Coleslaw

It was my Aunt Patti who made the potato salad; it was my Mom who made the coleslaw.

My Aunt Patti’s potato salad was legendary. A kind of Westport, Connecticut slight of hand. Classy all the way, proud in its starch. My Mom’s coleslaw betrayed her Appalachian roots, and my father’s way of counting.

It was a thing, you see, in our house, to count mayonnaise jars. They were collected and used for pins, nails, tin soldiers, dice, pencils, pens, book ends, bowling pins (that didn’t go over well), homes for convalescing goldfish, light prisms for housecats, piggy banks, thumb tacks, paint brushes, or even as a thing from which one might drink. But mostly it was a sign of wealth. That’s what my father would say. “Sign of wealth”. He had a way of making pronouncements, my father.

He had worked in a Hellman’s Mayonaisse Factory when he was a kid, summers before college, before the draft. He was no good at factory work. He was intimidated by the rough men he worked with who could crack half a dozen eggs at a time, two hands at a time. My father, left handed, would fumble the crack, his eyes lost in the color of the yolk, the color Van Gogh had been able to explain to him. The factory workers teased him, but took him to see Duke Ellington in a club on the South Side, where left handed Jewish painters didn’t go. He owed it all to the job he resented, in the place that smelled like eggs, where the fat hung in the air, stayed in the weave of his clothes.

An extravagance, is mayonnaise, counseled my father’s mother, who lived in a kind of luxury that only those who fear poverty are able to attain. She had married badly, but divorced exquisitely. Still, she could not shake her immigrant habits of hording, mixed w/ the shame of possession. She would wear furs and disallow mayonnaise in her pantry as a kind of pretentious extravagance. It is the one step of assimilation that tiny, Russian/Puruvian little girl couldn’t make.

My mother’s family, being from that part of the Cumberland Gap that is more Dell than Holler, grew up on farm mayonnaise that was always a little too rushed, yet absurdly kept for too long. The fat of the yolk, heavy w/ Virginian sloth, would overtake everything. My mother’s family was skimpy when it came to oil. It, like many things in my Mother’s childhood, was a kind of unfulfilled promise.

When they were young, and first together, my mother and father, it was hard for them. But, they were young and it was New York, and that is how things should be. They saved and lived on the cheap. They were a kind of frugal that is inherited. And yet they bought mayonnaise. Sign of wealth.

The slaw that my mom made was slap-dash and last minute. It was the effect of a mad grope across the transom of the refrigerator. There was always a cabbage. Forever and ever and as long as I can remember there was always cabbage in our house. She would sort of toss the head of cabbage over her shoulder onto the countertop. The head would roll around as she continued rooting. The carrots would come out followed by the red onion. She would set us to work in her kitchen, prepping her produce, as she went about making the dressing.

One brother would chop the cabbage into thin, neat strips. Each whisper of cabbage light as breath. He moved purposefully, intentionally, and forward to the end of the chore. He never would stop to see his work, to see how the cabbage would exhale and become light. The other went into the work of dicing the onion. It was he, of course, who would never cry. He was impervious to onions, dulled to everything else. He moved fast w/ the knife in a way you wouldn’t think a ten year old could. He was maddeningly precise. Each piece of red onion cut and planed like a diamond, glistening.

I would step on the stool in front of the sink and get to the task of peeling the carrots. I had a proper peeler, and not a paring knife. I wished I had the paring knife; I was terrified of the wobbly blade that spun in the metal grip. I was terrified of slipping, convinced I would miss the carrot entirely and peel my fingers instead.

“Hello Mr. Carrot!”
“Well Hello, Mrs. Carrot”
“Philip, stop playing with them and peel them!”

I would put the carrots down and begin peeling, looking out the large window my mom had fought for when the house was being built.

“Now you want a window?” he demanded. “Three apartments and a house in Staten Island. No Window. Now you want a window?”

“Yes”. It was hard for her to say.

“We don’t have the money.”

“We’ll cut back. On mayonnaise.”

