Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories

INTRODUCTION

Food is our common ground, a universal experience.

JAMES BEARD

ONE OF the first things I did as a young bride in 1972 was to buy a blue loose-leaf, three-ring notebook to contain the recipe inflow from family, friends, newspapers, and magazines. The first month or so, I neatly and carefully glued them onto lined paper separated by category in the following order: appetizers, eggs, vegetables, meat, seafood, Chinese, Italian, soup, bread, sweets, beverages, and chicken. Some of the recipes were typed on a manual typewriter.

By my tenth anniversary, many of the recipes were neatly folded inside the front and back covers. Ten years later neat would no longer apply. The Internet was my undoing. Until the arrival of the World Wide Web, I could always easily find what I was looking for. But the information age was too much for my notebook. I began printing out recipes in a frenzy, and had to move the notebook and its offspring to a medium-sized sage green gift bag.

One day, I took a deep breath and decided to go through the bag, prepared to eliminate and organize. In the course of this exercise, I found the story of my life.

I ran into my great-aunts, a few cousins, old family friends, childhood friends, adult friends, and friends from whom I’ve been separated by decades. I followed myself from Minneapolis (fifteen recipes using wild rice) to Baltimore (crab cakes several ways) to New Jersey (Hungarian chicken paprika) to Texas (real chili) to Washington, D.C. (the spring shad roe ritual). I revisited small and big life events—the birth of my son and subsequent birthday parties (chicken à la king and Texas sheet cake), the early years of entertaining (five different recipes for quiche for a crowd and the chicken divan that was my first dinner party dish), years of travel (chicken molé and sticky toffee pudding), my husband’s surprise thirtieth birthday party in a log cabin on the Raritan River (six-foot-long sandwiches using lettuce from our tiny garden).

I remembered my fancy drinks period—kir royales, bellinis, strawberry fizzes, and something called guava glows. Then there were the frozen desserts—ice cream, sorbet, and granita—although the equipment needed to make them is long gone.

The food of Mexico held my interest for years. And seven years in Texas is marked by recipes for salsas, chili con queso, and a grease-stained recipe for something called Hot Stuff that I got from my friend Ann, whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in more than twenty years. You cook onions, sugar, tomatoes, pepper, ground chilies, and salt for four hours. Then you add vinegar, bring to a boil, and serve on pinto beans or rice. I remember the first time I ate it at her house when we’d just met. After eating her Hot Stuff, I knew I wanted to be her friend. A note at the bottom of the recipe reads: Serve with salad and dessert. Dessert was probably Ann’s fabulous chocolate sauce over ice cream. I have the recipe.

In my notebook, there is evidence of my son’s four years as a vegetarian. The veal recipes come to an abrupt end in the early 1990s when he asked us to stop eating veal because of his outrage at the mistreatment of male calves.

Judging from the huge numbers of recipes for egg dishes—stratas, omelets, baked eggs—I have spent more than thirty years in search of dishes to serve for brunch. I still haven’t found just the right one.

There are a lot of recipes for ways to cook zucchini, probably dating to the trauma of our first garden and its bottomless patch of the green summer squash. My various diets are obvious from the number of recipes for cabbage soup, turkey meat loaf, and oven fried chicken. In the early part of the new century, a lot of recipes using whole grains show up. I also possess an unusually large number of recipes using couscous. My friend Annette gave me a recipe for chicken and couscous when I called her twenty-five years ago looking for something to serve at a dinner party. I have it written on the back of an envelope.

My collection of Thanksgiving recipes is one of the largest. It’s my favorite holiday—pure gluttony with no religious overtones. Jewish holidays are represented by potato latkes, Sis’s Passover cake, my mother-in-law’s spectacular chopped liver, and five different recipes for the perfect brisket.

I found the recipes Stephanie and I used for the all-rose-petal dinner we had for our friend Mary when she got married for the second time. It was shortly after the movie Like Water for Chocolate came out and we had learned about the aphrodisiac qualities of quail with rose petal sauce. We ordered squab (quail was unavailable) from Melvin, who runs our favorite poultry stand at Capitol Hill’s Eastern Market, a block from my house. He knew we were doing something fancy with them. So when we got to Stephanie’s and opened the package, the squab were looking at us. He had left the heads and feet on. We ran back for emergency surgery.

