20th Century Woman

This Christmas I won’t have to fret about what to have in the house for my family to eat.  For the first time in 54 years I will probably be without children or grandchildren. It will be just Jerry and me, possibly including Jerry’s younger son, who is a bachelor of 30.  I could visit any number of children or friends, but I thought it would be interesting to try it on my own.  Still, at this time of year one thinks of food, and I am mentally cataloging what I would have needed on hand for my teenage grandchildren. 

I think that teen agers can be excessive about food.  Some eat almost anything (me in my teens) and some limit consumption to one or 2 items.  One of my grandchildren in her early teens ate only pizza.  Another ate only red meat.  One has been a vegetarian all her life, but during her teen years she was difficult to feed, because she liked almost no vegetables.  When my oldest son was a teen ager he would come home from school, fling open the refrigerator, and as things fell out of its overstuffed interior, declare loudly, “There’s never anything to eat in this house.”

For a few months when I was a teenager every day after school I fried a pan of sliced onions, put them between 2 pieces of bread and had a sandwich.  I gave this up when I noticed an expansion of my waistline.  That didn’t stop me from occasional binges of candy making.  I was good at fudge, and ventured into the mysteries of the soft ball, hard ball, and hard crack stages.  Girl friends would come over and we would make pulling taffy and talk about academy boys.

Almost every Sunday my aunt Clare invited people for lunch.  These Sunday lunches usually included a good number of the aforementioned boys form Phillips Academy, where my uncle Bart was a teacher and director of the art Gallery.  It was a teenage girl’s dream.  Prissy and Pen, Clare and Bart’s best friends, were almost always present.  They usually brought a whole leg of lamb, and I learned from Pen the skill of carving a leg of lamb with the bone in.

Pen taught English at the Academy, and every year he produced and directed a play, usually Shakespeare.  Sunday lunch began about 1 o’clock, and at 4 most of the guests and their children and dogs would go up the hill to George Washington Hall for rehearsal, either as a spectator or participant. 

Pen would stand at the back of the auditorium calling out directives. Sometimes he would stride down the aisle followed by his 2 standard poodles and leap onto the stage to push the actors into position or demonstrate some piece of business.  Clare’s smaller poodles milled about with the children.  The dogs enjoyed the social event and the children, every one, developed an early and lasting love for Shakespeare.

We spent many summers in Maine, either at Blue Hill or an island, North Haven.  Clam bakes on the beach were the most wonderful events of the summer.  Bart and Pen and other friends would build a roaring driftwood fire on the rocks and keep it stoked all day.  In the evening when the rocks were almost red hot they would pile heaps of wet seaweed onto the hot rocks, throwing in lobsters, clams and ears of corn to cook in the steaming seaweed.  Great vats of butter were melted.  You got your paper plate with lobster, clams, corn and a cup of melted butter, found a seat on the rocks somewhere near the bonfire for warmth and light, and ate the foods of paradise.

These gastronomic delights came to an end when I married for the first time at the age of 20.  We were short of money, and my husband, Pete from South Carolina, was unused to eating anything but beef, chicken and rice.  He had never tasted lamb, and I found to my dismay, after cooking a dinner that included fish and kale, that he hated fish, and kale was to him like boiled grass.  He pushed away his plate, saying, “I’d rather eat a bowl of cereal.”  After that we existed mostly on hamburger.

Nine years later things had improved.  My husband was working as a college professor and we owned a small house.  I had had 3 babies, finished my bachelor’s degree, and was working on a master’s degree.  He and I got home from work/school at the same time, but he must have suffered from unstable blood sugar, because about 15 minutes after we hit the door he would be pounding the table, bellowing “Where’s my dinner?”

In the last year of our marriage he had a visiting professorship at the University of Rangoon in Burma.  My kids by that time were 9, 8 and 5.  It was a great adventure for all of us, though it ended sadly.  In Burma we had an army of servants including a cook, Joseph, who was Indian.  (The other servants were: a “sweeper-bearer” a baby nanny, a “wash nanny” a driver, a gardener and a “derwan” or night watchman.)

Joseph was a good cook, but I had to ask him not to leave the chicken he had bought at the market in the morning for our dinner, alive and tied by the feet, lying outside the kitchen door.  It upset the children.  I was advised by friends, both Burmese and American, that I should sometimes go with Joseph to the market to buy our food in order to keep him honest with his market money.