When I would peel the skins from the carrots I would do it in short and timid strokes. I would turn them in my hands, the carrots turning my young fat palms a light orange, and I would think about how many friends I could make with rabbits if they might come by. I would look out the window, sadly disappointed that there were no rabbits. I stopped peeling and stared out the window at car in the drive way, and past the neighbor’s yard, and wondered what it would be like to be a rabbit.

“Philip! Don’t EAT them. PEEL them.”
My brothers would rush me to finish, critiquing my peeling.

“This isn’t how you would carve a canoe, is it?”

“Jesus! Leave some carrot”.

My mom would then have me taste her dressing. She said it was because I had the gift.

The truth is that my Mom didn’t like the taste of her own cooking. She turned her nose up at the fat, and worried about her figure that had already been wrecked by the three boys crowding more than her kitchen. She could not taste the dressing, much less bring herself to eat the coleslaw. She wouldn’t have my brothers taste it as they would always find some way to make some face, find some fault, claim victory where there is no battle. It is their way. But when I would taste something I would find myself in the strange and insular place of being. Rather, I would find myself surrounded by the sensation of self separate from anything, or anyone. It, in itself, was kind of mind blowing.

When you add what happens when sugar and mustard seed go toe to toe my lips begin to pucker. Vinegar is powerful kind of magic. The lush love of buttermilk is holy. The small firecrackers of ground black pepper are boisterous and full of life. And of course there is mayonnaise – so sublime in it’s ability to hold you like a tango partner. So gentle in its romance, yet so lingering in its absence.

She would mix it all together with little pomp, and secure it in that 1970s Tupperware that will survive a nuclear holocaust. We would pack into the car in the driveway and go to Aunt Patti and Uncle Guy’s house. We would eat dinner together, the way families and friends would.

My mother and Aunt Patti would share martinis. We ate this kind of pot luck often in my youth. And while my mother could not stand her own cooking, she loved Patti’s potato salad.

The View From Olympus

A watched pot never boils.
First of all: yes, it does.
Secondly, get off me. Don’t tell me it doesn’t when it does. Don’t pretend to know the future if you can’t lay your thumbprint on the present.
A watched pot never boils.



It is that very same voice I hear over my shoulder, craning and cramping my neck, while I stand next to my stove, hips squared against the counter tops.
It is the voice that tells me not only to get on with it, get on w/ something, but also tells me that thing I am doing, this thing right here, right now, well that’s clearly a mistake.
There’s chopping to be done, dishes to be rinsed, surfaces to be tended.
There’s knives to sharpen, lettuce to wash, bits of the refrigerator could stand a little love while I stand solidly staring into the boiling water. This mighty vaudeville of chemistry takes my breath away. No, that’s not quite right.

The thick, damp air climbing into my kitchen’s stratosphere, into the soft recess of my lungs, makes me lush from the inside out. The wet air is heavy is sits on my skin, my face. I am embraced by it, cloaked by the steam coming off the big pot on my stovetop.

Yes, yes, I see the Mighty Oz parallel. Very clever. Thanks for pointing it out.
But I am not some Kansas Huckster. I am one not of a thousand lying white haired men, suckled by my own propaganda. I am not Phlebas the Phoenecian. I am Phil.

I am staring into the boiling pot, watching as the cosmos rises and swells.
I am breathing. This air. This moment. I have no place to go. I am already here.
I am watching the water evaporate, dissipate, change before my eyes until I must deny its existence, though I know that it still surely does.
I am waiting no longer. For pots to boil. For Moons to charm. For the Sun to complete its sloppy, drunken, ellipse. This is only to say there is a kind of entropy in still water that frightens me.

I think always of that bit of water between Sicily and Italy, the Straits of Messina. The rocks on either shore are those huge craggy pieces of the broken hearts of giants who walked this round earth before. It was those same giants who stirred the Mediterranean until the water forever separated the low flat of Italy and the crazed volcanic mountains of Sicily, forever making each lovesick for the other, each incomplete and each penned in by the boiling water of that Aegean Sea. And in between, on the rocks in the straits, are mermaids.

