F is for family …
… and the depths and heights of gastronomical enjoyment to be found at the family board.
It is possible, indeed almost too easy, to be eloquently sentimental about large groups of assorted relatives who gather for Christmas or Thanksgiving or some such festival and eat and drink and gossip and laugh together. They always laugh: on Norman Rockwell magazine covers and in Iowa novels and in any currently popular variation of I Remember Moustache Cups, there is Gargantuan laughter, from toothless babe to equally toothless Gramp. Great quantities of home-cooked goodies are consumed, great pitchers of Uncle Si's hard cider are quaffed, and, above all, great gusts of earthy merriment sweep like prairie fire around the cluttered table, while the menfolk bring out their whittling knives in postprandial digestive calm, and the women (sometimes spelled “wimmin” to denote an inaudible provincialism) chatter and scrape and swab down in the kitchen, and the bulging children bulge.
The cold truth is that family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.
The best way to guarantee smooth sailing at one of them, probably, is to assemble the relatives only when a will must be read. This at least presupposes good manners during the meal, if the lawyer is not scheduled to appear until after it. Funeral baked meats have perhaps been more enjoyed than any christening cakes or wedding pottages, thanks largely to the spice of wishful thinking that subtly flavors them, as yet uncut by disappointment, dread, or hatred.
My own experience with family dinners has fallen somewhere between this facile irony and the bucolic lustiness of popular idealization. I remember that several times at Christmas there were perhaps twenty of us at the ranch for a lengthy noon dinner to which none of us was accustomed. I always had fun, being young and healthy and amenable, but I do not recall, perhaps to my shame, that I had any special fun.
To be truthful, I was conscious by about my twelfth year that there was about the whole ceremony a kind of doggedness, a feeling that in spite of hell and high water we were dutybound to go through with it, because my grandfather was very old and might not live another year or because a cousin had just lost her abominable but very rich husband or because another cousin was going to Stanford instead of Yale at Yale's request and so would be with us. Something like that. It was tacitly understood that the next day would find my sister Anne droopy and bilious, my mother overtired, and the cook crankily polishing glasses and eying the piles of the best Irish linen to be laundered. My father, on the other hand, would still be glowing; he loved any kind of party in the world, even a family one.
I seem, and I am thankful of it, to have inherited some of his capacity for enjoying such intramural sport, fortunately combined with my mother's ability to cope with it. In spite of my conviction that a group of deliberately assembled relatives can be one of the dullest, if not most dangerous, gatherings in the world, I am smugly foolhardy enough to have invited all my available family to dine with me more than once. The last time was perhaps the most daring, and it went off with a dash and smoothness that will always bulwark my self-esteem, for it was the happy result of many days of thought and preparation.
Parents, cousins, new generation … all came. It meant hotel reservations in the nearby town and great supplies of food and drink for a long holiday of closed stores.
It meant wood stored under cover for the fireplace in case of rain (it poured), and bandages and liniment (my nephew and my two-year-old daughter fell off a boulder into the pond), and self-control (my favorite male shot several of my favorite quail).
It meant a lot of work: I was cook, and before the festival I had food prepared, or at least in line, for an average of twelve persons a meal, three meals a day, for three days. And the right good wines. And the other potables, right, good, and copious. That, I say smugly, is no mean feat.
It was exciting and rewarding and completely deliberate. Nothing, to my knowledge at least, went wrong. There was a cloud of gaiety and affection all about us … and that too, with people of different ages and sexes and beliefs, political and religious and social, is also something of a feat to attain and to maintain. The whole thing, for a miracle to bless me, worked well.
This is most often the case in planned celebrations, I think. Now and then there is a happy accident, in families, and brothers and cousins and grandparents who may have been cold or even warlike suddenly find themselves in some stuffy booth in a chophouse, eating together with forgotten warmth and amity. But it is rare. Most often it must be prearranged, with care and caution.
It must not simply be taken for granted that a given set of ill-assorted people, for no other reason than because it is Christmas, will be joyful to reunite and break bread together. They must be jolted, even shocked, into excitement and surprise and subsequent delight. All the old, routine patterns of food and flowers and cups must be redistributed, to break up that mortal ignominy of the Family Dinner, when what has too often been said and felt and thought is once more said, felt, thought: slow poison in every mouthful, old grudge, new hateful boredom, nascent antagonism and resentment…. Why in God's name does Mother put her arm always that way on the chair, and why does Helen's girdle pop, always, as she lifts the denuded meat platter up and away from Father, and why does Sis tap her finger always thus tinnily against the rim of her wineglass? Poison, indeed … and most deeply to be shunned!
