Edible Memories Day 11: Food and Tradition

With the exception of infrequent holidays spent with my father’s family in Georgia, we celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas with my mother’s family in Louisiana. The meals were always exactly the same: roast turkey and gravy, green bean bundles (wrap canned green beans in strips of bacon; fasten with a toothpick; bake in the green bean juice; serve), rice dressing and cornbread dressing (sauté the celery-onion-bell pepper trinity, add to it browned beef and then either rice or crumbled cornbread), seriously stanky garlic bread, cranberry sauce, and pecan, pumpkin, apple and blackberry pies.

For some reason, I never liked Thanksgiving but always adored Christmas, feelings which persist to this very day. That the meal was the same on both holidays didn’t matter oddly enough. On one occasion, it made me sleepy and blah, and on another, it made me sleepy but also happy.

In any case, the shining culinary stars were the blackberry and pecan pies and Nanny’s cranberry sauce. That sauce, a sweet reduction of cranberries, mayhaw juice, diced apple, chopped lemon and a good deal of sugar, was and remains, the crown jewel in our vault of food traditions.

One afternoon in my early twenties, Nanny taught me to make her cranberry sauce. It was a wonderful chance to spend time together but I also wonder if we both knew that if her cranberry sauce were to continue being an integral part of our holiday celebrations, someone needed to learn to make it, and I was likely that person.

Into her giant soup pot set over high heat went: the contents of one bag of Ocean Spray cranberries; two cups of mayhaw juice –purchased at the annual Mayhaw Festival in Starks, LA; the mayhaw is a state tree of Louisiana and produces pinky-red berries that, when pressed, produce a gorgeous pink juice; one apple that’d been cored and diced; and one de-seeded and minced lemon.

Once the berries started popping open, we added a lot of sugar and a packet of powdery Sure Jell, returned the whole mess to a boil and cooked it until the sauce sheeted, rather than rained, off the back of a wooden spoon. Rain drops meant the sauce wasn’t yet thick enough: not enough juice had boiled off to allow the sugar concentration to reach a set point. Sheeting ensured that point had been reached.

We’d ladle the thick magenta into sterilized mason jars, apply the lids and screw the bands finger-tight. While most people would recommend waterbath processing the filled jars, Nanny never did, and still we heard the happy pings as each lid vacuumed down, sealing the jars and rendering them safe to store in the pantry.

For the past four or five years, I’ve taught canning in and around the DC area. Several times, during my fall classes, I’ve taught Nanny’s cranberry sauce. I’ve also taught friends out of my home kitchen and frequently sell jars of it as others have adopted it as their own. Early last month, at a class in Virginia, two women, repeat attendees, told me it’s the only cranberry sauce they serve on their holiday tables now.

It’s hard to describe how this makes me feel, this sense that Nanny and her love and our traditions are spreading far and wide. Essentially, it is a feeling of joy.

As I’ve made the sauce over the years since Nanny became too old to do so, the recipe has evolved very subtly into my own. I’ve omitted the Sure Jell because cranberries have enough natural pectin to render the synthetic stuff unnecessary, and I can detect a slightly metallic taste when powdered pectin is used.

I’ve also had to find a substitute for the mayhaw juice which is unavailable here and awfully expensive to have Fed Exed in. Whole Foods’ unfiltered apple juice works beautifully. Apple cider, with its added spices, does not.

On occasion, I add a sprinkle or two of cinnamon. That depends on my mood.

I always waterbath can mine because while I’m not a worrier or germaphobe, why welcome the possibility of botulism or other toxins?

The thing about traditions and recipes is that the most loved ones do evolve. They’re carried in different hands, throughout different places and across different tongues. Ingredients are hard to find and so people find alternatives. Trends and equipment come and go, and with them methodology.

But the hearts of the matter remain steadfast. Nanny’s sauce is always on my Thanksgiving and Christmas tables, no matter where or with whom I celebrate. I’ll make and share it for as many years as I can, and I will hope that when the time comes, someone else with take the reins and maintain this sublime tradition for a generation more.

Edible Memories Day 10: Food and Time

I appreciate anything that forces me to slow down, in body and mind. Most days find me whirling about like a dervish, juggling responsibilities and to-dos and want-to-dos high above my head.

Some of this is my own doing, a helix of innate anxiety and my goal-oriented nature that drives me forward. 
Some is life as an at-home mother with very little help to two extremely energetic young sons, one of whom often demands more than your average bear. 
Some is the nature of living in DC, a city that moves and thinks quickly.

In any case, life. And by and large, I like mine a lot.

But going slo-mo is an always-welcome thing and one reason I love to cook.

I am making a double batch of mujaddara, that hearty, comfort dish from the middle east that combines lentils, rice and onions in a silky way. The rice is steamed, the lentils just the right side of al dente. All that remains is to deal with the small mountain of onions.

