A Wave of Grief Takes Me By Surprise

Pablo Picasso, 1941

Mom didn’t trim her artichokes 

Though it might have been expected it was a nasty surprise 

When a leaf’s spiny tip pricked my finger drawing blood 

I learned to be wary

She guided my hand as I held the knife 

to cut out the tangle that guarded the heart

With her intent I do it now

After supper I cut a mango to share with my son

“Want to gnaw the pit?” “Nah, no pit”  

There was never mango in my mother’s kitchen

A wave of grief takes me by surprise

Then I remember a lifetime ago 

I mistook pit for seed and said,

“A man plants a pit in the woman to grow a baby”

My mother laughed, repeating my gaffe a million times

It’s good to remember her laughter 

Opening Cans

     As if I were there now I remember the cold smooth surface of the white formica table that sat in the crook of our “L” shaped kitchen. I can hear, or maybe feel the latch of the cupboard, the Frigidaire’s hum, the smell of the broom closet, the nearly imperceptible progress of white enameled hands around the black Modernist clock. 

     I have few memories of eating supper with my family even though we set that table nightly, taking dishes from said cupboard, pulling things in and out of the fridge. After supper we’d sweep up, negotiating TV and bedtimes by the ticking of the clock. Maybe the memories are buried, maybe lost with the passage of time. 

     Except for Chicken-a-la-King. When it was served I’d pick gingerly at the plate, stomach in knots, shooting squinty-eyed hate darts at my sister. She loved this dish but I couldn’t stand the bland beige glop that was mixed from cans and called a fancy name.  

     I know from photos that Karen was a lanky string bean with a thick auburn ponytail that was longer than I was tall. Our parents divorced before I was two. Karen, five years older, remembered living with our father. She was Daddy’s girl and I was considered Mom’s. 
     I remember snippets of stories: we played “Highland Kennels.” She was the stern mistress and I’d crawl on all fours barking and wagging my butt, eagerly lapping the bowl of water she’d put on the kitchen floor. She’d insist I thank her. I’d lick her feet. 

     After latkes one Hanukkah we lit our menorahs and opened gifts of matching blue nightgowns we immediately pulled over our clothes. Mom went out of the room. Karen and I were alone watching the candles and I broke the rule and used a napkin to smother a dying flame.The napkin caught fire. With bare feet we stomped it out. My gown got singed. I took it off and hid it. Karen never tattled. 

     One year she stopped going to school. She’d get up, get dressed, sit and read, and in the afternoon visit Dr. Halpern who had candy and Highlights Magazine in the waiting room where I sat biding time. When she returned to school the next year she wasn’t even behind. In contrast, I went to school early each morning because I needed help learning to read. 

     By fifteen she was into boys, LSD and was at war with our mother. I don’t know—maybe it was after dinner and they were in the kitchen yelling while I fidgeted in the living room. I don’t know—maybe it was once or maybe a couple of times; what I remember are the sounds of slapping and crashing pots.  Soon after she swallowed a bottle of pills and knocked on a neighbor’s door. The Skernick’s in 6A. She babysat for them. They called 911. She had her stomach pumped and was admitted to a psych ward. My mother cried a lot. We went back and forth visiting the hospital. Years later Karen told me if she’d known the misery would end she wouldn’t have done it—it wasn’t like she wanted to die.

     It was unkind of me to turn up my nose at supper. I see now my mother and sister’s fondness for Chicken-a-la-King was a rare instance they could recognize themselves in each other. Food is good for that—nurturing bonds, which sometimes leads to healing. But I couldn’t stand Karen being ‘easy’ for even a moment. She got attention messing up, I wanted sole dominion being good. Each chunk of insipid chicken, each squashed pea pushed to the side of my plate wreaked havoc with the status quo.        

      Over years things softened. Mom remarried. My sister married. I did too and we spoke frequently about our kids, and then about my marriage falling apart. Mostly we had long wonderful conversations about art. But bring the three of us together, even after years living apart and we’d slide back to old patterns; Karen defiant, my mother beleaguered, me—nursing indignation.

