FAMISHED: A FOOD MEMOIR WITH RECIPES
FOOD AS EUCHARIST! THE SHARED MEAL AS THE HIGHEST FORM OF HUMAN CONNECTION!
In a series of loosely-related, loosely narrative essays, I tell my story—one of eight kids in a blue-collar family in which one overriding emotion was financial anxiety; twenty years of hard-core drinking; a move from Boston to L.A.; a marriage that bore fruit but didn’t last; the lawyering job I quit to embark on the perilous vocation of writing; my conversion to Catholicism; cancer; divorce; cross-country road trips; unrequited love. With food the connecting thread, I write of the discovery that the human condition is not a sickness to be healed but a paradox to be pondered, mystified by, patiently endured, and rejoiced over.
Through the essays runs the story of my love affair with food: foraged food, street food, my tendency to hoard food, dinner parties I’ve thrown, the shared meal as perhaps the highest form of human communion.
Plus, folks, there are recipes!
So come into my kitchen and pull up a chair.
The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.
–Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Gout, 1825
FAMISHED IS AVAILABLE ONLY BY SPECIAL OFFER: TEN COPIES FOR $100 PLUS $10 MEDIA MAIL SHIPPING FOR A TOTAL OF $110. THE BOOK HAS SEVERAL COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS AND MAKES A BEAUTIFUL GIFT.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. OUR HOLY HUNGER: RUSSIAN BLACK BREAD
2. EXISTENTIAL NOSTALGIA: BETTY CROCKER’S BROWNIE PUDDING
3. MY OLD MAN: FALL SLAW WITH APPLES AND BACON
4. APPRENTICE: SMOKED BLUEFISH PATÉ
5. DREAM HOUSE: BANANA BUTTERMILK PANCAKES
6. A GOOD APPETITE: CHICKEN LEGS WITH KUMQUATS, PRUNES AND GREEN OLIVES
7. EVERYONE’S SO FAT: ZUPPA ALLA CANAVESANA: GRILLED BREAD AND CABBAGE SOUP WITH CRUNCHY CHEESE CRUST
8. MY MERCIFULLY SHORT LIFE AS A LAWYER: PAD THAI PESTO
9. NOTES ON A SOUP KITCHEN: FLAGEOLETS GRATIN
10. SMILES: CHEWY CHOCOLATE GINGER COOKIES
11. LANGER’S PASTRAMI AND MY FRIEND JOAN: ASPARAGUS GLAZED WITH LEMON AND SOY
12. MILVIO: FOOD FOR A WAKE: JEFF DIETRICH’S BREAD PUDDING WITH WHISKEY SAUCE
13. K-TOWN: LOST AND FOUND: AUBERGE AT OJAI’S CHICKPEA FRITTERS AND FRISÉE
14. DONE WITH THE CHART: COCONUT FLAN
15. RIVERS AND TIDES: ROMESCO SAUCE
16. FOOD FOR THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT: INA’S GRILLED GRUYÈRE, RED CABBAGE AND APPLE SANDWICH
17. APPALACHIAN SUMMER: DEVILED EGGS
18. THE TRAVELER RETURNS: ZANKOU CHICKEN
19. GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: PHO GA: VIETNAMESE CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP
20. PILGRIM FEET: SLOW-ROASTED SHOULDER OF PORK
21. FAST, PRAY, LOVE: BULGUR AND LENTIL PILAF WITH CARAMELIZED ONIONS
22. REALITY FOOD: RED AND GOLDEN BEETS WITH BLOOD ORANGES, ENDIVE AND WALNUTS
23. THE MIRACLE OF THE LOAVES AND THE FISHES: ON BEING A HOST: TAPENADE
24. HARD TIMES/GOOD TIMES: CHEZ PANISSE SAUTÉED GREENS
25. THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER AND THE BANQUET TABLE: QUINOA SALAD WITH GRILLED SCALLIONS, FAVAS AND DATES
26. THE DRIVEWAY GARDEN: ON BEING A GUEST: PEACH KUCHEN
28. THE L.A. RIVER: FEEDING THE BIRDS: ROSEMARY CORNCAKES
INTRODUCTION
We dream about food, plan around food, live for and by food.