I don my onion goggles so as to avoid crying the entire time, and set to work with a paring knife, peeling back each onion’s crackling paper layers. Once inside, I carefully remove the softer but still fibrous inner wrapping. Onion milk begins to tear, cloudy droplets suggesting freshness and pungency. I gave thanks, both for the lovely alliums and, once again, for my goggles; they make me look silly but they work, so who cares?!

Reaching for my chef’s knife, I notice the blade’s glinting edge. Tom’s just sharpened these, I think appreciatively. With almost no effort, I slice each onion in half, place them cut side down on a board, turn them clockwise forty-five degrees and quickly sliver the pile into a jumble of crescent moons.

I notice that my breath has slowed.
I notice that my heart feels at peace.
I notice that my mind no longer races.

In a deep skillet, I place a knob of butter and several tablespoons of beautiful green-tinged olive oil. I set the heat to medium-low and watch as the butter melts into the oil, twirling and dancing into a marbleized canvas.

In go the Cheshire-cat smiles. With one of my beloved wooden spoons, I gently toss the onions until they’re glistening evenly with fat. It’s time to wait, to let the magic happen.

I sit to write and notice that the corners of my mouth have turned up. I notice that my brain feels light, as if it’s given so many thoughts and memories to Dumbledore’s pensieve: Hold these until later, please. Thank you.

My fingers fly and I notice the fragrances surrounding me: frying onions, earthy lentils, Louisiana, which is all I can think of when I smell just-steamed rice.

The onions are melting. I think of the tigers in Little Black Sambo (thankful that one’s been renamed Little Babaji), biting each other’s tails and racing around a tree so quickly and for so long that the dissolve into a pool of perfect butter. My onions are that pool. A gift. Except mine has come from patience and quiet attention, rather than fierce competition.

I bump the heat up to medium and watch as the silky, translucent onions become more richly hued, turning golden, amber, honeyed. The ones on the edges look like mahogany. I think of my colored pencils, ordered by shade and how much I like when they’re neatly arranged.

It’s time now to spare the onions additional heat. After a final flourish of my wooden spoon, I slide the skillet to a cool burner, and lower my face into the aromatic steam that arises from the beautiful mess.

I don’t know how much time has passed since I began cooking. What a delight to lose myself like this.

Edible Memories Day 8: Food and Longing

Even when I eschewed most food, I never stopped wanting it. I could ignore my desire, punch it down, beat it back, disavow it, but behind that curtain, the longing grew. Such is the primal relationship to that which we need.

I see it everywhere. In my insatiable pug who dances around his food bowl with salivating anticipation, who licks it clean for minutes after finishing the last bit of chow. In my ginger cat who nips at my heels when hungry and then seems to relish the glistening mound of pheasant or tumble of kibble I put in his bowl. In even our tank of fish as they race skyward each morning toward the shower of orange flakes –better for their color, see- raining down to water level.

It is in my garden, as the flowers shine their faces toward the sun, as that very reach determines angle of growth all around. As the soaring sugar maple tries to steal all the soil’s nutrients for itself. Year after year, I compost and fertilize on behalf of the smaller plants trying desperately to assert their worth against that tree’s. I see it in the bursts of green shooting from sidewalk cracks and microscopic fractures in the mortar between bricks; life finds a way. It longs to do so and will.

I remember the longing when I think of relationships past.

My high school boyfriend and the fettucine alfredo we cooked for each other one night.

My college love, the first real love of my life, and the way our eyes met over a high top at a bar a year in. There we drank cold pints, played darts and he fashioned me a ring from a foil wrapper, slipping it down my slim finger before kissing my waiting lips and whispering, “I love you, Emil.”

The man in Africa, next to me at the Ethiopian restaurant in Nairobi, where a slinky belly dancer beguiled the room. Frothy Naishos and plates of earthy greens and that spongy injera. We ate with our hands, scooping portions of the sumptuous food between bread and fingers, slipping bits into each other’s mouths, fingers sometimes lingering there, the belly dancer simply background noise then.

I watched it as my newborn sons rooted and suckled, hungrily and then blissfully when the milk came pouring forth. I watched their eyes roll backward before closing; never was there such a picture of heady satiety.

I saw such longing in my three-year-old when he came upon a case of chocolates, plastered his face and hands against it, and began making the big decisions when we said he could have one of whatever he wanted. I saw it too in my toddler as he pressed up against the oven, ogling the puffy muffins cooking within. “Please mama, when ready?”

I smile as I watch my husband’s eyes as I set a plate of his favorite pie or ragù bolognese in front of him. Watch him take a bite, close his eyes, and say “Thank you, honey. This is so good.”

And I think, my god, this thing called eating.