Growing up in an Italian family in Canada, meant doing everything food-related at home. Long before words like “casareccia” (home-made) gave it respectability, we were merely those kids with giant vegetable patches for back yards, whose hundreds of relatives were always coming over to can tomatoes, roast peppers, peel beans, boil fruit, bake biscuits, make cheese, cure salami, press grapes and yes, strangle chickens. Some of those activities have diminished over the past 30 years. Indeed, if any of my generation continue the practice of strangling chickens, they’ll only be doing so as a catharsis. That said, my family continues to produce homemade Italian specialities to this day. I hope that never stops.
One thing we never got into was curing olives. I mean, we love olives. There are stories about every member of my family almost choking on an olive repeatedly in infancy. It didn’t matter which: the waterlogged run-of-the-mill canned ones, the meaty, slightly bitter, crunchy ones a relative smuggled back from Italy in his luggage, the prune-sized black ones that were so oily I’d call the dog over to wipe my hands on....
So given that my family loved olives and was so adept at curing and preserving food, why did we never do olives? A quick poll of the family one night over dinner gave me a unanimous answer to the question: I dunno.
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.
When I was growing up, my parents took me and my sister to all kinds of restaurants but rarely ones with "kid's menus." We regularly came into San Francisco to eat Chinese food, tried sushi long before it became popular, and celebrated birthdays and school graduation at fancy French restaurants. Unlike many kids who probably longed for Taco Bell or McDonald’s, I enjoyed eating at The Good Earth, a casual restaurant near my house. The menu had a mix of salads and sandwiches and some very unique entrees. It wouldn’t necessarily be considered “health food” by today’s standards but there were quite a number of vegetarian dishes.
Working my way through college as a waiter in the Catskill Mountains I learned that the best Jewish cooks were Chinese. A chef who can make a swell wonton has no problem with kreplach. Chicken soup? Roast duck? Pepper steak? Stuffed cabbage? Delicious. The guests always wanted to know what the secret ingredient was. Why was this brisket so good? Even better than Grandma’s. Why? It was easy. MSG.