We have books about cooking food. We have books about growing food. We have books about nutrition, local sourcing, and becoming a celebrity chef. We have Michael Pollan, guru of the “real food” movement, dispensing earnest rules.
But we have few books about the spiritual dimension of food that also have a sense of humor. We have few books exploring the way our relationship to—and neuroses around—food shape our relationships to money, sex, love, and the search for meaning.
Famished treats of the Eucharistic overtones of food: food as an echo of our longing for transcendence and communion; food as a manifestation of our fears, our obsessive-compulsions, our quirks; food—ordinary, everyday food—as a sacrament, a mystery, and a source of unending reflection and delight.
In this collection loosely-related, loosely narrative essays, I tell my story—one of eight kids in a blue-collar family in which the overriding emotion was financial anxiety; twenty years of hard-core drinking; a move from Boston to L.A.; a marriage that bore fruit but didn’t last; the lawyering job I quit to embark on the perilous vocation of writing; my conversion to Catholicism; cancer; divorce; cross-country road trips; the agony of unrequited love.
Through the essays runs the story of my love affair with food: foraged food, street food, my tendency to hoard food, the occasional all-out dinner parties I host, the splendor of cooking, the shared mealas perhaps the highest form of human communion.
I write of the unfolding discovery that the human condition is not a sickness to be healed but a paradox to be pondered, patiently endured, and ecstatically, abundantly, lived.
I’ve included recipes, as did MFK Fisher, Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling, and many others who have written “literary” food memoirs. Robert Farrar Capon (The Supper of the Lamb), for one, wrote beautifully of God and food.
I’m honored to follow in their footsteps and I also hope that my own take is unique and new. As editor Theresia de Vroom observed, “Eighty percent of the paintings you see of Christ are of the Madonna and Child. Not the Baptism, not the Temptation in the Desert, not The Resurrection. In our most iconic image of Christ, he’s in Mary’s lap, drinking milk from her breast.”
In turn, we allow ourselves to be consumed: by love—so that others may eat.
CHAPTER 1. OUR HOLY HUNGER
Oh! Those who don’t believe in the sun…are real infidels! The sun, light in the darkness, light that brightens nature and people, light that calls the dead from their graves. Those who have eyes to see will recognize that all light comes from the same sun.”
–Vincent van Gogh, Letters to Theo
I’ve always been drawn to books about people in mental institutions, prisons, death camps: Genie, the feral child who, after rescue, would line up fifteen glasses of water by her bed; Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person to have been born in a North Korean starvation camp, escaped and survived; Marthe Robin, the French “holy anorexic,” who reputedly subsisted for decades on the Host alone (and no sleep).
I grew up on the coast of New Hampshire, one of eight kids. My father, a bricklayer, and my mother, a housewife, both came from want of various kinds. Dad’s version of their financial backstory ran, “We started out with twenty-five dollars and Mother’s sewing machine.” They were married by a Justice of the Peace (weddings cost). My father spoke, often, of a place called “the poorhouse.”
We had everything we needed—books, a piano, a love of nature—but emotionally and financially, a sense of scarcity reigned. Having as few needs, and taking up as little room, as possible seemed a sane psychic strategy to ward off the angst. That worked—up to a point. Then, in my case, the angst segued into self-deprivation, neurotic guilt and co-dependence. Even today, against the threat of abandonment, I have no psychic cartilage, no cushion: just bone scraping against bone; flooding pain. I’ve never been able to bear wasting food. Even today, I have a tendency to hoard food.