I have many, many recipes from my dear friend Eva, with whom I shared countless meals during my seven years in College Station, Texas. Eva grew up in Paris and San Francisco and was a beautiful home cook. Her house was always warm, welcoming, and smelled like freshly baked banana bread. I lit candles all over my house trying for the same effect. But a lot of it was just that she was who she was. I have her lasagna, split pea soup, and banana bread recipes, as well as instructions for some elegant European pastries I’ll probably never make. Because, I realized, I’m not a baker. I’m sure some people can do both, but not me. My desserts are generally lackluster. The exceptions are homey fruit desserts, Bundt cakes, and layer cakes. I’m pretty good at those. I have Eva’s recipe for dewberry cobbler using the large black berries found along the side of Texas roads in the summer. A newspaper recipe for Italian prune plum torte (the plums are available for only a few weeks in the fall) is in shreds. I have my friend’s Jenifer’s recipe for her grandfather’s favorite schaum torte. I make it every spring.

I have two recipes for candy: My father’s microwave peanut brittle and the toffee my mother and I used to make. Minnegasco, the Minnesota gas company, sent recipes with the gas bill. The toffee was one of them. Both are simple and delicious. The toffee may have been the first food I learned to cook.

The entrées I serve at dinner parties have changed through the years. When I started out, everything I did was complicated. If it wasn’t difficult and time-consuming, it couldn’t possibly be good. So I would spend days making pasta by hand, driving miles to find some exotic spice they didn’t carry at the neighborhood A&P, going to the seafood market for fish heads and bones for the broth necessary for some extravagant soup. Most of these recipes came from cookbooks. Some of my copies sport handwritten notes reading, Not worth the effort. The only one of these I seem to have saved is for b’stilla, a Moroccan phyllo dough pie of shredded chicken, ground almonds, and spices. I think I made the phyllo dough by hand. My mother had photocopied (twice) the recipe from a magazine and sent it to me. It was worth the effort. Today I can put together a dinner for ten in a couple of hours. It took thirty years to learn how.

I have many recipes my mother cut out of the paper for me or wrote down and mailed. For the ones she especially liked, I have multiple copies—for emphasis. There are two photocopies of the meat loaf in a breadbasket she made my son when he was little. You cut the top off and hollow out a round sourdough bread loaf, fill it with meat loaf, and bake it. Kids love it. I have her recipe for the Spanish tongue my father loved. I will never forget seeing the tongue in my grandmother’s heavy soup pot and suddenly realizing it was—a tongue. I have three copies—one cut out from a magazine, one photocopy of the same article, and one handwritten—for a caramelized upside-down pear tart she liked a lot. I have two recipes—one handwritten, one clipped from the paper—for Dump Dinner. The directions begin: Cover the table with multiple thicknesses of newspaper. Next you put shrimp-boil spices, water, kielbasa, corn on the cob, pea pods, and shrimp in an enormous pot. Cook until done, drain everything, and dump in the middle of the table. The directions end: Eat with gusto.

I have three copies of the same recipe for pasties—the meat-and-vegetable turnovers that are a standard winter dinner in the Upper Midwest. They were brought by Cornish miners who came to work in the northern iron mines. A pasty is a complete meal—a crescent-shaped pie filled with chunks of meat, diced potatoes, and rutabaga.

As I went through these recipes, I realized that I remember most life events by what I ate. Every Valentine’s Day on the breakfast table there was a plastic tree hung with red jelly candy hearts. Sunday nights we roasted chestnuts or made popcorn in the fireplace in the family room while watching Bonanza. August was the state fair, and that meant pronto pups (relatives of corn dogs).

I learned a lot in my mother’s kitchen. As she cooked Aunt Ossie’s borscht, Aunt Fanny’s pot roast, and Aunt Esther’s antipasto, she told me about her own childhood. She told me stories about dinners at her aunts’ houses, my paternal grandparents’ all-night diner in Chicago, and how my father fell in love with Italian food on rural farmsteads while fighting in Italy in World War II.

One of the most vivid memories I have of my wedding is that I suddenly realized I did like asparagus. I remember my husband’s swearing-in ceremony as assistant secretary of the Treasury by the empanadas we served. My son’s bar mitzvah was cold Russian chicken with walnuts. My father’s ninetieth birthday was a chocolate cake with the inscription: 90 Proof, Aged to Perfection.

I went to college in Baltimore, where I met not only my husband but a whole slew of new foods, as well—crabs, snowballs, and coddies. I learned that Chinese food meant more than chow mein. My husband’s grandfather was a kosher butcher, a lovely man who came to Baltimore from Poland when he was twelve. He never quite mastered English and read The Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish every day. Every time he saw me he would say, Darling, read to me from the paper. I would explain that I could read neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. The next time he saw me he’d say: Darling, read to me from the paper. This dance went on for a while until one day he varied the request: Darling, can you cook a chicken? That, I said, I can