Food, Family and Memory

My daughter Celeste recently returned from a semester abroad in Dakar, Senegal.

She spent several months in the West African city perfecting her French, learning Wolof, the unofficial language, and studying West African culture, art and Islam. One of the biggest adjustments for her was the custom of eating out of a communal bowl….with toddlers no less! Boy, I wouldn’t want to share the plate with my own family, and we’ve been exchanging the same germs for decades.

So, what did Celeste miss most after months of mutton and rice en famille? Bacon, avocados, pie, eggs from her back yard AND Mexican food.

This is an excerpt from the book "Clothing Optional: And Other Ways to Read These Stories"

We had just started Saturday Night Live, I was an apprentice writer, 24 years old and I felt intimidated.  Chevy was hysterically funny. So was John and Danny and Gilda and Franken. And Michael O’Donoghue, well, Michael O’Donoghue simply scared the shit out of me. So I stayed pretty much to myself. One day I came to work, and on my desk was a framed cartoon. A drawing – no caption – of a drunken rabbi staggering home late and holding a wine bottle. And waiting for him on the other side of the door was his angry wife, getting ready to hit him with a Torah instead of a rolling pin. I had no idea who put it there. I started looking around and out of the corner of my eye I saw a white-haired man in his office, laughing.  He had put it there. That was the first communication I had with Herb Sargent– which was significant given that he never spoke and he gave me a cartoon that had no caption.

I had seen him years before. Or at least I think I did. When I was a kid. My father manufactured jewelry and he had his shop on 52nd Street between Fifth and Madison. I used to come into the city from Long Island and run errands for him during the summer. And no matter where the delivery was supposed to go, I made sure I got there by going through the lobby of what was then called the RCA Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, with the hopes that maybe I would see Johnny Carson (whose show was upstairs) or some of the people from That Was the Week That Was: Buck Henry, Bob Dishy, David Frost – or Herb Sargent, who was the producer. I knew his name from the credits. As a young boy who wanted to be a TV writer some day, this was like hanging around outside of Yankee Stadium waiting to see the players going through to the clubhouse.

This fall I took a night train ride from Buffalo, New York to Chicago, Illinois. Normally, I find the train relaxing, a chance to rest, read and reflect. On this trip, however, I just wanted to sleep. But the guy sitting behind me snored so loudly that even the usually soothing train sounds couldn’t drown out his volcanic eruptions.

By the time we arrived at Union Station, I stumbled out of the train bleary-eyed, and headed for the nearest coffee shop. There, I unpacked a treasure from inside my backpack – my sister-in-law’s zucchini bread. I sat by the window, watching Chicagoans hurry through a light rain to their offices. Sipping a steaming latte, I savored every bite of the cake-like bread slices. I can’t think of a breakfast I’ve enjoyed more.

I realized I had never baked zucchini bread. Back home in Los Angeles, I decided it was time to rectify that situation.

This is a story about Beef Stroganoff. But before your mind wanders to sour cream and Russian Tzars, picture the small kitchen in which it was created. Probably 9 by 9, with a rudimentary stove, a wooden counter which doubled as a chopping board, a hatch leading into a dining room, a single sink with a window facing onto the mountain, with the silver birch trees, where the blueberries and wild strawberries grew in the summer. The larder, where on special occasions gravlaks was made (weighed down with wooden boards and round lead sinkers), was reached via a trap door in the wooden floor, the entrance covered by a red and white rag rug.

Because this story takes place a long time ago, when I was just a small child, the details of the preparation of the stroganoff are hazy. In those days such things did not interest me, and although no doubt many conversations were had by the grown-ups in the family about which butcher had the best meat as it was a special occasion -- and just on that day money didn't seem to matter quite as much -- I think I may have been sitting on the roof of the wooden outhouse, picking black morello cherries and stuffing them into my mouth at the time.

I did know that when the meat did arrive -- via my grandfather's dark red Lancia with its sweet-smelling leather seats -- there was a great welcoming party consisting of my grandmother, my mother, my aunt, maybe even my father in his rolled up jeans and a fish bucket, having coincidentally just stepped off the boat after a morning of catching cod and mackerel in the days when cod were as bountiful as the little crabs under the jetty. My grandfather was in his city clothes, his doctor clothes. The dark grey wool trousers, the pale blue shirt, the elaborately polished brown loafers he wore in Oslo. He carried the special stroganoff beef in front of him, laying it on his two hands like a tray, wrapped in white butcher paper and tied with twine. He had a smile on his face.