That in my early forties I converted to Catholicism is no accident. A God who, out of love, took on our humanity, pitched his tent among us, and left us his very Body to eat and Blood to drink is my kind of God. “[Jesus] did not need anyone to testify about human nature. He himself understood it well” [John 2:25]. He understood our terrible hunger: for connection, for love, to know we’re not alone. He understood what we will do to each other when our hungers are unfulfilled.
We ate what was put in front of us in my house and we were grateful for it. We rarely went to the doctor as kids: that, too, has shaped me. I love food but I’m not fussy about it. Eat what you want and take a walk is my theory. I don’t own a pair of bathroom scales and weigh pretty much the same as I did in high school. Nonfat anything depresses me. I adore gluten. I’m almost never sick. At 65, I take no medications. I rarely, and don’t really know how to, cook meat—not because meat is bad for me or to make a political statement, but because for much of my life I haven’t been much able to afford meat.
On the other hand, when a friend sent me half a dozen Royal Riviera pears last Christmas, I was touched to the core. Another friend who owns twelve houses, a car, a pickup truck, a motorcycle and an advertising business happened to see the shipping charges on the Harry and David box and sniffed at “the extravagance.” She was confusing shrewd business practices with generosity of spirit, as Judas did before betraying Christ. She mentioned the people in “sub-Sahara Africa,” but what she really meant was: You and your friends will never get ahead if you exchange such profligate gifts. With all her possessions, she was poor, and she was blind. I gave five of the pears away–including one to her—and kept the sixth, nestled in grass-green tissue paper, gold foil, and a fluted white nest, to savor for myself.
For much of the writing of this book, I lived in the hipster L.A. neighborhood of Silver Lake. I’ve since moved to Pasadena, but wherever I live, I am in the world, but not quite of it. My days are monk-like: prayer, writing, answering emails, cleaning my room, walking to Mass, pondering.
And always and forever, eating. Food: the sacrament in which we are made to partakethree times a day! Hunger: the incarnate reality and the inexhaustible metaphor. “We are conscious of the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations,” observed John Paul II. That hardly have we eaten before we’re hungry again is its own kind of insufficiency. Then again, how God must love us to want to be so ceaselessly and so often near!
The world tells us to tamp down our hungers—to become health-conscious, effective and neat. Christ says go for broke. Christ says make a fool of yourself, wear your heart on your sleeve, be a pest. Eat with your fingers, wipe your hands on your pants, let juice run down your chin. Climb up the sycamore tree and wave your arms. Throw yourself on the ground and give thanks. Set out on a long journey without knowing the destination.
Weep for the hungry, the war-torn, the poor. Order your life around them. Our hungers are our ticket to paradise. Our wounds make us more useful, more compassionate, and more complex than we could ever be sanitized and scarless.
That childhood anxiety, for example, has given me a capacity for joy and the ability to wonder at, and give thanks for, “small things.” I collect seed pods, stones, leaves from the sidewalk. I keep cards that people have sent me, sometimes for years. When you never expect things to go right and they do, you’re brought to your knees with gratitude. I have wept at times over indoor plumbing, sheets on my bed, toothpaste, the sun!
Driving cross country several years ago, I stopped at the CVS in Watsontown, Pennsylvania to buy a pint of half-and-half for my morning coffee, feeling an insane amount of pleasure because I’d remembered to bring a clothespin with which to clamp the carton shut and therefore have cream for a day or two. As the Italian poet Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) observed:”Religion consists of the belief that everything that happens to us is extraordinarily important. It can never disappear from the world for this reason.” One of the fruits of thinking that everything’s important is that you begin to live every second in such a way that all your powers and talents and faculties are brought to a sort of thrilling, vitalized, height. Either that, or like Pavese, you kill yourself.
Was Christ “happy?” I sometimes wonder. Nietzsche said that Christ never laughed, but I refuse to believe that the Son of Man didn’tcrack up at a good, black- humor joke.
