Food, Family and Memory

Defining the dress code of the Gents, that was easy….BUT OH, THE DRESS CODE for women…that was serious. Pant suits were just coming in big and the Maitre’D would have none of it. It was here, at the Plaza Hotel, with all the Management taking notes, that I rewrote their dress code with sketches and fabric swatches, as I tried to educate those huffy puffed-up doormen.

I explained carefully to them that they must never allow entrance, if the fabric on the pant suit was the least bit shiny… like Polyester… that was a no no. They liked that, since it left them with some power… Imagine having to make sketches of what a woman could wear to a doorman... Who were we trying please here in this Boys Club of the Oak Room? Why the Mad Men of course! Only linen darling... or flat dry wool or men's tweeds... Oh dear... 

Nothing I make ever comes out the same way twice.  Maybe it’s because I don’t measure?

I make my brother cookies all the time, usually his favorite- chocolate chip, and he knows they will always be a bit different.  I use the same recipe, really I do.  By the way, this is the disclaimer for the recipe below.  I wrote it down out of my head.  Good luck!  Don’t be afraid to adapt. 

Maybe that’s the deep lesson from my refusal to remember what I did last time?  Nah. 

I just like having fun in the kitchen.  In college, I lived in what we affectionately called “the treehouse.”  It was a converted attic surrounded by big pines (I think it was pine).  My kitchen was so small that I could practically wash dishes, stir my veggies, and stand inside my fridge all at the same time.  I loved it.  

If a group of 10 people playing the word association game were given the word “summer”, chances are at least half would say picnic. Probably more. For me, the best summer picnic, the only summer picnic, is a beach picnic. My family wasn’t park picnickers or picnic in the woods people. We were Long Island beach lovers. And that’s where we did our picnicking.

Every summer from the time I remember, until I was 18, my family belonged to the Lawrence Beach Club on the south shore of Long Island, New York. When school let out in June until after Labor Day, my sisters and I were there, rain or shine. If it rained while we were in the pool, we just opened our mouths to catch the drops.

On hot days after school started back up in September, my mom would pick us up at 3, the station wagon idling at the curb, and take us to the beach until 5 well into October when it was starting to cool down and get dark early.

Memories of Lawrence Beach Club own prime real estate in my memory bank. Beach picnics on summer weekday nights with my family are among the most precious. So precious they are usually keep vaulted in the back of the bank and brought out to be viewed on rare occasions.

It took me half my life to realize that when Guadalupe Contreras says “Gadaymee”, she means to say, “Goddamn it”. I thought for years that she had been referring to my sister, whose name is Amy, with a level of stifled frustration that I found hard to account for. I told a Spanish-speaking friend about this misunderstanding a while back, and he in turn informed me that my Spanish pronunciation of “I’m scared” (tengo miedo) sounds a lot like “I have shit” (tengo mierda). I relayed this conversation to Lupe. She claimed to disagree.

There are some things whose very greatness lies in the fact that they can’t be translated, or imitated at all, without some diminishment of their essence. This is often the case with poetry in translation, but I believe the phenomenon extends to other things, like bed-head, or fans of the Boston Red Sox. We read translations anyway, of course, secure that what we find in them will still be more than enough, that the meaning of a word, a palabra, can transcend language. Recipes can be like this for those who collect them, more than a list of ingredients, or a formula for the cook. Cooking from a recipe, or merely writing it down, is itself an act of translation, and so the closer that recipe comes to the source, the better. I feel this way about Albondigas soup, which is why my sister and I decided to take a lesson in preparing it from the true master, a woman who takes her own sources seriously, kneading raw beef like bread dough, and starting her meat stock with a pile of scary, dull white bones: Guadalupe Contreras.