     In 2006, after a period feeling foul my sister ended up in the emergency room, diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. It was already too late. I attributed it to drugs, to her diet, to a mistrust of authority that kept her from check-ups when maybe it could have been caught early on. We didn’t tell our mother because she was fragile and in early dementia. 

     I was back in school and had irregular hours so I became the chemo buddy. While the chemicals slowly dripped Karen helped me write my papers. After treatment, if she needed I’d walk her home and wait till her husband arrived. Often I made lunch. Once I made pasta tossed with mushrooms. She ate with gusto. We reminisced about Chicken-a-la-King. Further along in the treatments she became nauseated from the chemo so we skipped the meals. It was a good time for us, the period before her death.

     When my mother died, I set about cooking her dishes. I thought the smells and motions of cooking and the taste of her food would bring back memories of her vitality. One day I purchased the cans she’d used for Chicken-a-la-King; Swanson’s, Green Giant, Cambell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. I set them on the counter but couldn’t bring myself to open them. After a while I left the cans on the steps of the church down the street and decided to make the dish from scratch. 

      Objectively, free-range chicken tenderly poached in aromatic broth, tossed with wild mushrooms, hand-shelled peas, torn herbs and thick fresh cream is delicious over al dente egg-rich noodles. But taste is not objective. What goes in our mouths tastes as much of memory as of flavor. Each time we remember, each time a bite of something conjures our past, a part of us relives the time anew. 

     I was so sure my reinterpretation would be good but after a forkful straight from the pan I put the remainder in the fridge where it sat untouched. A month later I tried again sure it would be different, but there I stood, an hour gone, with a chicken and expensive wild mushrooms made bland and voluminous; wasted. 

     “You would like this” I pushed, hoping if my son ate the dish the feelings dredged up might also be consumed. “I just don’t” he declared “I don’t like it” and for a flash his simple declaration let me reframe my knotted sorrow. I had been right to rebel. Then I started worrying that without meaning to I must’ve passed along my pain.

Chicken-a-la-King

Poach a small chicken in 4-6 c water along with an onion cut in half, a carrot, celery, parsley stems, a sprig of thyme, a bay leaf, salt, and a small handful of peppercorns. When chicken is cooked through but before it is falling apart (approx. 40 minutes) strain broth and set aside. When cool enough to handle, pull meat off the bones and set aside. Return the discarded skin, fat, bones and seasoning to the broth and simmer for another hour to wring out every bit of flavor. Strain the broth again and discard the solids.                                                              

In a cast iron skillet sear two cups of mushrooms over high heat until the mushrooms give up their moisture and begin to brown. Add a splash of sherry, or bourbon is good too and let it cook down. Add a pinch of salt and set mushrooms aside. 

In the same skillet melt  2 T butter. Stir in a heaping tablespoon of flour and let cook over low heat for a few minutes. Add a cup each of milk and the reserved broth (save the rest of the broth for another use). Add a glug of heavy cream Add a scant grating of nutmeg, freshly ground pepper and a pinch of salt. Bring to a simmer and reduce slightly. Stir in cooked chicken, the mushrooms, a handful of frozen peas and some chopped fresh herbs (I suggest parsley, thyme, and a bit of sage). Serve over buttered egg noodles (or toss the buttered noodles directly into the skillet so they soak up the sauce).

Beef Stew

It was because the neighbors made such a fuss coming over when my mother cooked stew and asking for the recipe that the stew grew larger than life. I greeted the gravy soaked potatoes and carrots with pleasure. I’d line them up on my plate and mash them into piles, melting margarine on top to make them richer. My mother loved the onions but I didn’t and I was neutral on the celery. The meat was a crapshoot, some pieces were fall apart tender but the threat of hidden gristle or an endlessly chewy bit made each bite suspect.

She browned the meat first. She used cooking wine from the supermarket mixed with bouillon cubes for broth. She must have cooked it over the week-ends when she had more time. We’d eat it two or three times the following week. I’d sit at the table waiting, watching her discard shards of congealed fat from the surface of the chilled pot. Once defatted, she’d reheat the pot over a low flame and turn her attention to salad. 