It takes courage to do that, and at least once I had enough for it, being mightier in my youth than I am now (perhaps). I was flat, stony broke, unable to take no matter what judicious collection of relatives to a decent restaurant. So …
I summoned my father, mother, brother, and sisters to a supper in the ranch dining room, to celebrate nothing at all. I paid for it, almost to the last grain of salt: silly, but a sop to my young, proud soul. I set the table with the family's best silver and china and crystal (especially the iridescent and incredibly thin wine goblets we have always had for “party”).
Then I went to Bernstein's on the Park in Los Angeles and bought fresh, beautiful shellfish: tiny bay shrimp in their shells, crab cooked while I waited and lobster claws, too, pink prawns, little mussels in their purple shells. I went down behind the Plaza and bought flat, round loaves of sour-dough bread and good spaghetti and sweet butter. I bought some honest-to-God cheese, not the kind that is made of by products and melted into tinfoil blocks. I bought Wente Brothers' Grey Riesling and Italian Swiss Colony Tipo Red, and some overroast coffee blended on Piuma's drugstone counter for me. There, in short, was the skeleton of the feast.
The flesh upon this bony structure was a more artful thing, compounded of my prejudices and my enthusiastic beliefs. It is true that my comparative youngness made me perhaps more eager to do battle than I am now, but I still think I was right to rebel against some of the inevitable boredom of dining en famille. I reseated everyone, to begin with. I was tired of seeing my father always looming against the massive ugliness of the sideboard, with that damned square mirror always a little crooked behind his right ear. I assumed, somewhat grandly, that he was equally tired of looking down the table toward my mother, forever masked behind a collection of cigarette boxes, ash trays, sugar shakers left there whether needed or not, a Louis Quinze snuffbox full of saccharin, several salt shakers and a battered wooden pepper mill, and an eternal bouquet, fresh but uninspired generally, of whatever could be gleaned from the ranch garden. With never a yea or nay to guide me, I eliminated this clutter from the center of the table, which had been on my nerves for at least fifteen years, and I made a low bowl of “bought” camellias instead of a “grown” bunch of this-or-that from the side yard.
And I switched places on my parents. They were rocked on their bases, to put it mildly, and only innate good manners kept them from shying away from my crazy plan like startled and resentful deer whose drinking place has been transferred.
Those were my first and most drastic attempts, clumsy enough, I admit, but very successful in the end, to break up what seemed to me a deadly dull family pattern. Then I used the sideboard for a buffer, which had never been done before in our memory. I tipped off my siblings beforehand, and we forced my father to get his own first course of shellfish, which he enjoyed enormously after he recovered from the first shock of not having someone wait on him. He poked and sniffed and puttered happily over the beautiful platters of shrimp and suchlike and made a fine plate of things for my mother, who sat with an almost shy smile, letting the newness of this flood gently, unforgettably, into her sensitive mind and heart.
My brother poured the chilled white wine with a flourish, in a napkin, assuming what had always been Father's prerogative … and later I served the great casserole of spaghetti, and it was without its eternal “family” accompaniment of rich sauce, and it was doubly delicious for that flaunting of tradition.
The Tipo was good. The Tipo flowed. So, happy magic, did our talk. There we were, solidly one for those moments at least, leaning our arms easily along the cool wood, reaching without thought for our little cups of hot, bitter coffee or our glasses, not laughing perhaps as the families do in the pictures and the stories, but with our eyes loving and deep, one to another. It was good, worth the planning. It made the other necessary mass meals more endurable, more a part of being that undeniable rock, the Family.
G is for Gluttony…
… and why and how it is that. It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed to the bursting point, on anything from quails financière to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly. In fact, I pity anyone who has not permitted himself this sensual experience, if only to determine what his own private limitations are, and where, for himself alone, gourmandism ends and gluttony begins.
It is different for each of us, of course, and the size of a man's paunch has little to do with the kind of appetite which fills it. Diamond Jim Brady, for instance, is more often than not called “the greatest glutton in American history,” and so on, simply because he had a really enormous capacity for food. To my mind he was not gluttonous, but rather monstrous, in that his stomach was about six times the normal size. The obvious fact that he had to eat at least six times as much as a normal man did not make him a glutton. He was, instead, Gargantuan, in the classical sense.
His taste was keen and sure to the time of his death, and that he ate nine portions of sole Marguery, the night George Rector brought the recipe back to New York from Paris especially for him, does not mean that he gorged himself upon it, but simply that he had room for it.
I myself would like to be able to eat that much of something I really delight in and can recognize overtones of envy in the way lesser mortals so easily damned Brady as a glutton, even in the days of excess when he flourished.
