And So, We Begin....

Where to start. Where to stop. Both are so important in so many aspects of a life. Dating. Sex. Marriage. Child-rearing. Cooking a meal. Eating a meal. Telling a shaggy dog story.

“The beginning,” you might say, when queried about where to start anything.  I would respond, “The beginning of what? And can you be sure where the beginning is?”

The beginning of a story, or a relationship, or even a meal, can be purely subjective. I have a pair of friends – a couple, who love each other deeply.  The biggest dispute they have in their lives together is at exactly what point their long-standing platonic friendship wandered into romantic territory.

He says it was the overnight trip to Vegas, where they shared a first, slightly drunken kiss at the roulette table. She swears it was several weeks later, in Yosemite, when they made love stone-cold sober.  Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Neither. Both.

For him, when he finally stole a kiss from the girl of his dreams, that was the start of his love story. No matter that they were in a noisy casino, adrift in tequila and cigarette smoke. He’d kissed her, and that was what mattered.

For her, though, until they were alone in a musty rental cabin in the forest, absent roulette wheels and alcohol, a kiss was just a kiss.  Though she treasured their little lip-lock, what happened in Vegas definitely stayed in Vegas. Their love, for her, began in solitude, surrounded by majestic nature and the wind humming through the trees.

Beginnings are tricky.

Endings can be even more fraught with dispute. No doubt there are millions of people in the world at this very writing, whose relationships have ended without them even knowing it. A partner has checked out or cheated, closed the door to their heart, and is preparing to move on.

At some point in the future, the unsuspecting jilted party will look back and try and pinpoint the exact moment their love ended. All of them will venture a guess. Some will be right. The vast majority will probably be way off the mark.

Endings are tricky, too, and harder to pull off gracefully and with loving compassion.

Today, we’re dealing with beginnings.  This story – my story – will begin at the beginning. Not in Vegas or a cabin in Yosemite.  My story is the story of food, of kitchens, of meals and large tables full of people. This is the story of food and begins at the beginning of everything.

Cavemen.

Anthropologists date the beginning of human social structure – the germination of the proverbial “village”, as it were – from the advent of the campfire. Our cultural and social traditions, our language, or concept of family and belonging, turned from pack-like to communal, not when our predecessors banded together to kill the wooly mammoth, but rather when they gathered around an open flame to cook it.

These same anthropologists hypothesize that the minute we stopped merely huddling in the cold, dark caves, sharing our raw kills, but came together in a circle to cook and eat it around the warmth of the fire, we began to become who we are – in the sociological seeds for our humanness were planted in the ashes of those blazing open flames, and took root in ways that shaped our attitudes and experiences since.  Those roaring flames licking up at the chunks of red meat over those fires forged our ideas of community, family, parenthood and, perhaps especially, of food.

Passing It On: Cooking Through Generations

Helen, age 13

I never met my maternal grandmother, Helen. She died of lung cancer at the age of forty-two, when my mother was seventeen.  I did briefly meet my grandmother's mother, Freda, when I was seven, and she lay in a hospital bed, dying.  She had practically raised my mother, having left her own husband to "help" with the new baby (my mother), and "helping" until Helen's death.  Freda did most of the cooking in the house, so most of my mother's tremendous cooking skills were passed straight through from her. Freda's cooking skills and family recipes came from her own mother, Cristina, on the other hand, had immigrated from Bremen in Northern Germany, near the North Sea, in the mid-1870s.  I have no idea where Cristina was originally from, but I have a strong feeling it wasn't from Bremen, since many of her recipes were decidedly Tuscan -- especially the spaghetti sauce she passed on to Freda, that Freda passed on to my mother, that my mother passed on to me. Also, she spelled her name with a "C", rather than the customarily Teutonic "K". This leads me to believe that she might have been Italian, if not by birth, then by heritage.

Freda, in her wedding dress

My mother didn't spend much time teaching me how to cook. She was a working mother, busy and tired, and most of the time, it was just easier for her to do things herself.  But the two dishes my mother did pass on -- particularly because they were dishes that came from Cristina through Freda -- were the famous spaghetti or red sauce (which I have used as the basis for every Italian red sauce from lasagna to baked shells to spaghetti), and the Dish That Hath No Name (but which spent some time being referred to as the "sausage-pepper-potato thing", before it found it's more permanent name of "Kielbasa, Pepper, Onion and Potato stir-fry").

Cristina, in Germany

These are the only two dishes that survived the test of time because a) they were relatively easy and inexpensive to make, and they yielded a lot of helpings, and b) we liked them enough to keep wanting to cook them.  They've evolved somewhat, based mostly on the availability of produce in each generation. Peppers were the most ethereal ingredient. They do not grow well in cold, cloudy climes and once picked, require refrigeration to stay fresh for any length of time.  Peppers were rumored to have been part of my great-great-grandmother's version, but once she arrived in eastern Pennsylvania, where I reckon peppers were a rare commodity, she replaced them with root vegetables. My great-grandmother split the difference, using parsnips and peppers at one point. My mother took the dish to a whole new level by eliminating root vegetables altogether and getting back to peppers -- this time, in the lovely red, orange and yellow hues we have come to know and love today.