I don’t know the story behind the recipe, or if she took pleasure in the slow simmer that scented the house. Did she think “Damn I make good stew.” Did she sometimes think she was something raising kids on her own? Did she feel alluring and wish someone might fall for her because she could juggle, cope, and cook? 

When I make stew I use carefully trimmed pasture-raised beef, good red wine, homemade broth, and I think all those things. Lighter, quicker cooking is more my style, but when I make stew I’m filled with hope. 

My stew has never once matched the one that fed that awkward girl. I can see myself sitting in my mother's kitchen watching her every move, searching for cracks in her veneer—places levity or love might seep out. What I got was gravy soaked potatoes. My mother put in extra because she knew I liked them.

Stiffness and incremental loss of stability mixed with depression and the onset of dementia coalesced into the diagnosis of Parkinson’s. Year after year pieces of her disappeared. I’d sit with her, lining up food on her plate, mashing it into piles, feeding her with a spoon, hoping the food might wake her senses. She was trapped inside herself, slogging through a tangle of memories, or maybe they were drug induced hallucinations. I thought if I listened carefully enough I’d figure out what her broken sentences meant. I liked to think I had a knack that could break though her isolation.

Now, cooking and eating her stew to write these words, the memory of the girl at the table watching her mother cook, and the woman feeding her mother, merge. I'm realizing how much time I spent waiting, watching and waiting, hoping for something that wasn’t there. The food was there, but it didn’t fill me. It couldn’t fill her. 

One common storytelling trope is the quest story. When its a food story the protagonist tastes something and the flavor rekindles something lost. In the story a single bite transports an eater across time and a kind of magic takes place where the food and the thing lost become one. I cook my mother’s stew over and over. I am a better cook than she was and my stew is excellent. It tastes of what wasn’t there. 

Beef Stew

3 # Chuck steak

1 large onion, peeled and cut in half 

1/2 # Crimini mushrooms

3 c. homemade broth

1 c. red wine

bay leaf, thyme, 4-5 garlic cloves, salt, pepper

2 T tomato puree

1/2 # carrots—peeled and cut into large chunks 

1/2 # each: Japanese turnips and shallots—peeled and left whole

1#  potatoes—peeled and cut into 2” chunks

2 stalks celery, chopped into 2” pieces

Use a thick Chuck steak rather than the pre-cut stew meat. Trim away thick veins of gristle and the thickest of the fat. Sear the steak in a super hot skillet sprinkled with a big pinch of salt—approx 3-4 minutes per side—long enough to brown the surface of the meat. Move to a cutting board and let rest. In the same skillet sear the peeled onion until there are bits of char on the surface. Set onion aside. Sear mushrooms until they give up their water. Set aside. Deglaze pan with wine, scraping up any browned bits. Reduce wine to around 3/4 c.

Preheat oven to 300

Cut seared meat into 2” chunks. 

Put onion, celery, mushrooms, red wine, bay leaf, thyme, tomato puree and broth in an 

oven-proof stew pot. Bring to a boil. Add beef and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. The broth should not quite cover the beef. 

Partially cover pot and transfer to oven for an hour and a half. 

Add carrots, turnip, potatoes and another sprinkle of salt and pepper. Add a little more broth if needed. Roast, partially covered for another hour or until the vegetables and meat are fork tender.

baked goods

My mother would supervise and help me light the oven when I baked box cakes on my birthdays. As far as I recall she never baked a cake from scratch or made a pie—but since you don’t miss what you don’t know, I didn't feel deprived. There was frozen Sara Lee, or Entenmann’s, or maybe a babka from the bakery down the street. Anyway, I was more interested in salty crackers and chips.

Mom noshed mid-morning. A bisl bis to fit the side of a saucer or a paper napkin she’d de-crumb for later reuse, or on work days she’d tuck a foil wrapped treat in her purse. This was a habit she observed until her last days, an indulgence tenaciously guarded; her second cup of instant crystals with a bite of something sweet. All by herself. Not even with the newspaper. Over time I’ve come to understand such pleasure but as a girl I didn’t. Her ritual seemed lonely and dreary and I was never invited to join.

