In Scotland once, mid snow and ice,
A youth did bear this strong devise:
Avise la fin!
It was a clan call, albeit in Norman French, and the youth was one of my father's ancestors, and the devise said with blunt Scotch economy, Consider the end!
That is what my father did, gastronomically as well as in several other ways, for his offspring. He wanted us to taste life in the round, with all of our senses as well as our wits to work for us. He considered the art of eating a basic part of the plan. He was ably abetted by my mother, a voluptuous woman who had a fine teaching hand with pastry and custards when she cared to, and who managed to be assisted, for all I know of her life, by a series of devoted sluggards who may have forgotten to dust beneath the beds but who could produce a dramatic cheese puff for Saturday lunch or a prune tart worthy of any bishop, with children helping and learning under their feet. My father sat back, well nourished and watching, and his clan had little idea for the future, until they must do the same, that he was considering at least one more end of human fulfillment.
It was sometimes hard, however, to consider the end of our purely gastronomic development when I was little, because my maternal grandmother lived with us and she felt eating for anything but survival was a sin. The hedonistic allure of her favorite bowl of puffy, pallid steamed soda crackers after church, on a chilly night, might always be excused with her doctor's decree that the milk, the soda, and the flick of salt would Do Her Good. They did, and she lived to a so-called ripe age, and we all choked down the pap when it seemed propitious, dietetically and emotionally.
But soon after my grandmother died, Father hired a dry, spare little virago he called Anita-Patita. The chef of King Alfonso of Spain had taught her a great deal, she told us, simpering. She spent five days at a time making one meal of enchiladas. She spent three days making a flan, a kind of caramel custard. This casual dismissal of clock and calendar fascinated us children. Nothing must interrupt Anita-Patita's creative concentration. Mother could sit tapping her foot for a few dry diapers for the last batch of babies, or waiting to hear the piano under our heavy hands; Father could stop everything but the presses of his newspaper to dash over to North Spring Street in Los Angeles for some correct tortillas and an ounce of the right chili powder: Anita-Patita would move like an imperturbable cricket about the kitchen, reliving other giddier days, no doubt, while my sister and I watched, listened, sliced a tomato or beat an egg, measured one trembly tablespoon of this or that …
Anita-Patita served her enchiladas with inestimable flourish and pride. She usually neglected to prepare anything else, in her creative flush. But we ate them with both relish and respect, even Mother, who was suspicious of all exotic flavors as well as domestic melodrama. It was a kind of rebellion from Grandmother's digestive Puritanism that we indulged in, and we permitted ourselves indecorous enthusiasm, at least enough to send the little lonesome scornful Spanish woman back to the kitchen, cackling happily.
There was nothing on the table, besides what plates and silver my sister and I had hastily laid there, but the great steaming platter of delicately rolled tortillas (we had helped roll them), with fine chicken in them (which we had helped boil and slice), and the big bowl of salsa, or sauce (our own salsa). Father, the boy from Iowa whose ancestors once cried savagely, in the Scotch crags, “Consider the end!” picked up with unexpected skill the first rolled pancake of fine corn meal, and showed us how to be deft about the dipping and biting and so on. He was preparing us …
Mother forgot that for many hours the usual duties had been ignored and that the table did not look as “set” as she had been trained to see it, and that there seemed to be not even a salad. She forgot to tell us to sit up and keep our elbows down.
And then Anita-Patita glided into the room with clean plates and a beautiful flan, so bland and perfect after the hot salsa, and a pot of coffee “black as hell, hot as love, strong as death.” And we brought down one of the babies who was chirping, and my sister steeled herself to sing a song about “I saw a little dewdrop,” and everything was really fine.
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.
Let us go one step further in this consideration of a child's desired end as a self-sufficient human being: If, for instance, he has been exposed, in relaxed pleasant company, to the somewhat brutal fact that not all children his age find breakfast cereal essential to their becoming football heroes or even bullfighters, he may astonish his mentors by facing without a whimper some slices of good fresh bread, a pat of sweet butter, and a jar of honey. A jug of milk is good with that.
Once two little American boys came to stay with my girls and me on a remote farm in southern France. There was no milk worth pouring, and we got butter only once a week, and there was no refrigerator within ten miles. Bread came twice a week, so the butter turned rancid unless we ate it the same day it came, and the bread got harder and crustier; the little boys were not yet old enough to substitute too much of the local vin rosé for milk. But cheese was always there, and always good, smuggled or carted from the Savoy mountains.
After a week of affronted misery without their packaged morning comfort, the boys began to get up when the sun rose, break off a rough piece of the drying bread and cut themselves a good slab of the cheese, and walk past the well for a beaker of sweet cool water. They would sit peaceably for an hour or so with their backs against the cypress trees, with the sound of the sheep bells in their ears, and munch and store their various nourishments. I think that at first they felt like refugees, for the first time in their lives, poor thinning victims of a strange lapse in The Right Way. Then they began to realize that bread and cheese and pure water are fine, for breakfast or any time. They became tolerant, receptive, gastronomically at ease—and before much longer they were accepting without a blink or a shudder some flavors and aspects of restaurant eating, when we got into Aix-en-Provence or Marseilles, that would have sent them from the table a few weeks before.
They discovered that wrinkled olives taste better than the firm swollen ones canned at home and, even more important, that a handful of them with a piece of bread is food, not a garnish to be pushed aside—and that anchovies and garlic and minnows and sea urchins are fun to eat. Most important of all, I believe, is that they found that it is not essential to go from California to France or even Istanbul to find such pleasure.
There is always reward in travel: I aim to assault my own clan with as much of it as possible, to keep them malleable to the world's tempers. But a little child can fly from here to Djakarta and then on to Lisbon and not stir one pace from his path of hamburgers-and-Coke, if his parents do not care enough to push him off it. He can live and die.
If a child has grown up to know what honest food is made of, and how it can reassure people and soothe them in a noisy world, he will possess one strong weapon against adversity. Couscous in a cushioned restaurant in Casablanca; hot plum tan in London after a cut-off-the-joint; cracked crab and a sip or two of gray Riesling at the Wharf in San Francisco while the fishing boots wheel in from sea. All these things can add to a child's perception of what he can suck from life. Couscous, plum tart, fresh fish, and always a sip of the wine at home: They are as important …
But the main thing is to be with people who know it too.
This new little citizen must be able to look about him and see that other older ones can sit up straight, keep their elbows off the table and not dribble, and, above all, have a lot of fun eating everything from Great-Gram's recipe for hush puppies to poulet à la mode de Beaune. Then he, and she, will learn to laugh and eat at the same time. The battle will be won.