FOOD
It’s hard to imagine actual food on the Round Table at the Algonquin. Booze, yes, ashtrays, coasters, witticisms scrawled on cocktail napkins but no hamburger or trout amandine. Parker was a tiny thing and one suspects she often forgot to eat. But there’s no denying the profound role food plays in many writers’ imaginations. Here is our offering. Bon appétit.
We All Scream for Ice Cream
Word Count 198
A very long time ago, I asked my mother if she would do me a favor.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’ve just gotten an assignment to find the best ice cream sundae in New York and I need you to help me.”
For three weeks, we swept through the ice cream parlors of New York City, my mother sampling sundaes; I diligently scribbling notes.
Heat Is My Art
Word Count 745
My mother’s favourite weekend breakfast was kippers. With dread, I’d hear her bodging around the kitchen, and soon the house would begin to fill with a pungent, salty, fishy smell. No matter how much I flailed about, she had no sympathy for my exaggerated pantomime of a dying daughter. “Go sit on the front steps if it so bothers you.” But it was winter in Canada and cold. If I made the mistake of touching something that had come in contact with the fish and then began to rub my eye, it would swell shut, and each breath I took sounded like a squeezebox. I felt like ripping my skin off.
I was born allergic to fish, nuts, some fresh fruit, mould, trees, grass, dust, wool, and cats. With terrible eczema thrown in just for flair.
Clueless in the Kitchen
Word Count 706
Some people are born with a feel for cooking. They instinctively know just how much cardamom or coriander to throw into a chicken curry and have the courage to substitute one ingredient for another to transform a dull recipe into a gourmet meal.
That was not me.
When I walked into a kitchen, it felt like entering a foreign country. Having grown up in a 1950s home with a full-time housekeeper who cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the extent of my culinary skills ranged from making Bumble Bee tuna fish sandwiches on Wonder Bread to baking Duncan Hines Brownies without the nuts.
As a newly married Army wife living in a remote town outside of Munich, Germany, the first dinner I cooked consisted of Muller's Elbow Macaroni with baked potatoes and canned peas.
Banana Face
Word Count 808
On a sunny beach in Puerto Rico, I am reading Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, which states that if we don’t accept death as an integral part of life instead of dreading it, life itself can turn into a kind of living death.
Distracted on the pristine, burning sand, I fail to address a question from my husband.
He grabs the book from my hands and declares unceremoniously: “You read to escape. What are you escaping now? We’re on a beautiful beach!”
Yes, but what better place to think about civilization’s repression and why we should get out from under it?
My husband goes on, unabated: “You think you’re a social person, but you’re really not.”
Dude, Let’s Surf the Cake
Word Count 501
One day, the natural foods bakery where I worked in Santa Cruz, California received an order for a six foot long cake in the shape of a surfboard. The year was 1975, the cake was for the 24 year old son of Jack O’Neill, the creator of the surfing wetsuit. Everybody had heard of the family so when we got the order, we were thrilled. One problem. We had never made anything like this before.
The first quandary was, what were we going to put it on? They told us they would bring a board big enough for it. They brought us a door.
Taming the Devil's Testicles
Word Count 902
My father vowed they would never be cooked in our home. My mother agreed that the stink of a Dickensian workhouse could hardly have been worse. My brother startled me on social media by pronouncing them “the Devil’s testicles.”
My family’s disdain for the Brussels sprout was rooted in the uniquely British experience of 20th-century institutional dining, specifically the “school dinner.” There were no cafeterias, burgers – or indeed choice -- for us. In my all-girl school, we lined up in our brown uniforms to sit at long tables, each presided over by a senior “prefect.” Her job was to dish out food and send plates down the line in a dreary parody of family meals.
Banana Cake on the Breezeway
Word Count 906
At sixteen, the annual visits to my grandmother’s cinderblock house in Florida stopped being fun. I didn't want to leave my friends behind for three summer weeks. They’d be smearing baby oil on their shoulders, drinking weak beer, and hooking up. I would be drinking iced coffee and playing scrabble. I wasn’t worried about missing them. I worried my friends wouldn’t miss me. Upon returning, I wouldn’t be part of the inside jokes, the history they'd made. Belonging was tenuous for me, a kid who went to five elementary schools and spent most of the fifth grade alone in the library. When I found friends in high school, I was a follower. Cut class? Why not. Be lookout while a "hilarious" friend pooped in the Burger King sink? Of course. Eat mushrooms? Sure. If it meant not getting culled from the pack, absolutely.
When Food Kills
Word Count 1263
I spent New Year’s Eve sitting on a rolling stool in a curtained-off cubicle in the Emergency Room with my 27-year-old daughter. She lay in the bed hooked up to monitors and drips. I’d like to say this was an unusual event, but that would be a lie.
I have visited more ERs than there are dogs at a dog park on a Saturday. Some visits blur together. Others stand out because of how terrifying they were.
A few weekends earlier, my husband, Matt, had called from the living room across the second floor to my office, where I was grading student papers. “Did you see the story about the Bowdoin student?”
“No. Why?” I asked though, I knew what he was going to say.
“He died from anaphylaxis.”
Oranges In Sunlight
Word Count 81
Oranges in Sunlight
Kathmandu, Nepal
And so the sun gives back
what it has taken,
the orange unleashed from air,
from all surroundings,
lies as gently as a pearl
or drop of water.