Baking is a part of the life I’ve built as a professional cook. I’m a competent baker though lack passion for the art, nonetheless I’ve mastered what my mother loved; rugelach, tender quick breads that are a foil to coffee, sweetened yeasted twists. She was never tempted by milie feuille, cannoli or towering lemon meringue—those were deemed fancy and she was plain, and in cake at least, our tastes converged.

I never mentioned the cakes I baked and didn’t bring her samples though I've shared with everyone else. It was like I was out doing her, being more her than she was. I suppose too it was an unconscious revenge; “I wasn’t invited to your lonely kaffeeklatsch, well mine is tastier and more fun.”  

In the weeks following her death I binge-baked, stocking my freezer for her  memorial, rolling chocolate into rising dough, pinching measures of cinnamon and cardamom, slicking danish with melted jam. The more heavenly the kitchen smelled the sadder I became, but not from grief. It was that with her gone I could begin to examine the depression that had blanketed our world. 

Those meager bites she’d allowed herself for comfort only fed my hunger. The seeds and nuts buried like gems in the pastries she loved became seeds of my despair. I had been neither good enough company, nor strong enough to rescue her. 

The other night I had a dream. I am a cartoon apple. Round, red, easily bruised. I lay fallen in the shadow of the tree, waiting for a buck’s swift kick or howling winds to carry me off, ashamed I have no legs.

Apple Cake

1 c AP flour

1/2 c dark rye flour

1/2 c buckwheat flour

1 1/2 t baking soda

1/2 t each: salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and unsweetened cocoa

3/4 c granulated sugar

1//2 c brown sugar, lightly packed

1 1/2 c unsweetened applesauce
1 apple, peeled and cut into small chunks 

2 eggs

2/3 c vegetable oil

2 t vanilla

2 cups peeled and roughly chopped apples tossed with 1/2 t cinnamon (approx 2 apples)

Pre-heat oven to 350^o Oil and flour a bundt pan and set aside. In a medium bowl combine the flour, baking soda, salt and spices. Stir to blend. In another medium bowl combine sugars, eggs, vanilla, applesauce and oil. Stir to blend. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix well. Stir in apple. Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake 50 - 60 minutes or until a wooden skewer inserted into the cake comes out dry.   

(If you prefer, bake in a loaf pan but you will have a cup or so too much batter for a standard 9” x 5” pan—put the extra in a mini-loaf pan or a muffin tin and bake for approx. 20 minutes). 

Allow the cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Let cool. If you’d like, glaze the cake with 1/2 c confectionary sugar stirred with 2 t or 3t of apple cider.

rice-a-roni

Convenience may not be the most delicious, but it is a consideration. My mother worked full time, had little money and took whatever help she could get. She loved Rice-A-Roni. It was her way to elevate the same old same old, so in my eyes Rice-A-Roni became the mother-from-which-all-other-rice-dishes-derived; Biriyani, Arroz con Gandules, Mujaddara—even Chinese fried rice. Ass backwards, and the crazy thing is subliminally I still felt this despite knowing something of the crisscrossed journey of rice and recipes across time. We hold tight to what our mothers teach us despite the things we learn.

As a kid the elongated vermicelli and swollen grains were an impressionistic tangle of tasty earth tones on an otherwise hum drum plate. And eating something with such a happy tv jingle meant we too were a happy tv home. Now, the hydrolyzed corn gluten and dehydrated parsley flecks in true Proustian form carried me back through time, but the flavor set-off a collapse of painstakingly built illusion. The salty pilaf, like our dutifully held premise of happiness, turns out to have been make-believe.

In 1960, my mother, the shy youngest of shtetl immigrants, divorced my father who was having an affair, or maybe he left her—I never knew. Either way it was a distinction among her siblings and extended relatives, which speaks to her liberalism, and also how bad her marriage must have been. Dogged by missing support checks, the string of live-in nannies, my sister’s troubles—it was more than she could handle even though I tried so hard to make it right.

That bite of Rice-A-Roni after forty-five years filled my mouth with vitriol. Its broken promise tasted of my mother’s shortcomings, her weaknesses, my father’s narcissism, his absenteeism, my sister’s fragility, my passivity. Our missed connections. That bite ripped open memories I would have liked to forget. I scraped the Rice-A-Roni into the trash and left the pan on the counter where the rice dregs dried to crust.