The mermaids are neither Italian nor Sicilian. Neither God nor Man. Neither Giant or Mortal. Neither Fish nor Fowl. They are simply mermaids, caught in between the worlds that view the surf as either the beginning or the end.

It is the mermaid’s voice that tells you the pot will not boil. It is designed to wreck you on the shore, beach you broken and derelict. Counting off regret, sounding off for a deaf deity.

Or you can stand there. Right there. Breath that moment that is magic, that is electric. That is to say, each moment, each grinding undulation of the boiling pot of water.


Because it will. And it does.

Dependability

Dependability floats. It rides the currents of the sea untethered.
It is not so thick, so dumb, as a rock - some bit of earth the ocean has forgiven, but not forgotten. Dependability floats. It is not the salty deep six, not its child the surf, not it’s prodigal bay. Dependability can sit the entire day in the sun, and never freckle.

I love it more than anything, dependability. I am sentimental about it; I recall my father being wistful when schooling me in mathematics. “Math,” he told my seven year old self, “never lies”. He would then stack multiplication tables, talking to himself about architecture. “A building! A building is a thing you can depend on.”

He loved it more than anything, the fixed arch. While everything would expand and contract around it, the fixed arch would make the best of compression. “In this world,” he would say, “you can count on compression”,

It is best to be resilient; my Mother taught me that. Just because the waves will never, never cease; it does not mean you will someday drown. Resolve was a matter of will, not a matter of debate. She came from the Roanoke Valley, in the foothills of the Virginia Appalachians; she could not depend on anything. She raised my brothers and I on a mythology she did not inherit but rather invented: hope. Hope is the thing that makes dependability float on broken sea. Hope is the thing you put in your rice and beans.

Hope is the steam the makes your kitchen damp, the salt that stays in the crease of your palm. Dependability is the wide hipped luxury of thickening beans in the pot. The bean asks for so little, and gives so much. Time after time, the bean is the guy who’s going to help you move your couch.

I turn to rice and beans when I need that kind of thing, when it seems lost or beyond my periphery. When the clean blue of a spring sky, cloudless and guiltless, is chilled cold by a thin, Northern Sun. When the light off the riven does not reflect, when the traffic circles in on itself, marches west to the horizon. Rice and Beans remind me: there is hope, and hope is dependable.

There is this thing we can all do, this great bit of sorcery, in cooking. In bestowing on an ingredient purpose, and bestowing on ourselves the gift of love. That is the future I see in the soup, as I stir the beans. That is the sound of rice slipping through your fingertips, raining is more like it. And that steam, it rises and meets your tears, the way the ocean meets the fog. Each taste, though, each testing of the spice, each invocation, steadies the maelstrom. Each bit of salt reminds you the lust of thirst, the thirst for life. And you are buoyant, no longer fighting the ocean but a part of it. Hocus, Pocus. This is the magic of dependability.

LASAGNA

No one talks about its elegance. They’ll talk about its simplicity. Oh, they’ll go on about its simplicity. And how pure it is. How unpretentious. How basic.
No one talks about its curving and Rubenesque flavors. No one talks about its lush cream, or the sauce with a history all of its own. They neglect the thing that happens to spinach, and how its leaves turn supple, like lingerie. The do not talk about the magic spell in every fennel seed. They forget that the salt in Parmesan comes directly from the palms of Italians, lined and creased w/ Tuscan soil.
No, they freeze it and call it an ”option”. But Lasagna is no Veronica’s Betty, no Ginger’s Maryanne.

Lasagna’s seven veils are not wispy but thick and drowsy. Each noodle is a love letter, rectangular and curled in a waving Cheshire smile. Each dollop of Ricotta is white and hopeful in the crimson sea of sauce. The spinach leaves are laid out, straight and orderly. Each one is placed carefully, each intentionally, like careful love. The spinach and ricotta stare at each other, yearning, awaiting completion, burlesque and bawdy, each. That is the thing about lasagna.