Probably never again will this country see so many fat rich men as at the end of the last century, copper kings and railroad millionaires and such, literally stuffing themselves to death in imitation of Diamond Jim, whose abnormally large stomach coincided so miraculously with the period. He ate a hundred men like “Bet-You-a-Million” Gates into their oversized coffins, simply because he was a historical accident, and it is interesting to speculate on what his influence would be today, when most of the “robber barons” have gastric ulcers and lunch on crackers and milk at their desks. Certainly it is unfashionable, now, to overeat in public, and the few real trenchermen left to us are careful to practice their gastronomical excesses in the name of various honorable and respected food-and-wine societies.
It is safe to say, I think, that never again in our civilization will gluttony be condoned, much less socially accepted, as it was at the height of Roman decadence, when a vomitorium was as necessary a part of any well-appointed home as a powder room is today, and throat ticklers were no novelty at all. That was, as one almost forgotten has said in an unforgettable phrase, the “period of insatiable voracity and the peacock's plume” … and I am glad it is far behind me, for I would make but a weak social figure of a glutton, no matter to what excesses of hunger I can confess.
My capacity is very limited, perhaps fortunately for my inward as well as outer economy, so that what gluttonizing I have indulged in has resulted in biliousness more spiritual than physical. It has, like almost everyone's in this century, been largely secret. I think it reached its peak of purely animal satisfaction when I was about seventeen.
I was cloistered then in a school where each avid, yearning female was allowed to feed at least one of her several kinds of hunger with a daily chocolate bar. I evolved for myself a strangely voluptuous pattern of borrowing, hoarding, begging, and otherwise collecting about seven or eight of these noxious sweets, and then eating them alone upon a pile of pillows, when all the other girls were on the hockey field or some other healthful place. If I could eat at the same time a nickel-priced box of soda crackers, brought to me by a stooge among the day girls, my orgiastic pleasure was complete.
I find, in confessing this far-distant sensuality, that even the cool detachment acquired with time does not keep me from feeling both embarrassed and disgusted, no matter how slightly. What a pig I was!
I am a poor figure of a glutton today, in comparison with that frank adolescent cramming. In fact, I can think of nothing quite like it in my present make-up. It is true that I overeat at times, through carelessness or a deliberate prolonging of my pleasure in a certain taste, but I do not do it with the voracity of youth. I am probably incapable, really, of such lust. I rather regret it: one more admission of my dwindling powers.
Perhaps the nearest I come to gluttony is with wine. As often as possible, when a really beautiful bottle is before me, I drink all I can of it, even when I know that I have had more than I want physically. That is gluttonous.
But I think: When again will I have this taste upon my tongue? Where else in the world is there just such wine as this, with just this bouquet, at just this heat, in just this crystal cup? And when again will I be alive to do it as I am this very minute, sitting here on a green hillside above the sea, or here in this dim, murmuring, richly odorous restaurant, or here in this fishermen's café on the wharf? More, more, I think … all of it, to the last exquisite drop, for there is no satiety for me, nor ever has been, in such drinking.
Perhaps that keeps it from being gluttony … not according to the dictionaries, bu tin my own lexicon of taste. I do not know.
H is for Happy…
… and for what kind of dinner most often is just that evanescent, unpredictable, and purely heaven-sent thing.
In general, I think, human beings are happiest at table when they are very young, very much in love, or very lone. It is rare to be happy in a group: a man can be merry, gay, keenly excited, but not happy in the sense of being free … free from life's cluttering and clutching.
When I was a child, my Aunt Gwen, who was not an aunt at all but a largeboned and enormous-hearted woman who, thank God, lived next door to us, used to walk my little sister Anne and me up into the hills at sundown. She insisted on pockets. We must have at least two apiece when we were with her. In one of them, on these twilight promenades, would be some cookies. In the other, oh deep, sensuous delight, would be a fried-egg sandwich!
Nobody but Aunt Gwen ever made fried-egg sandwiches for us. Grandmother was carefully protected from the fact that we had ever even heard the term, and as for Mother, preoccupied with a second set of children, she shuddered away from the thought of such grease-bound proteins with a thoroughness which should have made us regretful but instead succeeded in satisfying not only our hunger but our human need for secrets.
The three of us, Aunt Gwen, weighing a good four times what Anne and I did put together, would sneak out of the family ken whenever we could, into the bluing air, our pockets sagging and our spirits spiraling in a kind of intoxication of freedom, breathlessness, fatigue, and delicious anticipation. We would climb high above other mortals, onto a far rock or a fallen eucalyptus tree and sit there, sometimes close as burrs and sometimes apart, singing straight through Pinafore and the Episcopal Hymm Book (Aunt Gwen was both British and everything from contralto to basso profundo in the Whittier church choir), and biting voluptuously into our tough, soggy, indigestible, and luscious suppers. We flourished on them, both physically and in our tenacious spirits.