Two days later washing my mother’s precious pan I was filled with such sadness. This is what she did. She fed us, then washed the dishes through her sadness and disappointment. She did the best she could. 

chocolate milk

         

    Around 5:30 pm I’d hover by the front door, waiting to take my mother’s briefcase to carry to the hall bench as she hung up her coat and kicked off her heels. Hungrier for her than for supper I’d trail her to the kitchen wanting to help. It couldn’t have been easy, working all day, then cooking with a kid hanging on your apron, but my mother had her repertoire and I think she was generally content making meals.

     By the time I was 10 or 11 I was reading cookbooks and making my own dishes. I got hooked on food because food’s a gregarious companion. It shares intimacies, gets messy and reacts to what you do, maybe more so than my family did.

     I don’t think my mother thought of food the way I think of food. The food she cooked shows she cared; it was tasty and mostly well prepared, but she wasn’t using the food to say ‘I want you to taste this because I’m watching you grow and I think you’ll like it now’ or ‘I know you’re studying such and such at school and this is what that food is like’ or even ‘here is a way we can celebrate the season’ the way I did with my kids. Her dinner would have been the same if I were there or not. She just made food.

     I have been cooking what I remember of her, trying to feel something I lost during the years of her illness and this experience of cooking and eating has roused buried emotion, but I hadn’t felt my mother’s love, and here I mean the deep primary kind, until I made chocolate syrup and drank a glass of chocolate milk. 

     When I was a kid we flipped between Bosco and Hershey's. It was what made milk palatable. I had it mornings with Cocoa Puffs and it paired surprisingly with fish sticks dipped in ketchup. On the occasions we had chocolate ice-cream I’d make a big production of double chocolate shakes. The syrup was her gift, her way of fixing things. I didn’t like milk but had to drink it, she let me use syrup. Closing my eyes now I can see the sanguine goo sinking in ribbons to the bottom of the glass, the edge of the spoon pokes out against the glass as it pulls upwards, stirring to blend though leaving unblended streaks too. I hear the spoon clinking on the side of the glass. 
     Chewing the tip of a red and white straw I'd blow bubbles till they overflowed, sliding in slow-motion down the side of the glass, popping on the table leaving chocolate milk rings. In my teens I swiped a baby bottle from one of my charges and late at night I’d lie on the couch stoned, sucking chocolate milk, obliterating my mind on late night tv. 

   Tasting my homemade elixir the chocolates’ spiciness ignited my throat while the milk caressed, hushing the flame. My eyes grew heavy. The sip coddled like only a mother can.

Making syrup from scratch takes hardly a minute. 

Syrup

1 cup good quality unsweetened cocoa

2/3 cup sugar

1 cup water

pinch of salt

big splash of vanilla

In a small saucepan over medium heat whisk together cocoa, sugar, water and salt. When it comes to a boil, remove from heat and stir in vanilla. It thickens as it cools. Can be stored in a jar in the refrigerator for weeks.

Add a tablespoon or two into a big glass of cold milk. Stir.

seeded rye

I hated the seeds in the rye my mother loved. Now I can pick them out.

                   

mashed potatoes

In most cases the progression of Parkinson’s includes dementia but that’s almost too simplistic to describe the hallucinatory dissociation and drug induced psychosis that was part of my mother’s increasing isolation and grim prospects. At some point she drifted from lucid to lost but even then, if I hung on her words I could shuffle them into something resembling conversation. I’d sit close leaning in my ear and guess at her mumbles and every so often I’d lean even closer and whisper I was sorry her life was so hard. It went on like this for years. Long spells without coherence. Her eyes shut, her face a twisted grimace, and then miraculously she'd look me in the eye and say clear as day she wished she were dead. 

