Part 3 (2/2)

A pocket knife was as essential as a shoe or a hat. My grandfather would whittle, lance a boil, cut an apple, or trim his toenails all with the same pocket knife. Mine was perhaps more a token knife, though I would find ways to use it in the woods, on fis.h.i.+ng trips, and so on. I don't want to push the implications here, but obviously our knives-their size, sharpness, relative elaborateness-were a subject of comparison for me and my friends. But so also were our dogs, our bi-cycles, our new winter coats. For whatever meaning, they were fascinating ob- 66 jects-knives-and it was an enthralling piece of action for me to walk into Mr. Woolfork's with my grandfather, order White House Ice Cream, and sort through the knives offered there for sale or trade. Probably my hope each time was that my grandfather would get me a different knife, but he did that only a couple of times during my entire childhood.

As for his own knife, he would wear down a blade maybe every ten years or so and have to trade the knife and some money with Mr.

Woolfork or go to the hardware store for a new one.

The thought of this particular hardware item in an ice cream parlor comes back to me on occasion, its force field of mystery as strong as ever. I call them the ice cream knives, and somehow I am trying to bring them to bear on the image of my grandmother and her ability to deal so summarily with her Dominickers and Leghorns. There are affinities, but the two images-the ice cream knives and my grandmother with her chickens-are bound to a time and a culture and I have to leave them there in a loose and tentative circling. They seem to want to join in what might be a redefining of sacrament and sacrifice that I could understand, but it is a closure that I am finally incapable of forcing.

Besides, that would be asking too much of a motley a.s.sortment of used pocket knives in a cigar box, and also my grandmother would look back at me through the years, puzzled at such a farfetched notion.

At the moment she is looking down at me as I reach under the thin cover-cloth she has spread over the leftovers on the table. There is not much fried chicken left except for a neck and a back with its vestigial tail pucker that she refers to as the preacher's nose. She knows I am full of White House Ice Cream but does not say anything. I am telling her about the ice cream knives. As I pick at the last of the nuggets of meat on the chicken back, I look up at her and see that she still has on the stained ap.r.o.n. She looks down at the bloodstains and then back to me without any comment. I don't say anything either. I am eating the best chicken I have ever eaten.

67 WILLIAM CORBETT.

To Carol Braider's Kitchen I first saw shelves of cookbooks, hanging copper pots, an overflowing spice rack-first drank wine and first ate garlic, olive oil, kosher salt, and soups made with homemade stock-in Carol Braider's kitchen. I was fifteen at the time and because of my upbringing expected kitchens to be sterile as hospital rooms. You went into them carefully for snacks, made no mess, and at dinner you cleaned your plate, did the dishes, and did not linger. It was a high compliment to declare some house-wife's kitchen floor was clean enough you could eat off it. first saw shelves of cookbooks, hanging copper pots, an overflowing spice rack-first drank wine and first ate garlic, olive oil, kosher salt, and soups made with homemade stock-in Carol Braider's kitchen. I was fifteen at the time and because of my upbringing expected kitchens to be sterile as hospital rooms. You went into them carefully for snacks, made no mess, and at dinner you cleaned your plate, did the dishes, and did not linger. It was a high compliment to declare some house-wife's kitchen floor was clean enough you could eat off it.

Carol Braider's kitchen smelled of food and cooking; there was no attempt to hide what took place there. Her stove was crusted with spilled food and her refrigerator crammed with leftovers-it was what my grandmother called a pigsty. As she cooked Carol drank wine, and dishes were as much improvised as built from recipes. Her ap.r.o.ns were spotted and stained, and she was constantly hovering, tasting, stirring, adding pinches of this and that.

When you dined at Carol's table you were expected to smoke between courses, to drink a few gla.s.ses of wine, to talk over coffee. Carol's husband, Donald, was my teacher, and when I came into their house as a baby-sitter and had my first meal there, I was appalled and fascinated.

We ate spaghetti with a sauce that was not not meatb.a.l.l.s, and their poodle, Bucky, ate with us-I can still see the strands of pasta disappearing one after another into his curly black muzzle. Growing up, I was usually put off by the strange odors in friends' kitchens. But Carol's kitchen did not repulse me. There was so much life and so many mysteries in the place that I was drawn to it. meatb.a.l.l.s, and their poodle, Bucky, ate with us-I can still see the strands of pasta disappearing one after another into his curly black muzzle. Growing up, I was usually put off by the strange odors in friends' kitchens. But Carol's kitchen did not repulse me. There was so much life and so many mysteries in the place that I was drawn to it.

