The comforts of gravy -- in lean years and fat

(Dorothy Allison wrote this completely great food memory thing in the New York Times Magazine section which is called the Eat, Memory.)

Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.  That's it. It smells of home, the door locked against the night and a stillness made safe by the sound of a spoon going round in a pan.  It is anticipation, the last thing prepared before the meal comes to the table, the bowl in Mama's hand closing the day out peacefully, no matter what time came before.

As my daughters will attest, I am not a cook. 

Indeed, the only thing I have ever cooked is brown rice and boiled eggs (you notice I said boiled and not scrambled or poached or anything remotely requiring any cooking skills) so it was a testament to my attempts to be fearless, that the first time I cooked anything more complicated than brown rice or a boiled egg, was on national television on Martha Stewart’s show...

When I was a child, for two weeks every summer, my family would go to a small town in Norway called Fevik. We would stay in a hotel called the Strand Hotel, which is, now, a home for the elderly. We were a large family, four children, (I was the youngest), my mother, my Norwegian father, and his sister, Else.                 

Our days were filled with expeditions that usually involved catching our lunch, by crabbing or trolling for mackerel which we would cook over a fire on a nearby island that was deserted, but for moss and heather.   

I never understood why we couldn't stay at the hotel for lunch, like the other families. The explanation was always the same, it was too expensive and there were too many of us, something that I now fully understand.

“The Lakes!” The children would shout from our rented Mini-Van, as we approached Waterville, Maine for our summer vacation. The first lake symbolized that we were almost at the end of our long day of traveling from Los Angeles. Every July, my husband and I traveled with our blended family of seven children in to the deepest country of the Belgrade Lakes, Maine.  Unlike the coastal towns, the inland lakes do not attract the tourists in masses, mostly New Englanders, visiting camps that have been within their families for generations.