I had a feeling that this would not have much effect, since the business looked quite mysterious, but nevertheless I did go once.  The market was open air with stalls selling all sorts of vegetables, rice, live chickens, fish and other things unknown to a European.  The most impressive thing about the market was that before one knew what sort of thing was offered (carrots, potatoes, spinach, etc.), a thick layer of black flies which completely covered the display had to be waved away.  They would swarm upward briefly only to quickly re-blanket the merchandise.  Our beef, and other household staples were bought at the military commissary.

The children ate separately from us, British style, and we ate on a screened veranda at about 8.  Often we had friends from the consulate or the university over for drinks before dinner.  The university was closed because of political unrest for most of the time my husband was there, and thus neither of us had much to do. 

There was a tennis court in our garden surrounded by gardenia bushes, and my husband played a lot of tennis.  Even now the scent of gardenias reminds me of Burma. The net on the tennis court was rather ragged because stray dogs played with it.  There were a lot of dogs because they were fed by Buddhist monks in the monastery up the hill.  They were rather wild, and I worried that they might bite the children, so I enquired about having them removed.  I was told that it was simple.  I should just call the authorities and they would distribute poison meat around our house and come later to collect the carcasses of the dead dogs.  

Thus we continued to have a dog torn ragged net, and for all I know, the descendents of those dogs are playing with a new net today.

I liked Burmese food.  It was fiery hot curries, often served with an accompanying bowl of soup, and various relishes.  My favorite of these was fried dried shrimp.  We also had parties with a Chinese hot pot.   The pot was tire shaped with a central chimney and a coal receptacle underneath.  Clear chicken broth, boiling from the hot coals, filled the pot, and dishes of the various soup components surrounded the pot.  These were thin sliced pork, beef, chicken, shrimp, many kinds of greens, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and onions.  The ingredients were added to the broth by the guests.  Each person had an egg which he would break into his bowl, and then ladle boiling soup over it. That would cook the egg and thicken the soup. There were condiments to add, some to make it very spicy.

Burmese food, as eaten by the Burmese themselves, was usually too hot for Europeans.  When we ate at the homes of our Burmese friends the fire level of the food was toned down for our wimpy palates.  Toward the end or our stay in Burma, at a time when the political situation had worsened, we attended a luncheon put on by the Burma America Society.  For most of the American guests the food was inedibly hot.  I ate it, and rather enjoyed it, though there was sweat running down my face, and my husband loved it.  He used to make money in college taking bets on how many hot peppers he could eat.  I guessed that it was just an error on the part of the caterers, but I was assured by some Embassy people that it was done as a deliberate political insult.  Things were getting tense.

About a week later I took my daughter Julia to a birthday party at the house of a Japanese child from school.  We passed the University, where the students were protesting.  There was a great mob of them, running around, laughing and looking festive.  Later, after we got home, the army moved in and shot hundreds, then spread out over the city and randomly shot hundreds more people.  We were invited to a party that night, and my husband insisted on going.  On the way home our car was following a truck, and in the gloom I gradually realized that there was a great pile of dead bodies in the truck bed.  That night the authorities blew up the student union, and the next day I gathered up my children and flew away from Burma and my marriage.

To be continued.

Which is more important, food or sex? One sustains life, the other perpetuates it. I guess that’s the reason one or the other subject is usually lurking in the recesses of the mind as we go through the day, and perhaps the night as well.

Though, come to think about it, I think I dream of sex more often than food.

Nevertheless, my whole life has been informed or enriched by new food experiences. Perhaps food events punctuate life.

As a child I focused on desserts and foods I hated. Turnips were my main food aversion, and to this day I have a deep suspicion of turnip like vegetables – parsnips, kohlrabi and the like.   These days, what with health and weight worries, desserts are for special occasions, but in the old days everyone had dessert every day. 

My mother made things like Floating Island and Rice Pudding.  Bread pudding and Apple Brown Betty were other favorites of hers. 

In Andover, where I spent much of my childhood in the household of my aunt Clare and my uncle Bart, Mary Stanton, the cook, ruled the kitchen.  She often made junket, and I had a book which my uncle read to me before bed called “Junket is Nice”.  Many years later my uncle told me that the name of the book had to be changed because it infringed on the trademark, Junket, so now it is called “Pudding is Nice.”  Somehow that doesn’t have the same ring.