My awareness of food as more than sustenance, of the lore of cooking, eating, and drinking, began in the Braider kitchen. Carol's kitchen meant freedom to me; although I was fed liberally, as any middle-cla.s.s child of the fifties, I was confined to a dull menu and a tense dinner hour.

My mother must have felt similar constraints, for as she got to know Carol she began to consult French cookbooks, use wine in sauces, and generally let her kitchen and her cooking go. She had always loved to 68 eat and had, until the ten days it took her to die from a fall down the stairs, a lumberjack's appet.i.te-she was forever going on a diet tomorrow. Yet before Carol's influence my mother's cooking was bland as her kitchen was spotless, and her dinners had as much to do with discipline as food.

My father was a doctor, a general pract.i.tioner, and five nights a week he held office hours, first in a room off the kitchen and then at his office in a local shopping center. When he came home at sundown he wanted food on the table. He often teased in a crude way that he expected his wife to be a slave and wanted things just like they were in the old country, where the wife served the husband, then satisfied herself on what sc.r.a.ps were left over. His diatribe was interrupted by the ring of his office phone. ”Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.” ”Give him a bath in Epsom salts.” ”I'll be out to see her after office hours.” If my mother served us a dish fixed-she never ”prepared” a meal-in a new way, he ate it without comment in an ostentatious silence. In response to her asking if he liked it, he'd snap, ”I'm eating it ain't I!” He half meant this to be funny, but he had so little gift for humor that the effect was most often deadening.

About his own father he said little, but his most repeated anecdote had to do with food. His father and mother had a miserable marriage, one of such acrimonious contention his father frequently stayed away from home for days at a time. When he came back at lunchtime he found waiting, as expected, a mound of cold stuffed cabbage. He sat down to this plate and wordlessly polished off every one, as many as twenty-five stuffed leaves at one of these sittings. Then he retired to his chair in the living room and snored off his gluttony. For my father his surly father embodied some otherwise indefinable male prerogative. The apple, as Hungarians say, does not fall far from the tree.

Of course, there were many nights when my father was not the ”moody Hungarian,” and on these occasions my brother and I sometimes suffered as well. During the day my mother used the rod of my father's coming home to dinner to try to keep us in line. By the time he arrived, and we were seated, my mother served up our crimes with the ca.s.serole, and the meal quickly became a court in which we were lectured and punished-so many nights early to bed, so many afternoons doing yard work, etc. As he harangued us, we either wolfed our hamburgers, hot dogs, or tuna ca.s.seroles so as not to be hectored about our lack of appet.i.te or, baleful night, pushed our food around our plates, food we had to force down even on an ordinary night: liver, broccoli, or lima 69 beans! Frozen Ford Hook lima beans cooked in a pressure cooker resembling the Kaiser's helmet! Limas that were a stomach-turning green, mealy and and slimy and even drowned in catsup...impossible to force down. My brother and I could not be members of the clean plate club no matter the threats that rained down on us: ”You'll stay here and finish your dinner even if it takes until h.e.l.l freezes over.” It took years before we could laugh at this and years before we could deflect some of the unwanted parental scrutiny through jokes and mockery, but it's no wonder I still inhale my food, as if to escape the table. slimy and even drowned in catsup...impossible to force down. My brother and I could not be members of the clean plate club no matter the threats that rained down on us: ”You'll stay here and finish your dinner even if it takes until h.e.l.l freezes over.” It took years before we could laugh at this and years before we could deflect some of the unwanted parental scrutiny through jokes and mockery, but it's no wonder I still inhale my food, as if to escape the table.

We were so ceaselessly sullen and sharp with one another, so angry and in tears so often, that the family battles over dinner are more memorable than the dinners themselves, save for my mother's desserts.

She had a sweet tooth and a gift for pies and cakes, inherited from her mother. Her cherry pie or b.u.t.terscotch cream pie, chocolate pudding, her black cake with white mint frosting, or even her thin-sliced ice-box cookies kept my attention on any number of mushlike stews from the pressure cooker.

At restaurant tables my father could be expansive and, to restaurateurs, charming. Thursdays were his day off, and if he and my mother didn't drive to New York City for dinner and a show, we dined out at Manero's Steakhouse, The Clam Box, or the Algonquin Club with its gla.s.s boats of celery and olives. My father liked to have his steak burned black, but what he liked best in restaurants was to diagnose illnesses he could see in another diner's walk, posture, or complexion.

Most dinners out calmed our fractious temperaments, and we even enjoyed ourselves. If I wasn't always crazy about the food in these restaurants, I did fall in love with eating out. I think it was the staginess of restaurants, their rituals that first appealed to me. There was so much to pay attention to, so much to consider and to master. I imagined a curtain going up revealing a world arranged to surprise, test, and delight me.