I hope that my addition to the dish continues to make it new and better. I figure people have messed with the vegetables long enough. I decided that the kielbasa needed a little help, so I chop up a slice of bacon into bits and use the fat to help brown the sausage, then deglaze the pan to cook the veggies in.  I am pretty sure this is an improvement, if for not other reason than... hey... it's bacon....

The weather dropped today to below 65 degrees and that means it's time for two things -- close-toed shoes and the kielbasa stir-fry.  This weekend, I'll be making it for the first time in several months. I can only hope to do my ancestors proud.

~C~

GATHERING AROUND THE FIRE PIT

“All good parties end up in the kitchen.”

Lin White 

(1934 – 1999)

Opera director, party connoisseur, my fairy godmother

My godmother, Lin White, used to say that all good parties end up in the kitchen. A notorious party-giver, she was an opera director who threw at least two scheduled parties for every production – the opening night party and the closing night party – and then several impromptu gatherings in between, as she invited cast and crew, audience members, and family back to her house after rehearsals for a bite to eat and some wine.

Whether the gathering was formal or improvised, Linny’s parties always ended up in her kitchen. Even when it was a tiny, ranch-style kitchen, by the beginning of the second hour, at least five people would be huddled tightly in the cramped kitchen, around Linny’s warm oven, drinking wine, picking at whatever had failed to make it as far as the bar or the buffet set up on the dining room table. A sad, brief experiment in trying to thwart this was attempted when her husband installed swinging saloon doors to separate the kitchen from the rest of the living area. They lasted around two years, before they finally got so sufficiently abused by the constant influx of foot traffic that they were removed for good.

Linny’s kitchen was where we wanted to be. We preferred it if Linny were there, too, but her presence was too much to hope for when she gave a party, as she was careful to circulate and mingle, and sitting down seemed to violate her most basic spiritual tenets. But we were content with the company of each other, around a warm stove, waiting for the next hors d’oeuvres, or the next bit of salad, or even picking the scraps at the foil where the chicken wings had just been baked.

Why are we always drawn into the kitchens of our successful hosts and hostesses? What is it about the casual easiness of leaning against a kitchen cabinet, drinking a too-warm glass of wine because the bar is a little too far away to bother with the walk.

Some anthropologists believe that it is a vestigial part of our evolution. In the Lower Paleolithic era, naked, spindly hominids stood little chance of survival on an open, unguarded savanna and only managed to conquer it with the advent of one essential, life-preserving substance – fire. We sought out the shelter of caves and crevices where we could take cover and only have to maintain a watch over one hundred eighty degrees of our landscape, rather than the whole three-sixty. The addition of fire brought even more comfort by providing warmth, and spooking big animals that might be consider stealing our dinner – or, worse, making us their dinner. Man’s mastery over fire began to shape how humans developed, culturally, linguistically, socially and evolutionarily.

We stopped being a pack and became more of a tribe. We gathered at night around a fire, cooked and ate the days kill, developed language and storytelling, learned to create art on the walls of caves, cared for the sick and elderly, allowed others to care for our young (something a chimp mother would never allow), and developed smaller teeth and shorter digestive tracks. We groomed and huddled and conversed and shared in a way that no other animal does with its kin. We stayed together and helped each other raise our incredibly helpless infants. We cared not only for our children, but for the children of our tribe-mates, as if they were our own. Adoption is not unheard of in other large primate groups, yet it is far rarer and more deadly for a chimp or gorilla infant to be placed in the arms of a female not its mother. Chimp mothers usually carry their infants in arms for nearly twice as long as humans, though chimp babies learn to walk in half the time as their human counterparts. Soon, our teeth, our builds and our digestive tracts adapted to eating cooked meat, and our fate as fire gatherers was sealed.

Our propensity for seeking out and gathering with our kin around the warm, protective comfort of the fire to eat and talk and care for each other persists. That is why all good parties end up in the kitchen. Because the food we make there, the warmth and the casual atmosphere of working and preparing, brings us together. The backyard barbeque was perfected specifically so that humans could return themselves to a time when we cooked our kill over an open flame, while gathering together and sharing our gathered sustenance, good talk about weighty matters (where did we last see that heard of mastodons, anyway?), and care for each other and the young ones.  Is it a conscious gathering? Who knows? But it seems fairly universal, for even the non-cooks in a group will gravitate to where the food is.  Most non-drinkers can stay away from the bar, but rarely can a dieting non-cook stay out of a warm kitchen during a cozy party.

~C~