Mangia! (Or Mang, as my grandmother would say)

In my addled state at the time of my last post, I completely lost track of our topic du week -- my favorite subject.  Food!

Since having children and losing my limited ability to concenterate for anything greater than a two-minute interval, my sole non-Nickelodeon TV viewing consists of the news and The Food Network.

A great disappointment to my mother and especially my beloved late grandmother, I am not a cook.  I did somewhat redeem myself by marrying Emeril. :)  As a child, I did not enjoy eating -- much consternation ensuing.  Of course this situation has been more than remedied now.  I may not cook, but oh, how I love to eat.

As I type this, I am listening to my husband and two-year-old son in the next room, watching an HBO concert tribute to the Rock and Roll Hall of fame. The pride of a musician sharing his passion with his appreciative son is beyond words. Of course I thoroughly comprehend why my grandmother could not get over my lack of aptitude for (or interest in) her life's work. But honestly -- as a cook, she was an impossible act to follow.

Like Carmela, my family had the whole pasta-turkey-22 course Thanksgiving meal as an established tradition.  Like Mary Ann, my grandmother grew up in a home with boarders (and 10 siblings).  And scrapple (yum -- I know, I know) and stewed tomatoes (yuck) were staples of my youth. 

My mother's family hails from Ischia and Amalfi.  My mom and aunt finally visted their ancestral homeland a few years ago, and the initial plan was to tour northern Italy.  My mom nixed this idea immediately.  "We can't go there!  They eat white sauce!"  In our family, tomato is King. 

My parents dated in high school.  My dad eventually went to college, joined the army to avoid being drafted and, eight months into his service, called my mom from California (in the middle of the night) to propose.  He said that army food sucked, and he really wanted to get married so he could move out of the barracks and have someone cook him good meals.  She turned him down. :)  He called back.  They have been married for 41 years, so he must have done something right. 

My father (a "Mitigan" = American) had a favorite meal -- stew.  He looked forward to it all day on one of their first days as a married couple.  He came home and was surprised to smell something spaghetti-like.  My mom assured that no, it was stew.  He was expecting beef in broth.  What he got was hot dogs, peas, and potatoes in a tomato sauce.  My mom had never eaten or cooked a meal that was not tomato-based.   Today, she makes a mean beef stew.  However, she remains horrified that my four-year-old prefers her pasta without sauce, thanks very much.

My dad being a Korean linguist and my mom being a cook, I also grew up eating some of the very best Korean food.  I recently read a book by Paula Yoo, and as soon as the protagonist mentioned mandu, she had me hooked.  Back in the day, my parents used to watch every episode of The Sopranos (bear in mind that I have two Aunt Carmellas, an Uncle Junior, and that my mom's godmother is married to a Tony Soprano who worked in waste management).  My mom would then call me in LA to report, in mouthwatering detail, the foods consumed in each episode.  If any family member eats at a restaurant, I know to expect a ten-minute recap of the meal, soup to nuts.  Family recipes are cherished posessions, framed and hung, replicated, discussed and dissected.  Especially in a family of non-readers and non-writers, the effort to record a recipe (much of which consisted of "a pinch of" this and "add until it looks right") was clearly and act of pure love.

Reading JoAnn's post about A Wrinkle in Time, I was transported as soon as I saw the words "cocoa" and "liverwurst."  I remember those details intimately, along with the turkey dinner served at the denouement.  The word "tongue" in Mary Ann's post immediately invokes Beverly Cleary and Ramona Quimby, Age 8, as well as a Cleary description of french fries that I can recite to this day.  I was recently reading my daughter a picture book based on Little House in the Big Woods, and of course the maple sugar candies that I so vividly recalled were a centerpiece.  Buttons that resembled blackberries and even canned peaches were described in detail that stays with me to this day.  No wonder I always want to eat when I read! 

The English language is sadly lacking in words to describe tastes, smells, and textures.  Writing well about food is more difficult than it might seem.  Watch the Food Network, and you will hear the words "beautiful" and "delicious" more often than you can stand.

Many of my friends who enjoy cooking describe the activity as a satisfying creative outlet.  For me, writing about food serves the function of "creating art" more effectively than actually cooking.  After all, eating is a fleeting act; words are forever.

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Check out this link for information on developing writing lessons and even entire composition courses centered on the subject of writing about food:

http://www.pearsoncomppro.com/electures/index.php

Food and Fiction

      I hate to cook. Period. I have mageirocophobia,the cook's equivalent of stage fright. Just knowing that someone else is going to consume and judge what I am cooking turns me into a quivering pile of Knox gelatin. Then why do I own shelf after shelf of cookbooks?
    To me, cookbooks are literature. My favorites are the organizational fundraisers, each contributor adding a little history. ("My mama always made this milk punch for Christmas brunch" or "Uncle George used to stir up this stew on hunting trips.") Family tales aside, each recipe really is a potential story.  The ingredients form a cast of characters waiting for the right circumstances...a specific way of combining, a certain degree of heat...to become something delicious and memorable. Thank goodness my husband does cook.
     For someone who doesn't cook, food and recipes are an integral part of most of my books.  I have my mother to thank.
     I fear cooking. Mom hated it. I remember finishing lunch at the kitchen table, while Mom went into meltdown mode over supper, five hours away.  With her head inside the ice-encrusted maw of our non-self-defrosting refrigerator freezer,  Mom shuffled through frozen bricks of meat and vegetables, muttering "What can I make for supper?" Finally, she would extract a couple of frost-covered, foil-wrapped bricks and with an exhausted sigh, toss them on the countertop to defrost. Mom had sentenced herself to making yet another meal.
    Eventually I learned the source of Mom's distaste. During the Depression, my mother's mother (known as Maga to her grandchildren) ran a boarding house as a way of keeping food on the table for her family of eight.  (If this sounds like a certain fictional character from the American Girl series...well, sorry. It's the truth!) My teen-aged mom served as Maga's sou chef, in cooking vast quantities of food, not only for her own family, but for a dozen or so boarders. That meant a hot breakfast, a hot supper, and a packed lunch for everybody. No wonder Mom hated cooking.
    This also explained why all of Mom's recipes read"Yield 24".
    "Frances, are you cooking for the Fifth Army?" Dad would ask, peering into an enormous vat or skillet or roaster pan. "You can reduce the recipes."
     "Too much trouble," Mom would shrug.
     I understood.  Cooking was bad enough without adding a math exercise to the mix. Even though Mom was only cooking for three people, the food didn't go to waste. If we had hash on Monday (a good meat-stretching Depression era meal), we also had it Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. When I moved out on my own, Mom didn't offer me a file of heirloom recipes, and I didn't ask. I never wanted to eat Fried Salmon Patties or Scrapple again.

     In fact, I didn't even think of those old boarding house recipes until I was writing Jimmy's Stars. It suddenly dawned on my that Maga was running a boarding house through the World War II rationing. Sure, her boarders ration stamps helped out, but sometimes it didn't matter if you had the money and the stamps. The food just wasn't available.   It was being sent to "the fighting boys overseas."
     Aha!  This explained Maga's "meat" loaf where the main ingredient was a soy "meat extender." And Wacky Cake, made without eggs, flour of sugar.  Even my all-least-favorite-dish-ever, stewed tomatoes.
     I dug deeper into a world where sugar, butter and meat were scarce. Recipes emphasized "natural sweeteners" (like prune juice), "sweetbreads" (which are neither sweet nor bread) and "the lesser organ meats." I wondered what the average American kid thought of finding a "tongue" sandwich in his lunchbag.  I decided that in matters of school lunches, the kids' tastes haven't changed that much over time. The difference would come in that the kid of 1943 had come to realize that patriotism and sacrifice took precedence over personal preference.
    Food became integral to Jimmy's Stars because finding and preparing food was such a large part of WWII homefront life. "Use it up, wear it out or make do" inspired "Rookie Cookies" (butterless, rock-like lumps that could withstand the trip from homefront to battlefront) and "Tomato Aspic."  I had so much fun researching additional recipes, never thinking that bloggers and teachers would ask for them, and actually make them! Check out the results at Mawbooks.

     My latest picture book, Surprise Soup, came from my husband and I swapping childhood food memories, both involving our fathers. Considered too young to "sit still" in church, Craig and his father stayed home Sunday mornings, making pancakes for the return of the rest of the family.
    My dad was (and still is!) an excellent chef. He pitched in with mealmaking when he could, but as an FBI agent, he didn't have a lot of time to indulge his inner Emeril.
My favorite memories are of weekends when we would make Dad's vegetable beef soup, a process that could consume an entire Saturday.
    I sliced and diced these two memories, chopped them together, added and subtracted ingredients and fiddled with the heat. After several years of simmering on the back burner of my mind...voila! Surprise Soup!
    True, I can't really make soup or aspic or even the allegedly goof-proof Wacky Cake without scorching or botching something. But in my mental kitchen, there is always a pot of soup bubbling on the stove, a batch of cookies in the oven, and a loaf of home-made bread, rising under a clean dish towel. And sometimes, when I am lucky, my husband who is a good cook, brings my food fantasies to fruition.

Writing Workout


   Try this with your young writers.
   Write down your favorite food, whatever it might be.
    Now describe this food, without telling how it looks.
   Here are some questions to consider:  How does it taste?
Is it sweet, salty, sour, a combination? Can you taste individual ingredients?
How does it feel in your mouth? Crisp, crunchy, smooth, slippery, hot, cold?
    What does it smell like? Does one ingredient dominate the aroma?
    Do you have any specific memories of this food? Where did you eat it first? Does it remind you of any place or time or person?
  
    The last time I used this exercise, my entire group of middle schoolers, except one, all described the same dish...macaroni and cheese! Yet, no two descriptions were alike, because everyone had their own personal vision....from mac-in-a-box to Grandma's-from-scratch!

Reading Recommendations


    Usually I don't recommend books per se. I just tell you what I am reading. But what I am reading now fits in so well with our current topic, I just had to tell you a little about it. It is The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal by Mark Kurlansky. The WPA Writer's Project was compiling an encyclopedia of American food when World War II essentially ended the work. Kurlansky has compiled some of the never-published essays into this fascinating book. Some of the contributors' names are familiar...Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, Eudora Welty...and some are not. All transport us back to a time when local food meant just that. Happy reading and Bon Appetit!

Mary Ann