Artifacts and Talismans

I don’t usually do memes, but I saw this little guy sitting on the fence in my garden and decided to make him pay for his lunch.

When I was 12 or 13, I was fascinated by all things Irish, and I read a lot of Irish literature. At some point, my parents decided that James Joyce was Not Suitable, and I was forbidden to read his works. So every morning I would set my alarm clock for the unspeakably early hour of 6:30 a.m. and sneak downstairs before anyone else was up so I could read a short story from this copy of Dubliners, jumping every time the stairs creaked for fear of being caught. When I had read the story, I would carefully insinuate the book back into its place in the living room bookcase so no one would notice it had been disturbed. Whether because of the anxiety or the passing of time, I can’t remember a single word of this book.

Ironically, if they had caught me they probably wouldn’t have cared. Most likely they were worried about Joyce’s later works, not Dubliners. But I did get that thrill of the forbidden.

(One more scan from the Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls Cook Book)

I used to see eggplant in the supermarket when I was a kid, but I could never figure out what people did with it. It was a complete unknown to me: What did it look like under the skin? Which part did you eat? Where did the eggs come into it? All this remained a mystery, because we literally never had eggplant in our house.

Eventually I learned that this was no accident.

My father’s mother, whom he called “Ma,” was an excellent cook. In fact, she was a professional cook before she married my grandfather (”Pa”), and although there were eight kids in the family, and it was the Depression, the food was always plentiful and good.

Breaded pork chops were one of Ma’s particular accomplishments. Nobody makes breaded pork chops any more, because they are pretty much the definition of unhealthy food, and that’s a shame. Ma taught my mother to make them, and they were one of our favorite foods when we were growing up. After my sister got married, her in-laws used to drive 100 miles from the Chicago suburbs to South Bend just to have Mom’s breaded pork chops.

Back to Dad’s childhood trauma: One day, probably in the late 1930s, Dad sat down at the dinner table to what appeared to be a large platter of breaded pork chops. No one told him otherwise, so it wasn’t until he bit into one that he discovered that his mother was trying a new dish: breaded eggplant.

From that moment on, eggplant was anathema to him. We never, ever had it in our house, not even in the vegetarian-friendly 1970s, which were arguably the glory days of eggplant. The first time I ate eggplant, I was in graduate school. A guy who was trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to win my affections fixed me a big pan of eggplant parmesan from his family’s traditional recipe.

And reader, I loved it.

I got this book as a birthday present when I was 7 or 8 from my good friend Steve Stasheff (I suspect his mother picked it out, actually). I don’t remember doing much cooking when I was a kid, but I did spend a lot of time reading this book, and I memorized a lot of the pictures. Even today, when I make pancakes or meatloaf, the images from this book are lurking in the back of my head.

First of all, I was fascinated by the test kitchen cooks whose faces and comments were sprinkled throughout the book. Who were they, and what did they know that I didn’t, that they got to get their pictures in the book? They looked kind of nerdy, but they were in a book and I wasn’t. That didn’t seem right.

The book started with a section on Beverages, the whole concept of which just puzzled me. Why bother? The only beverage I was interested in was pop, which we seldom got. I used to squint over the recipes, trying to figure out if they had slipped in a recipe for pop, but all they had were nauseating concoctions like Red Rouser (vanilla ice cream and cranberry juice), Choc-o-Nut Milk (milk mixed with peanut butter and chocolate syrup), and Cheery Cherry Drink: Stir maraschino cherry juice into milk and then “drop a maraschino cherry ’surprise’ into each glass.” I didn’t think a bright red blob would be a good surprise in a glass of milk.

In the Salads section, the Betty Crocker folks rolled up their sleeves and got down to business, which in this book meant one thing: Making food look like something else. In the Betty Crocker cookbook, “Rocket Salad” did not involve arugula; it was a banana, set upright in a slice of canned pineapple and topped with a “nose cone” of half a maraschino cherry.

The salad section relied heavily on such artifice. Canned pears become bunnies (with almond ears and tails of cottage cheese). Carrots cluster, points inward, around a clump of olives to form a black-eyed Susan. And someone even made a Raggedy Ann Salad, using a marshmallow for the head, shredded cheese for hair… I’m going to stop there.