Mary Stanton had a specialty which I have never found out how to make.  I’ll describe it.  It had sweet coffee jelly on the bottom, and a sort light colored, frothy layer of coffee, perhaps mixed with beaten egg white or cream, which seemed to have risen to the top as it jelled. For a long time it was my favorite dessert. I wish I could find a recipe for it.

Mary Stanton often made cookies.  If she was in a bad mood, which she frequently was, she would shoo me out of the ball-room sized kitchen, with its shiny linoleum floor and big black cast iron coal stove.  But sometimes she wanted company and she would let me sample a cookie, and tell me stories about life in Ireland before she came to Massachusetts.

Since dinner in those days was not until 7:30 or 8:00, Mary often had a quiet break at around 4 in the afternoon. Mike, the Irish gardener, would come into the kitchen for tea.  He was always welcome, and they would talk about Ireland.  Mike was a big, handsome fellow, but a confirmed bachelor.  We thought that Mary was in love with him, but she herself was plain, heavy set, with a black shingled bob, pale skin and thin lips.  She didn’t have a chance with Mike.

Because pigs were raised every year there was always a side of bacon hung in one of the pantries.  There never was better bacon.  But the best New England breakfast was on Sunday morning.  We would have baked beans, often home made, Boston Brown Bread (a sweet moist bread from a can – Cross and Blackwell) and deep-fried codfish cakes. Yum. 

I loved to climb the apple trees in the small orchard down the hill from the house.  I was warned not to eat the apples because they were sprayed with an arsenic solution for worms.  They had white water marks all over them, which I suppose was the spray, but I used to eat them anyhow, and I wonder to this day how much arsenic I ingested.  I had no ill effects as far as I can tell.

The War came, and we had rationing – meat, sugar, shoes.  When I was put on the train in Boston to go to Washington to visit my mother or my father I had to carry my ration books with me.  Was coffee rationed?  I was not old enough to care about that.  We had margarine instead of butter.  It came in a tough plastic bag, all white, with a little packet of orange color which you pressed to burst and then kneaded the bag to mix in the color so as to make it look like butter.  But it tasted bad. I enjoyed mixing in the color, though.

We saved grease in cans for the war effort. (To make explosives?)  We squashed cans and saved other scrap metal.  Of course we had a victory garden, or it got called that in the war.  We always had a garden.  When the corn was ripe someone would go to the garden to pick it and run to the kitchen to cook it.  Then it tasted sweet.  These days the corn is genetically altered so that the sugar is not converted to starch nearly so fast.  You don’t have to run. Peas were a staple, and shelling them was often my job.

At some point during that time Mary Stanton left us, and so did Mike.  Freddy, the other gardener, stayed on, and since my aunt, Clare, had begun having babies there was a parade of nannies.  Aunt Clare did most of the cooking, often aided or supervised by my grandmother when she was with us.  My grandmother and my aunt were interested in food and cooking, and there were lots of consultations about both lunch and dinner.

Thick steak cooked over the open fire was a wonderful treat.  There was a fireplace in almost every room, but the biggest one was in the den, where there was a rough stone fireplace jutting out into the room, set high, so that there was stone seating around it with asbestos cushions for comfort.  Bart cooked the steaks over the hot coals of the fire.  The steaks were clamped between metal racks with a handle, and he held this over the fire.  They got charred on the outside and were red and juicy on the inside. There were often guests for these feasts.

I think the day I made the transition from being a little kid to being a big kid was the day I learned to love raw oysters on the half shell. I was about 12, and there was a big party for some reason I don’t remember.  But my uncle Bart’s younger brother, Guy, was there.  He had just finished medical school, he was very good looking and he was nice to me. I had a really big crush on him. 

There were several bushel baskets of oysters in the kitchen which Guy was opening and serving on a platter of ice to the guests.  I watched him opening them and then followed him around as he offered them to the martini drinking guests.  After a while I sat down on the bottom step of the big winding stair leading up 2 flights from the front hall.  Guy urged me to eat an oyster.  I refused, thinking they were disgusting.

 “Go on,” he said, “Just try one.”

I was brave about trying new food (with limits), I was curious, and think who was offering it.  So I took one.  It was cold, slightly salty, and smooth, with a fresh taste of ancient oceans.  What a revelation. I must have eaten at least 20.

I had 3 mothers.  This is how it came about.  My mother, Marion, gave birth to me in 1932.  She and my father were living in Washington, DC. They were both economists, trained at the London School of Economics. I think he was looking for a job with the government in the depth of the depression.

