The Best of Electric Velocipede (19 page)

Recipe for Survival

Sandra McDonald

B
rewis is a traditional dish from Newfoundland. It’s pronounced just like one of the black-and-blue marks your father’s grip has left on your arm and when properly prepared comes out as a thick, fishy mush. Your grandfather usually cooks it but on this fine summer day you’re fixing it alone for the first time and want to make sure it comes out exactly right.

First you break apart the hard biscuits (also called hard tack) that Grandpa’s sister sends down now and then from St. John’s. Soak them overnight in a large pan of cold water. Do not use the pan that Grandpa uses to soak his calluses and corns. Do not use soft biscuits that you can buy locally. Hard biscuits are made with wheat flour and water but no leavening agent, and on sailing ships of yore, when your kind would come to slaughter my kind, they could last for entire voyages without spoiling. Try to eat one without softening it first and you’ll break all your teeth.

Next, make sure you have fresh cod on hand. Salted cod can be used as a substitute, but must be soaked overnight in a separate pan. Fresh fish is usually in supply because the year is 1952 and your father, despite his disability, unloads each day’s catch on the Boston piers. But sometimes he forgets to bring his work home with him. Sometimes he forgets to come home at all. Grandpa is much more reliable. He welds iron at the navy yard and has done the household cooking for as long as you remember. He prowls his lime-green kitchen wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and sucking on Camel cigarettes. At dinnertime he fries steaks or boils hot dogs and asks you how your day was at school. If Dad is home, he’ll be drinking a six-pack of Schlitz in the living room and cursing at the news coming out of Korea. Eight years ago he lost his right hand attacking Germans in Normandy. Sometimes you have nightmares about that hand digging its way out of the dark French soil, swimming across the Atlantic and knocking on your door in the middle of the night. If your mother were around you’d go to her when the nightmares wake you, but she’s been gone since she walked into the freezing cold ocean at Christmas in 1948.

Your father’s hand, dear one, would never make it across the ocean. If the sharks didn’t eat it, I would.

Come morning, after the man from Hood’s Dairy has left two half-gallon bottles of fresh milk on the stoop, add salt to the softened biscuits and bring to a near-boil. If you’re using salted fish, change the water and boil for twenty minutes. If you’re using fresh fish, cut into pieces and bake with salt pork for twenty minutes. (Salt pork is fat from the belly of a hog. In 1965 you will become a vegetarian and swear off all animal and fish products. In 1978 you will relax your rules enough to occasionally eat lobster, which your then-husband calls the “cockroach of the sea.” There are worse things in the deep, things that crawl and fight and cower.)

Sometimes Grandpa prepares recipes from Newfoundland that do not involve fish or fat. Of these, toutons are your favorite. Toutons are pieces of dough rolled out with flour and deep-fried in an inch of heavily salted vegetable oil. The fried dough they sell at county fairs is airier and not as satisfying, and the Dutch funnel cakes you will sample on a trip to Pennsylvania are far too sweet. Properly made toutons (thick, slightly chewy, golden brown on each side) are best served cut open with slabs of fresh butter melting inside. You will never get skinny eating toutons for breakfast.

Nor will you ever get skinny if Grandpa has his say. He makes you scrape clean every plate of food and drink three tall glasses of milk each day. You have heard Mrs. Stevens next door say, “So tragic, that girl with no woman to raise her,” and though Grandpa can’t help you sew a skirt or warn you about menstruation, he’s determined to make sure you’re at least properly nourished. Sometimes he and your father go days without speaking to one another, and sometimes when you’re supposed to be asleep you hear them fighting. At times like that you pull your pillow over your head and think of your mother in the ocean, her bones in the stomachs of whales, her hair entwined in seaweed that floats around the world.

Step four of Grandpa’s recipe: Drain the near-boiled soaked biscuits and mix with the fish. Make sure there are no bones in the fish. Although brewis is excellent on its own, you may also add bacon or onions or scrunchions, which are bits of salt pork fried up in a pan.

Once you asked Grandpa why he adds salt to everything. He said that’s just the way things were back in Pouch Cove. (Pouch is pronounced “pooch,” as in dog. Every Christmas you ask for a puppy, but the answer is always no.) Pouch Cove is a small coastal town north of St. John’s where, each spring, icebergs float by on the bay. In the March of 1914, when he was sixteen years old, Grandpa left home to go swiling on a steamship. He was one of a hundred and thirty men who were left stranded on the ice fields during a vicious blizzard. Seventy-eight of them froze to death or drowned in the sea, but Grandpa found me in my royal lair, I who rule all the creatures of the ice. He slit me open with his knife; I clawed him from neck to hip. Twined together on the ice, our hearts’ blood merged. After he was rescued, he traded the frozen seas for a blowtorch in Boston and married a girl who’d emigrated from Harbour Grace. Grandma died before you were born, but her picture hangs in Grandpa’s bedroom. Sometimes says to it, “Ann, it’s a curse. But how can I break it?”

You felt terrible about the ice field disaster until you found out that “swiling” means crushing the skulls of baby seals and slicing off their fat and pelts to sell at market. It was for food, Grandpa says. To feed impoverished, starving families at home. In 1972, in response to protests, the United States will ban the import of Canadian seal products and the industry will whither to fifteen thousand kills a year. In 2006, when you settle in Pouch Cove in the house left by your great-aunt, the worldwide demand for fur will cause the Canadian government to increase the annual quota to three hundred and fifty thousand.

Newfoundlanders, you learn, will always go down to the sea.

Step six: You have successfully cooked your first “feed” or meal of brewis, though no one is there to enjoy it with you. Two weeks ago you woke up to find Grandpa still and cold in his bed. Not dead, thank God, but the stroke has left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak clearly. The doctors don’t know if he’ll ever be released. Your father has promised to come home on time every day but last night he stumbled in late and drunk. After you complained he shook you by the arm and said, “You don’t know anything about it!” You’re afraid nosy Mrs. Stevens next door might tell call the police or social workers, and then you will have to live with strangers. At twelve years old you are beginning to suspect that your life, like those of your parents and their parents before them, will be full of hardship and sadness. But the salt that stings is also the salt that preserves, and you have the strength of the Seal Queen in your veins.

Refrigerate what you’ve made. Clean the kitchen, tidy up the house and go sit in your room, where you keep a photograph of your mother stashed under your pillow. Later, when you’re hungry for a snack, heat the brewis and drizzle it with molasses or brown sugar. Savor the sugar and salt, the cod and pig-fat. After a few months in Pouch Cove you will heed our siren calls and walk fully-clothed into the icy sea. You will come to us, daughter of my blood. We will feed you, and feed upon you. It is how we endure, here on the ice fields. It is our recipe for survival.