With the exception of the hideous “Ham” Loaf Hawaiian (the scare quotes say it all: It’s Spam, studded with pineapple rings and baked), the section on main dishes is pretty solid. The food stylists did go a little nuts on Meat Loaf a la Mode (meatloaf baked in a pie tin and topped with scoops of mashed potatoes), but other than that, it’s straight-up home cooking. The cookies are pretty basic as well. But then we get to the cakes.

This is the Enchanted Castle Cake, and I wanted it. Bad. I used to sit and look at the little chocolate bar doors and just desire that cake. I never got it, of course, which is probably just as well as there is no way that reality could live up to that image. This one was too freakish for me, though:

I could never figure out what that creature in the center was supposed to be, but it didn’t look appetizing. And note the popcorn-ball clowns lurking in the background. The entire scene just screams “forced gaiety.”

I leave you with the best page of the whole book, a chocolate cookie recipe that really works—my 12-year-old daughter uses it when she bakes cookies, and they are still delicious. But what makes it perfect is the dollop of sarcasm added by my sister at the very end. Happy eating!

My dad once said that if our family had a motto, it would be “Good food, good books, good conversation.” Those do seem to be our three favorite things.

I grew up in a house full of books, because we all like to read and we all have wide-ranging interests. After I left home, my mother began collecting books as a hobby. Actually, it was more like a scavenger hunt: She would buy books for a quarter and sell them for ten bucks. You won’t make a living that way, but Mom just loved the idea of finding overlooked treasures and turning them into cash.

In order to do this, she learned a lot about offbeat authors and illustrators. You’re not going to find a Dickens first edition at a garage sale or Goodwill, but you might find a 1928 edition of Dana Malone of Greenfield, by Rev. Howard Chandler Robbin, that retails for about $10. If you can buy it for a dollar, that’s a 900% profit.

Mom liked finding the books—she always had a great eye for the good stuff—and she liked doing the research. What she didn’t spend as much time on was the selling part. Every now and then she would pack up a box of books and bring them to a dealer, but while she was there she would spot some more books that had potential, and my Dad would find two or three books he couldn’t live without, and the upshot was that they would usually walk out with more books than they came in with.

So when the time came to clear out their house, we were faced with stacks of books that were too valuable to just give away but not valuable enough to interest dealers. We set aside a few to sell on E-bay, and we had several dealers come in and go over the rest. When they were done, we still had a lot of books left. Many bore little Post-It notes with Mom’s handwriting: “$15 on Amazon” or “hold on to this.” Going through the books was like having one last conversation with her. But I couldn’t ship all of them across the country, and we were starting to run out of time.

We ended up giving a lot of the books to Goodwill after all, reasoning that we would give someone else the thrill of finding a semi-valuable book in a pile of Readers Digest Condensed Editions. But there were quite a few that I just couldn’t part with. I shipped seven or eight boxes to my home outside Boston, where today they nestle on my overcrowded shelves with all the other books that I found somewhere for a quarter and just couldn’t leave behind.

These are the books—Mom’s and mine—that will be featured under the “books” tag. Don’t bother breaking into my house to steal them—none are in good enough condition to be worth much. They’re just sort of interesting, at least to me.

This is a little book with a drab green cover, and it’s the 18th printing, so it must have been popular in its day (1944). It’s a book of goofy letters that people supposedly wrote to draft boards and other official bodies. Some are sort of plausible:

Others seem like they must have been intended as jokes:

It all seemed in good fun until I got to this page:

It’s not too much of a stretch to see what underlies this letter: These people were living on a farm that was confiscated from American citizens of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II. (It has been suggested that one of the driving factors in this was that the internees were successful farmers, and their neighbors were covetous of their land.) The ignorance and racism evident in this letter sort of took the chuckles out of the book for me.

My aunt sent me this picture from Ireland last week, along with a note saying that it hung for years in the dispensary (doctor’s office) in Louth Village. My grandfather was the village doctor from about 1930 until, literally, the day he died: He dropped dead of a heart attack in 1985, at the age of 85, while on a house call.