It’s straight laces, is comforting rectangular housing and easy geometric portioning, that is the great trick as lasagna is comforting, but not because of its neat packaging, its easily deconstructed layers.

Lasagna assembles, orchestrates, curates. It leads you around the dance floor, confident and strong. It does not buckle under. Rather it holds you there, just above your hips, and whispers in to your ear, just so.

Lasagna sings softly, but steady. More than a murmur, as Italian in a hushed, sexy voice often can seem. The heat in the kitchen is from more than the oven.

And it lingers, it draws it out. From the moment of firing the oven to when it finally presents itself supine for consumption there are a hundred small romances each more maddening than the last. Each taste of the sauce is a stolen kiss. The smell of the frying Italian Sausage, the sound of mad crackling grease, have the kind of electricity and immediacy of a copped feel. The garlic oil gets into your skin, slick and deep in its permeation.

In spite of all this madness lasagna remains elegant, long and complex. For each Amsterdam Red Light explosion of longing and yearning lasagna keeps a mystery hidden, tucked away, inside. This small thing, this small bit of immaculate brilliance, is love.

Love is what brings the milk to the milkmaid. Love is what grows the tomatoes. Love is what rains on the starved spinach crop. Love is the voice behind the song. Love is the secret spell inside of the fennel seed. Love is what assembles these bits into an orchestra.

That is what lasagna tastes like.

A Prayer for Stroganoff

There is a prayer in the way salt gets thrown
Into the Big Boiling Pot, sitting like Capone
In the corner of your stovetop
Water crests and foams, stream clings on my face

Dear God, please make something of these things
Left in the side drawers, these bits discarded forgotten
These leftovers from other recipes, from other Master Plans
Remnants, ink smudges, stroganoff

It is a last ditch effort, stroganoff.
That bit of beef that was insignificant, less than prime.
Wide egg noodles, thick hipped and lush
It’s sexy and it knows it, stroganoff.

There is comfort in the pepper grinder,
In its weight, in its imbalance. The sound
Is the same as shells crunching beneath my feet
Bare on volcanic sands, Mt. Etna at my back.

The cream and stock were meant to be together.
The cream’s decadence lingering in the roux
Brown, comfortable, dependable, brown
Flecks of yellow mustard sparkle, recessed like stars

And each time stroganoff is charming, soothing
Each ingredient proud but not dickish about it.
Like gypsy violin, or a proper kiss
Stroganoff

The Holy Order of the Immaculate Muffin

I've been trying.

Since I was a kid, since before I came to fall in and out of grace, measured in 1/2 cups. I've been trying.

I came to it as a stranger; a pilgrim, as my friend Henry would say.
Though I'd never seen it myself, held it in my hand, I'd heard people talk about it. Talk about it in that way that sets folks eyelids fluttering, knees wobbling.
Like snake charmers and revivalists. Like yogis and swamis and the like.
I was looking to be charmed. Needing to be revived.
And so I made cornbread.

Rather, I tried.
God, how I tried.

At first I came at it with arrogance, with ego, with force of will - all the things that will fuck up a perfectly good cornbread.

I had thought it was simple bread and I was a complicated man. Boy, did I have that backwards.

Irony is never a good starting place.

Through my 20s I made thick, lifeless bricks of cornbread that hillbillies could use to build pyramids. I ran my ovens too hot. Inevitably I would rush the bake. Inevitably I would run my forearm into the rack; young men are measured in scars. Time after time, scar after scar, I learned nothing but only became more disappointed with each sandpapery paperweight or bludgeon masquerading as cornbread.

Boy, I was mad. Everyone had lied to me about cornbread. I was mocked in the aisles of the supermarket buy boxed mixes. I dug my heels in and continued to bow down, genuflect and lower myself to the bottom shelf, because that's where they keep the cornmeal.