As my parents got to know the Braiders and their interest in food developed, so did their taste in restaurants. During the late fifties and early sixties, good cooking began to mean French cooking. They were not adventurous eaters, and we sampled none of the ethnic restaurants in working-cla.s.s Bridgeport. Indeed, their tastes must have been formed in part by their rejection of the ethnic cooking of their childhoods.

My father's mother was a hilariously rotten cook. We went there twice a year for the same lunch: stuffed cabbage (I still can't stomach even one!), chicken paprikash, a bland bland dish, noodles that came to the dish, noodles that came to the 70 70 table in a clump, green beans in a red sauce named ”lurch” by my mother, and a dessert of hard curls of pastry dusted with confectioner's sugar. We ate this meal in her kitchen with the windows closed even for the summer lunch, and we sweated like pigs as we groaned through the courses.

My mother's mother was more gifted. We still use her recipes for spinach or Swiss chard with hot bacon dressing and for shoofly pie, a Pennsylvania Dutch mola.s.ses-based breakfast pie she called crumb pie.

She had a small vegetable garden behind her Pennsylvania home, and she put up vegetables and the huckleberries my grandfather and I gathered while stream fis.h.i.+ng. She could bake a superb huckleberry pie and cursed them if they came out ”runny b.u.g.g.e.rs.” And she could make a good dish of sauerkraut and roast pork. But she hated the mess of cooking, and her meals seemed less important than the cleanup to quickly restore her kitchen to apple-pie order. Outside of the lunches she made for her bridge club, she never served a guest in her house.

And her husband refused to eat out after being served cake on a dirty plate at his sister's.

Throughout my childhood I heard women complain of slaving over a hot stove, of working their fingers to the bone fixing dinner, and of men who wouldn't lift a finger and if they did have a mind to wouldn't know what to do if you told them ten times. ”Get out of the road,” my grandmother shooed my grandfather out of her kitchen. Cooking, for the cooks of my childhood, and eating for all of us, was a form of labor.

Given the extraordinary plenty of this country, it seems strange we did not enjoy ourselves more, but we did not seem to know how. Certainly my grandparents, three of whom were immigrants, sustained no peasant traditions. Perhaps we had so much we took food for granted and did not want to remind ourselves of how much we had.

The food at meals was often secondary, secondary to discipline, to cleanliness, and to shortcuts, bargains, and the new improved world of timesavers. Food, it seems, would take care of itself or be taken care of by ever-new marvels of processing. In my house meals were used to dispense justice, or they were finished speedily so the mess of cooking could be tamed and order restored.

In Carol Braider's kitchen I experienced a mixture of leisure and total attention. Every move Carol made mattered and could be enjoyed in itself; and every cheese, cut of meat, sauce, piece of fruit, or hunk of bread had a history, imparted some knowledge, and therefore possessed a presence. I remember watching once as Carol made ca.s.soulet ca.s.soulet with its with its 71 71 traditional goose fat, mutton, and pig's hocks. It was a snowy March afternoon, and she cooked from a thick book, warped by b.u.t.ter, oil, and a hundred different sauces. And I remember another ca.s.soulet ca.s.soulet at her table twenty years later. Its texture, grainy and smooth, is in my mouth as I write. And I remember Carol's at her table twenty years later. Its texture, grainy and smooth, is in my mouth as I write. And I remember Carol's creme caramel creme caramel, a slippery blond denseness, taste, color, and texture in each mouthful.

Certainly there was turmoil and sometimes sharp words as Carol cooked, but there was also the intense pleasure of watching someone in love with her work. And the special pleasure of listening and talking while you are doing something else at the same time. Carol seemed to be free to do as she pleased, and this sense of freedom was liberating for me. Carol made food that tasted good, sometimes great-but the greater pleasure came from enjoying food for its own sake. In this way the humblest sausage or a dish of leftover ca.s.soulet ca.s.soulet has dignity. And so does the man or woman who sits down to savor it. has dignity. And so does the man or woman who sits down to savor it.

72 MICHAEL DORRIS.

The Quest for Pie One of my seminal childhood books was Mickey Sees the U.S.A. Mickey Sees the U.S.A. , a travel extravaganza in which Mickey, Minnie, and the two nephews, Morty and Ferdy, set out in a convertible and traverse the country. , a travel extravaganza in which Mickey, Minnie, and the two nephews, Morty and Ferdy, set out in a convertible and traverse the country.

Every place they pa.s.s offers adventure, new sights, tasty treats-the ultimate all-American family vacation on wheels.