Grandpa was the Platonic ideal of a village doctor. He started his practice in the days before there was a test for everything, so he had to be a good listener. He had a hearty, reassuring way about him: “Totally normal,” he used to say to most minor complaints. And because he came from the area, he knew everyone’s family history for generations. This gave him considerable insight not only into his patients’ health but also into human nature. “Life is a struggle between the church and the hormones,” I heard him observe at dinner one day, “and the hormones usually win.”

He even looked the part of the country doctor, strolling through the village in the warm weather in a white suit and straw hat. And although Ireland has national health insurance, his patients still brought strawberries and chickens to the house.

The dispensary was in my grandparents’ house, which was actually owned by the government. Patients came to the front door, and one of my duties when we were visiting was to let them in and settle them on a chair in the front hall. I remember one night the family was rousted out of bed by knocking on the door; a motorcyclist had hit a tree on a curve just beyond my grandparents’ house. Grandpa got dressed and went out, but there was nothing he could do. The man was already dead.

The print is part of my legacy from my Aunt Eleanor, who shared Grandpa’s practice and took it over when he died. The artist is Mabel Lucie Attwell, who specialized in plump children doing cute things. (This is actually less cute than her other work, at least the things I have seen.) My mother’s family were big fans of hers. I remember having a Mabel Lucie Attwell annual when I was growing up, and when I went through my mother’s papers after she died, I found Mabel Lucie Attwell cards that she and her sisters had sent back and forth when they were in their 20s.

The picture is a bit buckled and grimy, reminders that it hung for years in a house that was heated only by coal fires. Most people don’t know what it’s like to live without central heating, even in a fairly temperate climate like Ireland’s. For one thing, nothing ever dries out completely, which means the sheets are always clammy and paper often feels limp. (Perhaps that’s why the cook, Mrs. Finnegan, used to iron the newspapers.) And the coal fires bring soot and smells with them. Coal smoke is my Proustian madeleine. In my grandparents’ house we burned two kinds of coal, bituminous and anthracite, one in the fireplace and one in the stove, and going out to refill the coal scuttle was another of my jobs when I was over there. This could be fairly intimidating at night, when the coal shed was pitch black.

I haven’t figured out where exactly I’m going to hang this picture, but it will have to have pride of place somewhere. The subject matter, the artist, even the grit trapped inside the glass, all are reminders of things too important to forget.

When we were cleaning out my parents’ house, my sister ran across a paperback novel, the sort of thing that normally we would have tossed on the give-away pile. Except this one had a Post-it note on it, in my mother’s handwriting: “This is the book Mammy was reading when she died.”

Mammy was my grandmother, who died in 1981. My mother passed away in 2003. As we cleared out the house, we found that she had left notes all over the place—stuffed into teacups, stuck on the covers of books, tucked inside folded clothing. As far as I can tell, she wasn’t dying when most of them were written. They were just reminders to herself, and information for us should something happen. How else would we know that the ugly woven-glass basket, which we would have thrown away in a second, was from the 18th century and identical to one that sold for over $2000 at auction? Would we have realized that the black lace mantillas in the cedar chest had belonged to Great-Aunt Daisy, who went in and out of three convents, slapped Mussolini, and sat for a portrait that now hangs in the National Gallery of London?

I wouldn’t call our family materialistic, exactly—we don’t care much about cars or jewelry or expensive stereos—but we do invest ordinary objects with great significance. Like a complete set of china, including massive platters and tureens, that my mother shipped over from Ireland to our home in South Bend, Indiana, after my grandmother died. I never saw her use it, although she hung a couple of the platters on the wall and put a tureen on top of the china cabinet. “Dad must really have loved Mom, to pay for shipping all that china over here that she never even used,” my sister observed. Then we fell silent when we realized that we were shipping the entire set to Boston for pretty much the same reason: Because they belonged to my grandmother.

This is a blog about stuff. Some of the posts will be longer versions of my mother’s notes: Here is the story of this object. Others are about interesting things that I picked up in my travels that I think should be shared with a broader audience. It’s a way of getting the information down and sharing it.

I don’t want to end up like an acquaintance of mine, who taped his father’s dying breaths and then was faced with a dilemma: He couldn’t throw out the tape, but he didn’t want to listen to it, either. If my life must be filled with these oddments and talismans, well, at least I can make something of them. And if somehow they are destroyed, the record will linger.

In the end, like the notes my mother left on nearly worthless books, the stories are more important than the things themselves.