As a single, childless, creative writer in Los Angeles (as opposed to TV and film writers, who apparently actually make money), I have to have a sense of humor. In fact, one of my heroes is L.A. writer Sandra Tsing Loh’s elderly father who, with a masters in physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering, apparently used to go around the Malibu Starbucks nabbing left-behind half-drunk lattes, grande drips, and mochachinos which he downed while reading an L.A. Times fished from the trash bin.
I thoroughly approve. I think he hitch-hiked, too, and I look ever forward to truly old age when you can be any damn kind of kook you want.
RECIPE:
RECIPE:
RUSSIAN BLACK BREAD
I’m a mid-grade cook: not super accomplished, but able to make most things by following a recipe. I’m going to assume the same is true for you.
Bread—the staff of life—is so not hard to make. (What is hard to make, for me, is pie crust, but that’s another story). Bread is flour, yeast, kneading with your hands, and the best smell in the world. You really can’t go wrong. So go out on a limb. Give it a try. The worst that can happen is the bread doesn’t rise properly in which case you have hardtack and can be in solidarity with the pioneers who explored the Western frontier.
Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen—from which many simple-to-follow but interesting and delicious recipes come—adapted this from Beth Hensberger’s The Bread Bible.
“Bread” and “Bible”: I like it. I’ve tweaked the instructions a bit. Thanks to both gals.
Makes 2 loaves
2 packages (1 1/2 tablespoons) active dry yeast
Pinch of sugar
1/2 cup warm water (105 to 115 degrees)
2 cups water
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
3 cups medium rye flour
3 cups unbleached, all-purpose or bread flour
1 cup bran
2 tablespoons caraway seeds
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder
1 tablespoon minced shallots
1/4 cup cornmeal (optional)
1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour (optional)
1 teaspoon caraway seeds (optional)
In a small bowl, combine yeast and sugar with warm water. Stir to dissolve and let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.
Heat two cups water, molasses, vinegar, butter and chocolate until the butter and chocolate are melted. Set aside.
Combine whole-wheat, rye and white flours in a large bowl. Set aside.
Combine two cups mixed flours, bran, 2 tablespoons caraway seeds, fennel seeds, salt, espresso and shallots. Add yeast and chocolate mixtures. Knead until satiny and smooth, which will take several minutes. (You can also use one of those heavy mixers with a paddle attachment, but why? You can also grind the glorious whole gritty seeds in a spice grinder, coffee grinder or mortar and pestle, but again, why?]
Add the remaining mixed flours half a cup at a time, until the dough clears the sides of the bowl. It will be very sticky but firm.
Flour the counter well, dump the dough onto it, and knead to make a springy yet dense dough.
Form the dough into a ball and place it in a greased bowl, turning so the whole ball is thoroughly greased. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm area (e.g. on top of a stove in which the oven is heated to 250 or so, or to the side of a fireplace in which a fire is lit, or near a space heater) until doubled, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Combine cornmeal, flour and remaining caraway seeds, if using, and set aside.
Gently punch down dough (self-explanatory: “punching down” is actually a term of art in bread-making). Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide into two portions and form into two rounds or loaves. Loaves should be placed in a loaf pan sprayed with nonstick spray, while rounds should be placed seam down on a greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Sprinkle loaves with cornmeal mixture, if using. Cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let rise until doubled in size, about 45 minutes to one hour. Slash a cross into the top of the round before baking.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45 to 50 minutes or until loaves are well-browned with a shiny crust. Remove from baking sheet to cool completely on a rack.
CHAPTER 2. EXISTENTIAL NOSTALGIA
During the 50s and 60s the metropolis of North Hampton, New Hampshire—my hometown—boasted a population of circa 2000. Always on the kitchen counter at 108 Post Road was my mother’s loose-leaf, red-and-white checked Betty Crocker cookbook: its pages pocked with shortening stains, vanilla extract droplets, and bits of cookie batter. Always the fridge held a bowl of cooked potatoes, left over from supper, to be made into home fries or patties. Always in the cupboard above the stove was a Crisco can of bacon grease, set on a pale green Melamine plate to catch the drips, for frying potatoes or fish.
