The Spaniard went on her way, as good cooks mostly do. But Father had broken at least a part of the web of cautiousness that Grandmother had spun with her gastronomic asceticism, and from then on we had a series of cooks who did everything from receiving an excessive number of male callers to relieving us of the family silver for worthy causes, but who managed, drunk or sober, to tolerate the watching children in the kitchen and to slap amazing victuals on the table whenever the occasion arose, once or twice daily.
All the time my Father observed our epicurean education. Consider the end, his face and shoulders said. Dozens of young ones in addition to his own ate their way past him, the big man always at “his” end of the table, always The Carver, always savoring and listening. He shaped us, and through us, our children, into a pattern of deliberate and discerning enjoyment.
I know that I still put tortillas over a hot grill or griddle the way I watched Anita-Patita do so long ago. And I know that I would never use cheap oil for the beginnings of a salsa like hers, an elaborate French sauce, or a plain old sauce like Aunt Emma's “receipt” for giblet gravy. And I know, by now, that my own children will never accept haste or suspicion or adulteration in their own ways of sustaining the breath within them. This is because they have seen how not to. They have eaten, as well as cooked, with intelligence since they could hold a spoon, and they have absorbed much more than food over a bowl of good soup.
It is very hard, for more of us than seems possible, to keep some sort of steady serenity with our present noisy mechanized way of life. But I know what strengths I have drawn on, from things like my parents' acceptance of Anita-Patita's slap-happy creations, and I have tried to pass some of it along.
Say that some neighbor-children and my own girls are involved in the preparation of supper, things to slice-dice-and-mince-subtract. There is the table to set. I list what silver we'll need and one of my girls sniffs and asks almost ecstatically, “Not fish soup?” And one of the little guests says with horror, “Fish soup?” and his brother says, “I hate fish!” and they both say something desperate about being allergic to fish and hating soup and so on. And one of my girls says blandly, soothingly, “But you won't hate this. This is the way you eat it when it's made right. You can eat it this way in Toulon. Toulon is a city that got plain hell bombed out of it, but the soup is still good. You see, you don't make a bouillabaisse at all. You simply take all those little rockfish—and stop saying ugh, Robert …”
And off she goes, part fantasy but with a basic recipe or at least gastronomic conception to lean on, and the neighbor-children listen, and gradually help slice tomatoes and grind dry basil in the mortar, and before they know it they are passing their plates for another helping from the big tureen which all of them in one way or another have helped fill.
The next day my neighbor calls. I must give her the recipe, she begs, half gaily, half icily: The boys say they never ate anything so good. But it turns out that her husband won't eat anything with olive oil, she can't stand to have garlic in the house, both boys loathe fish, and anyway it smells so disgusting. And she simply doesn't have the time. She could just combine a couple of cans, except that they never eat soup anyway.
“Why not?” I ask. Well, the boys have such awful manners when they all have to eat together that it's just too messy. It is an abortive conversation, and it leaves me feeling fairly helplessly exasperated and sad. There isn't a child in this world, I think rebelliously, who cannot turn into something besides a sullen swiller, given love and good food to batten on. Certainly we have plenty of both, here in America. I think of the little boys laughing the night before at supper around the tureen. I remember their funny probing questions: What is this taste of lemon? Who ever ate the first tomato? Things like that. We went off on the subject of love apples, and my older girl explained her theory of how a tomato is an inside-out strawberry, and all the time I was noticing what good manners the two little neighbors had. Inevitably, in some such plan as my father's and then mine, to consider the end, to help shape well-adjusted, perceptive world citizens, “table manners” are a part of the whole.
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