Put Down the Peanut Butter!
Word Count 1367
I was wearing a blue bikini with flowers on it. The sun was high in a clear sky. The lake was shimmering. Viviane and I were chasing each other and playing with a bouncy and squishy red ball. We were shouting, screaming, and laughing all at the same time. We were eight. The grownups were at a picnic table nearby, smoking, eating, drinking Fanta, and being boisterous.
This was in Canada, where the air was crisp even in summer. The grass was prickly beneath my feet. We stopped to get some water. Viviane had an older sister, Claire, pronounced Cligh. As I was gulping down water in between my giggles, Claire pointed at my belly and puffed out her cheeks. When I didn’t respond, she said, “You are fat!”
Francois Makes Corned Beef
Word Count 1216
When my mother was first married, she watched the show, “Creative Cookery,” on Chicago Public Television every day She talked about Francois Pope as if she knew him, had been under his personal tutelage for years, and was now informing her children of the man who taught her everything she knew about cooking. It was 1951, and she was new to Chicago, having met my father when they were both on vacation in Miami. They were married just a few months later. My mother was thrilled to escape Brooklyn, where she had been since coming to this country from eastern Europe as a child.
Best Food Friends
Word Count 787
We shared the same last name and were both involved in San Diego’s feminist community in the early eighties. Occasionally one or the other would be asked, “Any relation to ___?” We were just names to each other until finally, we met. “At last!” I said, or was it she?
A couple of years later, L. hired me, fresh out of graduate school, for an administrative position at Planned Parenthood. We quickly became friends, seeking each other out with work, then personal issues. We discovered common bonds, including our love of food. Whether eating leftovers from home in the communal lunchroom or making the rounds of the area’s many restaurants, we swapped meals, stories, recipes. A food-centric clique of two, we ate off each other’s plates, taking and bestowing bites. Once she nibbled away, bit by bit, the entire crunchy top of my blueberry muffin—the best part—before I’d had a bite. “Oh no,” L. said. “I didn’t mean to take the whole thing.” I glared. She grimaced. We laughed.
An Inexplicable Hatred of Zucchini
Word Count 539
My family had a few peculiarities when it came to food. No one on my father’s side had ever eaten the dark meat of chicken or turkey. Mother’s favorite snack was sardines on saltines, slathered with dijon mustard. And my favorite sandwich was peanut butter and bacon..
Our oddest food idiosyncrasy, however, was the family aversion to zucchini. Disdain was ingrained in me as a young child from the first time its name was spoken in my presence. The family ritual was to dine out at Peter’s on Sundays and zucchini rejection was reenacted weekly. Tony, our waiter approached the table with menus.
“Buona sera, Mr. and Mrs. Miles and children. Our specials tonight are veal piccata and osso bucco. Molto delizioso. And zucchini fritto misto is the vegetable“
Pishima’s Jackfruit
Word Count 634
My husband’s aunt, had a difficult, even tragic, start to life. Married at fourteen in East Bengal, later Bangladesh, her husband died within six months. She found herself a widow at the age of fifteen. For the rest of her life, she had to follow the strict rules then prescribed for Hindu women in her situation. She wore only white with no jewelry. All her bangles had been broken on her husband’s death. Foods regarded as ‘hot’: meat, fish, eggs, onion, and garlic were forbidden. She ate rice only once a day. On the last day of the lunar month, she fasted. Her food was usually cooked separately. Vegetables prepared near meat could be considered contaminated.
Eating Out
Word Count 1536
Each Saturday, my mother took me out to eat at the Chinese restaurant near us. These weekly lunches, a chance to be out, were major events in my life, marked by poverty, danger from Brooklyn street gangs, and vanishing time. I eagerly counted down the days until Saturday the way others counted the days until the end of school. My mother was single then, a status that would bookend her short, second marriage to my stepfather and the birth of my brother. Back then, every penny came out of her pocket, but amid the drudgery of a dead-end, low-wage job as a file clerk and endlessly trying to conquer roach infestations in our tiny slum apartment, she recognized the need for a treat for us, and this was it.
All For Me
Word Count 407
I can’t account for it, all this chopping and measuring and stirring and simmering. I haven’t cooked like this in ages, except for pound cake, but here I am, reading recipes, buying the ingredients, cooking them successfully, and eating them all up myself! Two days ago, I made seafood chowder. It’s the kind of recipe I like, handfuls of this and that, not a third of a cup of this or a fussy quarter teaspoon of that, no. Handfuls!
I Want Candy
Word Count 888
My mother didn’t like to cook; mostly, she made reservations. She started her day with instant black coffee and a slice of Melba Toast; for lunch, she had half a Dannon yogurt; for dinner, she and my father dined at supper clubs. On the nights those places were closed, we all went out for Chinese. My mother brought home doggy bags of leftovers, and I nibbled cold French fries and bits of Steak Diane. Mostly I subsisted on licorice whips, chocolate-covered malt balls, fudge, and pralines. Our town, a popular beach resort, had no end of specialty candy. We lived close to the boardwalk and daily I munched on Planter’s double-dipped chocolate covered peanuts, Fralinger's salt water taffy, Steel’s fudge.