Mom was the original recycler.
My father cooked, too: corn fritters, clam chowder, bread. This was before the tiresome days when everything was a political “issue.” He wasn’t wildly concerned with “equality..” He was a man and a lover of poetry and a construction worker and he just happened to like to cook.
Everything in our house was made from scratch. For breakfast either my mother or father would make popovers, pancakes, muffins. Supper was meat loaf, lasagna, clams, haddock, flounder, lobster (my father had a little outboard motor and traps in the Hampton River). For dessert my mother made gingerbread with lemon sauce, peanut butter cookies with crisscrossed fork marks, apple pies with the outline of an apple knived into the center of the crust. For snacks we had popcorn, popped in Mazola, or Saltines crushed in a bowl of milk
We shopped at the A & P; at the stand of Mr. Holman, the One-Armed Farmer; at Kennedy’s Butter & Egg Store in Exeter for cottage cheese and freshly ground Eight O’Clock coffee. The country store at the bottom of the hill, a handy bike ride away, supplied penny candy, Black Jack gum, and Squamscot tonic (New Hampshirites call soda “tonic”). In summer, we’d sometimes pile in the car after supper and drive down Lafayette Road to The Big Scoop for ice cream in quintessentially New England flavors: frozen pudding, black raspberry, peppermint stick.
In retrospect this all sounds pretty idyllic, but as a child, I was embarrassed by our failure to enter the Space Age. Why couldn’t we have Tang and Rice-A-Roni and Cocoa Puffs like the other kids? Because that stuff was crap and my parents knew it (plus cooking from scratch was cheaper). Thanks to them, even today, I would rather not have brownies or pancakes or muffins at all than have them from a mix, rather use a teakettle than an electric kettle, rather heat something on the stove than in a microwave, rather peel and chop carrots, beets, fennel than buy a vacuum-packed cellophane package, rather forage fruit from a tree than buy it.
My scavenging skills were honed early. Walking the Atlantic shore, I grabbed handfuls of the amber-colored, gelatin-filled seaweed pods that draped the rocks and ate them. Exploring the wilderness behind our house, I gathered complimentary raspberries, fiddlehead ferns, and wild asparagus. Even now, I find free food a big draw—you never know when you’re going to run out or get stranded or find yourself in jail—and always feel a little thrill at wrapping up a stray cookie or pizza crust and putting it in my pocket “for later.”
Even now as well, I have a guilt-based fear of taking more than my share and a feeling close to compassion for food others might disdain. I’d almost rather eat slightly spoiled food, or leftovers, than high-end, over-priced food. I once drove cross-country and back subsisting for seven weeks on Ak-Mak crackers, sardines, and nuts.. A samosa, cooked in a communal, grease-encrusted vat and sold by a crippled woman on the teeming streets of Calcutta; or a chunk of fresh sugarcane, chopped with a rusted machete by a sweating, shirtless chap on a polluted Thai beach, I would fall upon with delight, but to patronize a Taco Bell or a Subway is a moral-aesthetic compromise I just can’t, for the most part, bring myself to make.
I’m lucky enough to live in Southern California, home to some of the best farmers’ markets, street food, and cutting-edge culinary trends in the country. I can cook: roasted beet and blood orange salad, ricotta gnocchi with chanterelles and sweet corn, pine nut-polenta tart. But living alone, most of the time I graze: goat milk yogurt, dried apricots, almonds, arugula, St. Andre cheese, olives, an occasional slice of salami. I don’t “locally source” all or even most of my food (much of which comes from Trader Joe’s and an Armenian market in East Hollywood called Edi and Peter’s). I rarely eat processed food—if for no other reason than that it doesn’t taste good—but I take in my share of pesticides and chemicals along with the rest of the world. I splurge on an occasional high-end restaurant meal and I also pilgrimage a couple of times a week to the 99 Cents Only store on Sunset and Micheltorena.