Through my thirties I ruined batch after batch by adding whatever struck my fancy. My cookbooks, my armory of spells and folklore, sat uncracked, untouched, unloved - stacked above the cupboards, dogpiled. I cheated on the recipe like a touring rock musician. I played the part of plantation dandy in our sprawling Brooklyn apartment in the rural lowlands of Prospect Heights. Not surprisingly my cornbreads were often mush. Half baked and muddled. I would always check the oven too much. The oven that ran slow. The oven that was held together w/ bailing wire and twine. So it goes in your 30s, in Brooklyn. Each disappointment chipped away at me. Each soupy mess made me question my skill as a cook, my depth. Cooking is a magical thing. I came to doubt.

I doubted myself. I doubted the original, mythical cornbread that everyone had talked about. I doubted this non-existing thing that was the bar for every actual cornbread that fell short of the mark, shy of the finish. This weekly exercise in failure had brought me nothing but shame. Even the feral cats in the abandoned lot would not eat it. I walked by the cornmeal the way anonymous and guilt ridden lovers do in the long walk between trains at 14th Street.

And then I stopped. I turned my back on it. I laid into biscuits. I started working w/ high gluten flour and making bagels. I started making long batons of french bread, stubby rounds of Italian. I used no longer used my cast iron skillet, so heavy and powerful, for baking. I abandoned cornbread and viewed it as some old, brown god that the natives had placed on a pedestal. I regarded it as quaint phase of evolution.

Yeast was good for me. I understood it. It understood me. I came back to recipes and scales. I came back to quiet process, to peaceful patience. Over time my breads became better and better. I found a way to whisper to the dough, to be patient with the sponge, to let the oven be. In this way I was charmed by the tenacity of yeast that is thick in the air - unseen but prevalent. Every week I stood in my kitchen and had my own tent revival, shouting sermons and stomping my bare feet on my kitchen floor. Still, I was incomplete. The cornbread haunted me.

Last week I swung at it again.

This last weekend I made cornbread muffins for my Mom as a side for a crab cake dinner. I figured if I tried in her kitchen, the kitchen of my youth, I would have some extra luck. I was wrong. I followed the recipe closely. I was disciplined w/ the use of a timer. Still, the cornbread muffins I made were dense and coarse. They stuck to the pan, embarrassed to be debuted. My mom was kind, and the meal was good. But the cornbread muffins were awful. I was defeated.

Three days later I tried again. This time w/ grilled portobellos and a roasted pepper slaw. I let them go to long, didn't compensate on the cook time for it being muffins as opposed to full bread, and again I was presented with a small gang of cornbread cobblestones perfect for any preindustrial alley.

And then there was last night.

Last night I was pretty dragged out from a long day at work, and a long bike ride home. I couldn't think of food, much less prepare it. My wife made a really, really nice salad. We didn't have any croutons or nuts on hand so I took one of the left over muffins, that I had left in a bowl on the kitchen table as if to remind me of my failure, and crumbled it into the salad.

It was amazing. A-Maze-Ing.

In that moment it became clear to me that the thing I had been doing wrong (wrong from the start, as old E.Pound would say) was thinking the cornbread was one thing, and then blaming it for being something else. The previous failure didn't matter at that moment I was eating that salad. The failures of my youth, the failures in my Brooklyn kitchen. The failure of that dark time when I decided I would no longer try. It was clear to me that the magic lay in understanding the thing, and not forcing it. The magic was in the thing itself, as well as w/in myself, and would come to fruition when I gave it enough space to simply be what it is.

There is beauty in that which is terrible. There is hope in every failure. There are surprises only for those who are open to it. The question always is the intention. Am I cooking to impress? Am I cooking to quiet that voice that won't talk with its mouth full? Am I cooking to flex my will and strut? No. I am cooking to eat better, to be more fulfilled, more complete.

To be fed. In more ways than one.

Amen.