For a while when I was a baby Marion, a New Zealander, had to stay with some rich relations of my father because he was unemployed and they had no money.  When the rich lady of the house handed her a bar of yellow soap saying, “This is to wash the baby’s diapers,” my mother got my father to send a telegram saying “Come home at once”. 

My father was a gentle man, but distant and cerebral.  My mother needed passion.  When I was 3 she went off with a passionate Canadian named Ben. 

At the age of 3 I was sent to live with my father’s younger sister, Clare, and her new husband, Bart, in Andover, Massachusetts.  I stayed there for a year. Clare and Bart lived in the summer “cottage” that belonged to his parents.  Although his family was rich, his own money had been invested unwisely and he lost the lot in the crash.  He was the director of an art gallery, a job with a nice title but not much salary.  The household was sustained with cash infusions from his parents who had retired to a date farm in Indio, California.

The “cottage” had 3 floors and about 10 bedrooms.  There was a grand winding stairway leading upstairs from the spacious entry, and a back stair for servants. There were 3 servant’s bedrooms, but by the 30’s there was only a cook, Mary Stanton. 

My uncle’s sister’s money was better invested, and she had built a big new house on adjoining property.  We called that “the other house” as in: “Where are you going?”  “To the other house.” 

Between the 2 houses there was a path, a chicken yard and a big chicken coop.  Pigs were raised in the barn, where there was a work horse, and where my uncle kept his car.  He always drove a convertible in those days.  There was an apple orchard down the hill from the house, and near it an old tennis court all grown up with weeds. 

Two gardeners, Mike, a big Irishman and Freddy, a local fellow, took care of the grounds and the vegetable garden.  Mike lived in the upper part of the barn and Freddy had a room at the other house.  Mary Stanton ruled the spacious kitchen, with its black cast iron 3 oven built in coal stove that also warmed the kitchen and 3 pantries.  Every morning in winter Freddy brought a hod full of coal up from the cellar and started the kitchen fire.

I must have missed my mother.  She was a loving mother and I believed she had a beautiful face.  I think I dreamed of her face.   My aunt was gentle and affectionate, and my memories of my first year with her are all happy.  Clare was like my father, a little removed, her attention often in some other place.  From time to time my elegant grandmother was in residence along with my father’s brother, Dickie, a failed opera singer, and my uncle Bart’s sister, Ruth, a cheerful, hearty spinster who was devoted to my grandmother.

It was an extended family and I was the only child.  I listened to the grown-ups talk and was sure that I would never learn to talk like that.  I know now that they were discussing things like art, music and politics.  It sounded like a wonderful foreign language to me, and sometimes it actually was, since they often spoke in French or Italian. 

When I was 4 years old Ben dumped my mother and my father rescued her from Chicago after she made an unconvincing suicide attempt. A few months later I was taken back to Washington to live with them. 

My parents stayed together another 4 years.  During that time I spent summers with my aunt Clare, mostly in Andover, some of the time in Maine in rented summer places, and one summer, just before the war, in Italy at my Grandmother’s Villa on the Riviera.

I was 6, in 1938, when I spent the summer in Italy.  We often went swimming at the beautiful beach.  The grown-ups dressed for dinner which was after my bed time.  They had cocktails on the veranda, and I watched from the balcony outside by bedroom.  The ladies had chiffon dresses that floated in the breeze.

 I often listened to them talk about the coming danger of war. Though I didn’t understand, I was afraid when soldiers boarded the train we took across Europe to the ocean liner, the Normandy, which we traveled home on.

I was 8 when my mother came to Andover at the end of the summer to collect me.  We went for a walk in sunny fields.  She said that she and Daddy had fallen out of love and that she was now married to another man, called Carroll.  I cried.  Mother told me later that I said, “Only stupid people get divorced.”

Soon after that my father remarried.  His new wife’s name was Edythe.   Edythe was the daughter of a German immigrant who had a dry goods store in the Bronx.  She was a teacher at the National Cathedral School in Washington, DC.  She had positive ideas about the correct way to do or think about almost everything. She disapproved of almost everything about me.

After 2 years of shuttling back and forth between mother and step-father and father and step-mother I asked to be allowed to go back to my aunt Clare in Andover for good.  I think everyone was relieved to let that happen.

This short account of my first 10 years may sound hard in some ways, in others uniquely privileged.  Children are resilient, and I believe my childhood was happy.  My mother and my aunt loved me, and although my stepmother did not, my father was my defender, and he taught me a lot about the world and how to enjoy it.