I walk the mile each way because walking is a way to observe the world and give thanks. En route, I pay homage to the scarlet hibiscus, note the sun filtering through the amethyst bougainvillea, and smile at my fellow walkers. Inside the 99, I observe my fellow shoppers—old people, crazy people, punks, hipsters—and imagine their stories. I ponder the nobility of spirit of the minimum-wage cashiers who are efficient, forbearing, and kind. I give money to the homeless guys hanging out front.
Food, in other words, is about giving thanks, about the way we see and experience the world, about sharing.
I love food. What I abhor is food as fetish: chefs who objectify food in order to glorify themselves; food that is made to prostitute itself into something food was never meant to be: quail egg foam, liquid ham, garlic sorbet. I don’t want ever to eat food that would be an insult to a starving person; that would be unrecognizable to a person who was truly hungry.
I also abhor supposed concern for the world that is really concern for ourselves: our health, our beauty, our longevity. As.G.K. Chesterton observed: “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle.” Or as Christ said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You cleanse the outside of cup and dish, but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may be clean” [Matthew 23:25-26].
Which is why I, for one, don’t need precious, fussy “food rules:” another province of the rich, and a variant form of fetishization. People have instinctively known what to eat, what they like, and what’s good for them for thousands of years.
I don’t need food rules: I need to get outdoors, observe the sky and trees and birds, and fully live. I need to be restored to the sanity of my deepest soul and heart. That so much of our food is engineered—and that so much of our food has become the province of pretentious, money-grubbing snobs—is emblematic of our cultural tendency to take the most sublime things on earth—food, sex, art—and try to sanitize, regulate, commodify, apply peer pressure, and make money off them.
There’s only one “rule” around food and that’s whether whatever we happen to be tucking into at the moment evokes a spontaneous, Man, is that good!
**********
My childhood, like all childhoods, had its share of loneliness and sorrow. When I think back, though, one thing stands out: we ate supper together every night. I sincerely think that one consistent, communal event—which on many levels must have cost my overworked parents plenty—saved us, or at least saved me.
My father would have left for his bricklaying job in the dark and come home in the dark—and there he sat, with us. My mother would have washed, scrubbed, hung out clothes, folded, changed diapers, put kids down to nap, run errands, and cooked from the moment she awoke—and there she sat, with us. Way back then, I understood that my parents were laying down their lives so we could eat, and wear clothes, and have a roof over our heads.Way back then, I knew that the company is always higher than the food. Way back then, I learned that the spirit of the law is always higher than the letter.
As little Joe stabbed little Ross with a fork over the last hot dog, or two of us simultaneously lunged for the shepherd’s pie, or a melée broke out over the discount brand harlequin ice cream, I knew to the marrow of my bones what I have never, in spite of every detour and wrong turn, for one minute doubted since: Love trumps all.
RECIPE:
BETTY CROCKER’S BROWNIE PUDDING
God was in his heaven and all was right with the world the nights Mom made brownie pudding for dessert. This was one of the first recipes I learned to make on my own, using the battle-scarred 8 x 8-inch aluminum baking pan that also did duty for, corn pudding for Thanksgiving, Yorkshire pudding for when Dad made roast beef, and leftover squash, meat loaf or lasagna.
Brownie pudding, in case you don’t know, has an upper layer of slightly crispy, cooked-batter brownie and a bottom layer of gooey liquid chocolate. Somehow this is achieved by the utterly unorthodox move of pouring a cup and a half of boiling water, mixed with brown sugar and cocoa powder, over the batter.
I’ve always wondered whether brownie pudding was the result of a happy mistake, like the discovery of penicillin. However it came into being, I can never hear the phrase, or imagine the meltingly rich taste, without feeling a warm rush of gratitude for my late, sainted mother.
BETTY CROCKER’S BROWNIE PUDDING
1 cup flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1 tablespoon vanilla
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups boiling water
HENRI FANTIN-LATOUR