That was a while ago-so far in the past that Disneyland didn't yet exist as an promotional destination-but the high concept of that fictional journey took root in my imagination and informed each family outing. We had relatives scattered from Tacoma to Miami, from New York to San Francisco, from Tensed, Idaho, to Henderson, Kentucky, and every summer my mother, my aunt, and I managed to visit some of them. (Occasionally my cousin Frank would join us, but not for the long hauls. He had a tendency to become carsick, and once my aunt had to bathe his forehead in milk from the thermos just to keep him pacified until we reached a picnic ground.) I was too young to drive, of course, so I became the navigator. In deep winter I would begin to clip coupons from the National Geographic National Geographic, soliciting maps and lodging brochures from the tourist bureaus in states along our potential routes. These packets, as they were invariably called, arrived in impressively lumpy envelopes, extolling the ”enchantment”

of New Mexico, the ”surprises” of Missouri, the ”discovery” potential of New England. Sometimes, once I had learned to type, I wrote letters to accompany the clippings, broadly hinting that I had more than just a pa.s.sing interest in this or that region and was in fact contemplating relocation. This line of correspondence yielded even more substantial harvests of mail when the respective state office of economic development got into the act. For one heady week in 1959 I received, absolutely free, a daily subscription to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Star-Telegram, forever establis.h.i.+ng in my mind a loyalty to that plucky city in its underdog rivalry with Dallas-which was apparently above wooing my business.

Over the spring I would cull through my colorful stash, making short lists of state parks, petting zoos, and inexpensive motels that prom-73 ised heated kidney-shaped swimming pools. I mail-ordered a wonderful little device that looked like a cross between a ballpoint pen and a thermometer. By merely adjusting a setting to correspond to the scale of a map and running the little metal wheel on the tip along the route of any highway, one got an instant reading of the approximate mileage involved. Then it was a matter of simple calculation. The distance from starting point A to destination B divided by fifty miles an hour (my family's average speed) times eight hours a day (their joint capacity behind the wheel) equaled the range of my accommodations search.

There was a limit, however, to the discretion I enjoyed. I was, after all, a child, a pa.s.senger, and my mother and aunt-the women who drove the car and paid the bills-had their own priorities that any proposal of mine necessarily had to incorporate. And those were, in a word, pie.

Looking back, I realize now that our journeys could quite accurately be described as a quest for pie. For instance, like experienced surfers who chart odd itineraries (Laguna to Capetown by way of The Big Island) in order to snag a reliable wave en route, I always had to include Paoli, Indiana, in any cross-country trip. There was a cafe off the square in that otherwise undistinguished hamlet where was found, according to my mother the connoisseur, a lattice crust like no other. Woven in intricate patterns across a sea of blueberry or peach, each segment was crisp and melting, studded with just the right amount of sugar, laced with a subtle jolt of almond extract, and browned to perfection. If I brought us through Paoli too soon after a major meal, we might order our twenty-five-cents-apiece slices for the crust alone, reluctantly leaving the fruit on the green plastic plates.

An innocuous-looking lunch counter in New Ulm, Minnesota, was the polar opposite: a decent pastry, nothing to complain about, but a truly spectacular chess or lemon or coconut cream within. The baker wouldn't tell, but my grandmother back home, upon hearing my aunt describe the airy yet smoothly substantial and satisfying volume of the filling, put her money on whipped egg whites and a dash of mace. Yet no amount of research was too exhaustive in pursuing the solution to so important a mystery, and that was fine with me. New Ulm was also the site of my favorite motel in the world: a swimming pool, a play-ground, and a fully made bed that folded down from a door in the wall-for eight dollars a night. I always finagled for us to hit town just as the sun was about to set, and consequently in New Ulm we ate pie for dinner, and then again for breakfast.

74 The pie map of the United States bears little resemblance to standard demographics. The New Yorks and Clevelands and Milwaukees are mostly etched in light print, marked with tiny dots, while the big black circles and capital letters are reserved for Brattleboro, Vermont, Tyler, Texas, Shelby, Montana, and Hays, Kansas. There are other features as well: On the west side of an invisible line, running roughly correspondent to the Appalachian Mountains, people prefer their doughnuts with icing. The South is The South when you leave a restaurant and instead of ”good-bye” the waitress says, ”Come back,” unless it's New Orleans and she says, ”Enjoy.” The hallmark of the Midwest is an all-you-can-eat salad bar with at least one hundred items, most of them encased in jello. The Rocky Mountain states feed in pure volume, no matter what the course-the byword there is ”Refill?”-whereas the Pacific Rim overdoes with fruit, as in a wedge of orange on the plate next to your pizza.

