rice, eggs, Parmesan, and a ragged handful of parsley. Then she’d knock hunks of carrots and potatoes into a sputtering pot of fowl. Every few minutes when she’d push the bird’s bony feet back into the pot, Patricia would ask, “Does anyone actually eat those?”

Mom responded in her thick Boston accent: “No, but they’re good for flay-vah.”

Grammie always gave the girls three squares each of torta di riso and a few plucks of the once stringy bird.
“Mangia, mangia!”
she’d sing. “Eat, eat—too SKINNY!” Even as Patricia grew curvy, the savory rice squares never filled out Mom’s beanpole limbs.

For Mom, this was a spectacle of heritage; for Patricia, curiosity. The Italian food adventures were so different from those of her Irish upbringing. With her mother regularly resting her nerves, Patricia found comfort in her friend’s loudmouthed, hot-blooded brood.

By age 15, the girls discovered a different sort of attraction: dating. On Saturday nights, they went down to the local church hall to dance the bug with boys in letter jackets and slim-jim ties. The boys lined one wall, the girls the other. It always took forever for the first guy to muster the courage to cross the invisible divide. One night, too eager for formalities, Mom flounced across the room and asked if anyone wanted to dance. A boy named James, the only one with a sensible haircut in a sea of ducktails, stepped forward. After that he always took her to the Saturday night dance.

Five years later, Mom and James were married.

Mom went on to earn her B.S. Ed., double majoring in math and science, with credits toward a master’s degree in the psychology of adolescents from Boston State College. She worked as a math teacher at a nearby school, he as an architect.

By the time she turned 25, in the mid-sixties, they had three children—Connor, and the twins Tim and Grace. Mom quit her job after the twins were born. I’ve seen pictures from that era—little Connor with a trim vest and a balloon of black curls, Tim’s ear-to-ear grin, and Grace, a blond angel in pink seersucker. But it’s Mom who makes me look twice. With her neatly styled curls tamed beneath pillbox hats, she resembled Jackie Kennedy.

Though Connor, Tim, and Grace were more than a decade older than Michael and me, I still remember how Mom would gasp if we deigned to call them our half siblings. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she’d scoff. “There’s no such thing as
half
family. Just call them what they are—your brothers and sister. Anything else is splitting hairs!”

Mom’s friendship with Patricia was a rudder in those early days. The women knit matching sweaters, received matching full scholarships to the Museum of Fine Arts certificate program, and were each other’s bridesmaids. After Patricia and her new husband, Pierre, had three daughters, the two took turns hosting playdates and potlucks.

In the beginning, the food was easy—maybe a quick noodle casserole, a garden salad, a pitcher of lemonade. But when Patricia moved to the suburbs, their gatherings evolved into sit-down dinners with cloth napkins and etched stemware. As she learned the exacting recipes of her new husband’s French family, Patricia began dabbling in velvety salmon mousselines and cheese soufflés. Mom once told me that, though the food was excellent, after a while, there was too much white porcelain. “Either Patricia’s plates were growing,” she said, “or the portions were shrinking.”

It wasn’t long before Patricia and her girls followed Pierre’s career out of the state—and, by the end of the sixties, out of the country. The women wrote letters, but the distance made visits few and far between.