Food, Family and Memory

My dad lived part-time in Sag Harbor and made the drive from the city every weekend in every type of weather. I would visit him and my stepmother every summer, and we’d stay put for the weekend, usually poolside. My dad and I would swim back and forth and read books and nap. He would do his Sunday puzzle and I would nudge him for clues; I would read books he gave me and he would nudge me about which part I was up to. Because to me, my dad was part Phillip Roth and part John Updike, I read Phillip Roth and John Updike. Because we both loved to punctuate the headier reading with murder mysteries, he would toss me his copies of Lee Child or Lawrence Block, and I would gobble them up like candy. I still have the water swollen copy of Annie Proulx’s Shipping News that he accidentally tossed into the water in order to save me from a hovering bee, and I remember how he had said he envied my getting to read it for the first time.

But what would any return home to the family be without the requisite favorite foods? Besides the inevitable Saturday night Maine lobster dinner, the most memorable part of the summer food wise, in addition to the musk melons and the corn and potatoes and other fresh fare at the roadside markets, were the little blue and white checkered bags of chocolate chip cookies that one could find only at Kathleen’s Bakeshop.

I saw a beautiful fruit tart today, but I didn’t buy it. Though one brief glimpse of its light crust, glistening white cream & assorted seasonal berries and our whole intense love affair came rushing back.

It’s the mid 1970’s. The place: Patrick Terrail’s West Hollywood restaurant Ma Maison. An old house on Melrose converted into the most innovative, modern French restaurant of its day. It was so very French and so very Hollywood, and when those two worlds collided on that patio of Astroturf and umbrellas, it was magic.

Big Hollywood deals were made, infamous fights broke out, and occasionally I was lucky enough – if someone with more money was paying—to be there, enjoying the food. That’s where it began – an infatuation that would turn into a stalker’s obsession. They had me at crème anglaise.

I was there a lot with Jackie Mason, which sounds so random, sort of like my celebrity dreams, but he was a friend of my dad’s and we went as his guest, or vice versa. Often, when we were at a meal with Jackie, he would do his bit:

Gentiles never finish drinking, Jews never finish eating. What do you think Jews talk about for breakfast? Where to eat lunch. At lunch: "Where should we have dinner?"

Until I was sixteen, Thanksgiving was spent at my maternal grandparents’ house in Ashtabula, Ohio. Often prefaced by a blizzard, and by my father worrying about making the five hour drive with 5% visibility and black ice on the Interstate, these holidays really began when we arrived, cold and tired, to find a House Full O’ Jews at 5105 Chestnut Street. We put our bags in our assigned bedrooms (I preferred the front bedroom, with its partially removed, politically incorrect and leering 1940s Cleveland Indian stuck to the mirror), and found our way to the living room, where there was always chopped liver with crackers.

My grandmother’s chopped liver, a miracle never repeated in my lifetime, was smooth, addictive and so delicious that I could completely disregard the fact that it was made largely of chicken livers and rendered chicken fat, along with some egg and onion. If you have never had good chopped liver, I fully understand that you may find the idea repellant, and that you are possibly imagining liver and fried onions, raw liver, or some other equally unredeemable and noxious substance. This was not that; this was intoxicatingly rich, bore no resemblance to liver in its original state, and could have been classified by the DEA as Hungarian Crack. The fact that my brother and I loved it from the time we were small (notwithstanding the fact that we both hated liver) and would have eaten until we foundered, should give you an idea of its universal and supernatural appeal. Now, of course, no one has my grandmother’s  recipe and we are all doomed to wander the kosher delis of the universe, trying in vain to get just one more bite of what we can only have in our dreams. (There’s probably a joke in there somewhere, about “wandering jews,” but it’s just too easy).

When I was 4 years old I was on Kids Say The Darndest Things with Art Linkletter. My folks told me the teacher in our Nursery School recommended me. When I think about the fact that I once called her ‘fatso’ just to try out the word, nothing personal, and she got so mad she locked me in a broom closet, I’m ever convinced of the altruism of teachers.

I told some outstanding whoppers to Art Linkletter and my lies are preserved in perpetuity on a 78 recording that was issued to each family along with a Tiny Tears doll for the girls. This thrilled me no end.