A culinary relief map of the country pretty much inverts the standard topological zones. Rather than the vaguely camel-back shape of North America (the humps represented by the two major north-south mountain chains), portion size translates into a more hammock effect. Sea level becomes the highest instead of the lowest part, and major sags and droopings are found inland from the coast. The state of Utah, for instance, const.i.tutes the sleeping giant's hip, for it's a place that com-pensates for an arid and rather spartan environment by distributing ten-cents-a-pop soft ice cream machines at the exit door of most restaurants with large parking lots. Nebraska, home, at rest stops beckoning from the endless Interstate 80, of a particularly high-density food called potato meatloaf, accounts for the mid-depression of the continent, and the Old South-arbitrarily centered in Gadsen, Alabama, birthplace of the bottomless grits-is its lolling head, which, as any chiropractor will tell you, is the heaviest part of the body.

European tourists, with their effete tradition of teeny-tiny gla.s.ses of no-ice Coca-Cola, must be flabbergasted by the proffering of ”20 oz.

Thirst Busters” at each K-4 convenience store in the western steppes, and j.a.panese honeymooners, coming from a context of hundred-dollar steaks, must believe they've found paradise in the hefty ”full-pound burgers” of rural Texas. Dietary largesse is patriotic, an ent.i.tlement protected, coterminous with individual owners.h.i.+p of automatic weapons, by the Const.i.tution. We fought Iraq for the right to drive-thru an emporium boasting thirty-six oil-based flavors of frozen nondairy dessert. We celebrate Christmas with Federal-Expressed boxes of the world's 75 weightiest Oregon pears or Idaho potatoes or California onions, or by sending each other baskets, their overflowing contents of dense Edams and Goudas barely contained by protective cellophane, s.h.i.+pped from Wisconsin-a state whose highway signs proclaim more often than historic markers or scenic vistas simply CHEESE. Less specific, but no less commanding, is the banner permanently overhanging Tower City, North Dakota, visible from five miles in any direction, reading FOOD, and followed by an enormous arrow pointing straight down to the rich, loamy landscape.

For Americans of a certain age and cla.s.s, food is the punctuation of life, a commercial break between those bothersome segments of work or play that require the use of our hands, thus prohibiting their availab-ility for unwrapping, unpeeling, or defrosting. Eating certifies leisure, the coffee 'n' Danish break a defiance of the time clock, the snack a voluntary intrusion into a routine not of our own making. And yet eating is also a kind of defensible duty, a recreation we can shrug off as a need, excuse ourselves for, indulge in with some righteousness.

Researchers tell us that diners' pupils narrow to pinpoints when plates are set before them. Our beings concentrate, focus, rivet to the task at hand. We need need to eat, we tell ourselves. Our parents mandated it, and it made them happy when we complied. It made us good. It made us grow. Unlike masturbation or pleasure reading or a midmorning nap, determined consumption carries a cultural cachet of respect, equaled only, on occasion, by refraining from eating, an appositive ingestive practice during which, if anything, our minds are even more firmly fixed on what's to eat, we tell ourselves. Our parents mandated it, and it made them happy when we complied. It made us good. It made us grow. Unlike masturbation or pleasure reading or a midmorning nap, determined consumption carries a cultural cachet of respect, equaled only, on occasion, by refraining from eating, an appositive ingestive practice during which, if anything, our minds are even more firmly fixed on what's not not for dinner. We read cookbooks as literature, copy and exchange exotic recipes, devote on the average (if we can afford it) one technology-laden room of our homes for the sole purpose of food storage and preparation, and another, plus deck or patio, for its display prior to disappearance. We support an entire industry of pressure-sealed leftover containers because we invariably prepare more of everything than we can swallow. for dinner. We read cookbooks as literature, copy and exchange exotic recipes, devote on the average (if we can afford it) one technology-laden room of our homes for the sole purpose of food storage and preparation, and another, plus deck or patio, for its display prior to disappearance. We support an entire industry of pressure-sealed leftover containers because we invariably prepare more of everything than we can swallow.

What is this obsession with jumbo helpings? Is it the aftershock of the Great Depression, a kind of chipmunk-drive to h.o.a.rd unto and into ourselves so that in the event of lean days we can feed off our own stored fat-the ultimate convenience: we don't even have to leave home or microwave! Is it an a.s.sertion of Manifest Destiny, the ultimate reward for the transoceanic migration of our starving ancestors? Do we eat ”because it's there”? Certainly for most of us the urge to stuff normally arises from habit, not from hunger. Early on we were initiated

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