The Potato Story

My mother came from the foot hills of the Appalachians, in the corner of Virginia’s New River Valley, shrouded in mountain fog, in arcane smoke full of specters and ghosts. Depression Era Virginia of my mother’s youth was just another plague or pestilence for the people of the territory. Sure, they’d been American born for two generations, a clear 60 years; but these pasty, freckled, Irish Scots had only traded fen for holler, bagpipes for fiddles, proud songs of revolt for murder ballads. They carried charms to ward of fairies and other pissed off mountain spirits. They carried scars from the Civil War. They lost an entire generation at Gettysburg, 400 miles away. Generations passed and the fables of terror were recounted in those flimsy houses built during each city’s little boom, when the Company came to town, and then became the town. The ghost story each mother told her child, the boogie man always, was the famine of 1843.

Not when what little they had was laid asunder by the Union marching home, savage w/ reckless energy. Not when raw Hell had unleashed @ King’s Mountain, when Ferguson took a bullet in the head and every man in the shadow of the Blue Ridge claimed responsibility for that aim being so true. Not when they Tutulo and Powhattan tribes agreed that these white people had no right to their sacred ground and took their revenge, not discriminating between women and children. No, it was always the famine of 1843.

It was in Ireland. The blight had taken the crops. When the crops failed the landlords came and each family was put out, one by one, until the Crown took all the ruined land. Pushed out of Ireland they came to the Virginia colonies, carrying w/ them the potato that failed them.

My mother’s grandmother, Mom Weaver, would always pause at this part of the story and point out that her family (which is to say her father’s side of the family) came from Scotland, and had not been put out. They were not vagabonds, her kit and kin.

They had come to the mountains to pull coal from the ground, each day losing a little more light. They had gone into the mines and carried out the coal for the electricity they could not afford. They had seen their savings disappear as the banks crumbled in 29. Still Mom Weaver only talked about the famine, as if it were a catch-all.

Each potato, she would say, was a kind of miracle.
“So much, you see, can go wrong”.
Mom Weaver would turn a potato over and over in her hand, scanning it like a crystal ball as she unwove her story:

“When they come to move you out, with their dogs and their guns and their writs on paper,” her hard Scottish consonants slammed like waves against a breach wall, “it’s the same as when the cold won’t break, the river don’t flow, and the crop dies before the strawberry moon. “

“But a potato, a single potato, can stretch today into tomorrow, and remind you what can come from this cold, hard ground.”

“It ain’t proud but humble. Not fancy but homely. The potato comes to us covered in dirt and sod. You can’t get at it and not take the earth home w/ you under your nails, back beneath your ears, deep in the crease of your skin. So what. Dirty hands can be trusted. Ain’t never met a banker w/ dirty hands. Can’t trust one of them.”

“Ain’t complicated. Not like an onion. Spend all day peeling an onion. Just crying and crying. Never getting to anything, each layer thinner than the first, until its nothing but tears and thin sheaf of onion you can see through. Not the potato. No sir.”

“You peel a potato one-two-three. No surprises. What you see is what you get.”

It was at this woman’s elbow that my mother learned to skin a potato, to hold the paring knife confidently, hidden strong in the crease of your palm. She would stand at the table in the kitchen on the South East corner of the house, the side closest to the willow tree, and she would peel potatoes as her grandmother had her separate the peels for later use in moonshine or sourdough starters. She would listen, trapped in the river valley, in that thin walled house, as Mom Weaver would retell the stories of warning, the horrifying recounting of the past.

My mother didn’t tell me about the famine of 49 when she taught me how to skin a potato, to prepare it, to hold the skins to the side (for luck, she said). She would only tell me that you can always count on a potato. It’s humble. It’s pragmatic. My mother smiles a certain way when she says “pragmatic”.

The potato is better than that.

It is better than Mom Weaver’s scarecrow ghost stories. It is better than my mother’s pragmatism.

It is the beginning of everything, a still point. It can become almost anything, swayed by your mood, by your impulse. Its texture is open for discussion. Its meat is a chameleon.

It is the best dinner date you will ever have. The most sublime accompaniment.

It is immediately gratifying in its ability to become. It is ever patient in its process of becoming.

I will hold a potato in my hand and consider its weight, consider its journey, trying to rub the bits of dirt off. I am struck by the great potential of the potato and realize that famine, back there in 49, that was a famine of Hope.