Lone meals, which can be happy too, are perhaps the hardest to put on paper, with a drop of cyanide on their noses and a pin through their guts. They are the fleetingest of the gastronomical butterflies. I have known some. We all have. They are compounded in almost equal parts of peace, nostalgia, and good digestion, with sometimes an amenable touch of alcohol thrown in gratis … and gratefully.
As for dining-in-love, I am blessed among women to find the subject limitless! Today I think of a luncheon at the Lafayette in New York, in the front café with the glass pushed back and the May air flowing almost visibly over the marble table tops, and a waiter named Pons, and a bottle of California Folle Blanche and moules-more-or-less-marinière but delicious, and then a walk, in new, black, high-heeled shoes with white stitching on them, beside a man I had just met and a week later was to marry, in spite of my obdurate resolve never to marry again and my cynical recognition of his supersalesmanship. Anyone in the world could dream as well, being blessed….
Group happiness is another thing; it is not easy to look back upon the veritable event, divorced from its wishfulness. Few of us can think with honesty of a time when we were indeed happy at table with more than our own selves or One other. And if we succeed in it, our thinking is dictated no matter how mysteriously by the wind, the wine, and the wish of that particular moment.
Now, for no reason that I consciously know of, I remember a luncheon at the Casino at Berne, in Switzerland. I was with my father and mother, my husband, and a friend deep in his own murky moods but still attainable socially. We had driven there from Vevey, and we sat in the glassbound bourgeois sparkle of the main dining room with a fine combination of tired bones and bottoms, thirst, hunger, and the effect of altitude.
I do not recall that we drank anything stronger than sherry before luncheon, but we may have: my father is a forthright man, raised in the hard-liquor days of editing a paper when his Midwest village had fifteen saloons and three churches or thereabouts, and he may have downed a drink or two of Scotch, or the Bernese play on words, eine Gift, aptly called “poison” and made of half sweet vermouth and half any alcohol from vodka to gin.
Then, and this is the part I best remember, we had carafes of a rosé wine that was believed to be at its peak, its consummateness, in Berne, and indeed in that very room. Zizerser it was called. It came in the open café pitchers with the federal mark at the top, naming the liquid content. It was a frivolous, gay color. It was poured into fine glasses (they were one of the many good things about that casino) from a height of two feet or so, and miracle! It foamed! It bubbled! It was full of a magic gas, that wine … which melted out of it with every inch of altitude it lost, so that when I took down a case of it and proudly poured it lakeside, in Vevey, it was merely a pink, pretty drink, flat as flat. In Berne it was champagne. We drank deep.
So did our driver, François, and later when a frenzied-looking mountaineer waved back our car, we drove on with a nonchalance along a cliff road above fabulous gorges, singing “Covered All Over with Violets” and “Der Heimat” (ensemble) and “Rover Was Blind But Brave” (my mother), until finally a rock about half as big as our enormous old Daimler sailed lazily down in front of us and settled a few feet from the engine.
We stopped in time.
Another mountaineer, with tiny stars of gold in his ear lobes to make him hear better, dropped into sight from the pine forest. Go back, go back, he cried. We are blasting a new road. You might have been killed. All right, all right, we said.
He lingered, under the obvious spell of our happiness. We talked. My father introduced my mother as the sweetest singer in Onawa-iowa, which she once was. My husband breathed deeply, as if in sleep. My friend looked out over the plumy treetops and sighed for a lost love. François blinked in a surfeit of content. We all sat about, on felled branches and running boards, and drank some superlative cognac from an unlabeled bottle which my father had bought secretly from a Vevey wine merchant and brought along for just this important moment.
A couple more boulders drifted down and settled, dustily and noisily but without active danger, very close to us.
The mountaineer sang three or four songs of his canton. Then, because of the Zizerser and mostly and mainly because we were for that one moment in all time a group of truly happy people, we began to yodel. My father, as a smalltown editor, had the edge on us: he had practiced for years at the more unbridled of the local service-club luncheons and banquets. My mother found herself shooting off only too easily into Aïda and the more probable sections of Parsifal. My husband and even my friend hummed and buzzed, and I, too, buzzed and hummed. And François? He really yodeled, right along with the man from the mountains.
It was a fine thing. Whatever we had eaten at luncheon, trout, I think, went properly with the Zizerser, and we were full and we were, above all, happy, beyond the wine and the brandy, beyond the immediate danger of blasted boulders and cascading slides, beyond any feeling of foolishness. If we had lunched on milk and pap, that noontime in the Casino, we still would have felt the outer-world bliss that was ours, winy and full, on the Oberland mountainside that summer day.
It happened more than ten years ago, but if I should live a hundred and ten more, I would still feel the freedom of it.…