Mostly, until the end, she knew who I was and I would feel that maybe, if nothing else, I brightened her day. You might call it love, but there was bleakness, and below that a layer of magical thinking; as if my presence could reverse broken neurons, as if it were a matter of will for her to pull herself together. As she lay finally dying the hospice nurses wanted to give her morphine to ease her passing. I withheld permission. I wanted her suffering over, I’d been saying that for years, but I wanted more to hold on to the dream that she’d wake up and tell me something. A loving last word. 

Making and eating her food memorializes her. The way the taste of foods I haven’t eaten for years carries me through time helps bypass the black hole of illness. 

Trying to remember everyday routines I close my eyes and imagine the kitchen of my childhood home. At the top of the room an assembly of avocado pits rooting in murky water sit on the sill of the air shaft window. Jammed down the narrow length of the room a four burner gas range and a chipped enamel sink face the harvest-gold floor-to-ceiling cabinets and the noisy Frigidaire. Some years there was a caged parakeet on top of the fridge--Skipper 1, Skipper 2 and so on. At the far other end there was the broom closet and the wall phone with its perpetually twisted cord, with a notepad and pencils tucked neatly on the counter. 

I see the white formica table and moulded swivel chairs in the center of the room but I don’t see us. I have no memories of arguing with my sister over who set or cleared, no memories of eating as a family. I can't recall what we spoke about around that table. The image of the kitchen is silent except for a memory of the ticking Modernist clock with no numbers that made it so hard for me to learn to tell time.    

What I can summon clearly are memories of things cooking—flank steak marinated in garlic powder and soy sauce, charred on a warped cookie sheet. A roasting pan with permanently blackened corners filled with chicken breasts topped with lemon rounds and parsley, and the ever present saucepan simmering, brimming with potatoes, or spaghetti, or stew. 

After my mother remarried and I went to college and they moved from the west-side to a smaller apartment on the east-side and my mother did less cooking, that saucepan moved to their week-end house upstate. There, the scuffed dented workhorse with its ill-fitting lid took on a patina of calcified lime from the well-water used for boiling, and when it came time years later to sell the house, the pot was relegated to the pile for the auctioneer. The stigma surrounding aluminum cookware and Alzheimer’s, even if discounted by further studies was enough for me to let it go.

Now, I wanted to make mashed potatoes the way my mother made mashed potatoes, and that is when I was hit with the longing that is grief. I couldn’t make potatoes because I didn’t have her pot. Of course I can cook them in my fancy stainless steel, or if I’d wanted to snap a genuine looking photo for this collection of stories I could stop by the thrift shop and pick up something old for nothing, but that's not the point. It is her pot I want and I made the mistake of letting it go.

tuna salad

It wasn’t everyday but many many days I had tuna salad for lunch. I can take it back to pre-school sitting on the floor in front of our black and white tv watching Romper Room eating mayo heavy tuna on crustless white bread sandwich quarters, and move it forward to middle school when I started making my own school lunches or to high school when it was on toasted whole wheat with added tomato slices, red onion, capers and a layer of crumbled potato chips to keep the bread from getting soggy. 

So few are the memories of cooking with my mother I can count them on my fingers. She taught me to squeeze the water from grated potatoes before frying latkes, to shape meatballs by rolling them between my hands as if they were balls of clay, to pull creamed spinach from a boil-in-bag with bamboo toaster tongs so as not to waste any and also not to burn my fingers, and to finely dice celery for tuna.

Celery was a refrigerator staple. She used it in soups and stews, used the leaves in salad, and fed us stalks filled with cream cheese for snack. I was fascinated by the dirt nestled in the root ends, the fibrous threads, the two part procedure of cutting strips the length of the stalk and then bundling them for the perpendicular cut to dice.

I married a man who didn’t eat mayonnaise and my children wouldn't eat fish so I stopped making tuna salad and ate it only rarely at luncheonettes where it was always disappointing. 

A few weeks after my mother died I made some. I bought imported cruelty-free tuna packed in oil and put it in one of her bowls. I paid special attention to the celery and added onion diced the way she showed me. Once the sandwich was made I couldn’t wait long enough to snap a photo, couldn’t even get it on a plate. From kitchen counter to mouth, then whoosh I was teleported to when I loved my mother and she fed me and nothing else mattered. My hands could barely get the sandwich into me fast enough.