Best Food Writing 2015 (31 page)

Of Links and Legacy
Of Links and Legacy

B
Y
S
TEVE
H
OFFMAN

From
Minneapolis Star-Tribune

          
Freelance writer (and sometime tax preparer) Steve Hoffman wasn't born a Lapadat, but he married into the family through his wife, photographer Mary Jo Hoffman. And even in-laws are needed to help out when the whole clan gets together to make their traditional Romanian Christmas sausage.

According to family legend, Eva Lapadat arrived in New York by ship from Beba Veche, Romania, in 1937, with three dollars in the pocket of her housecoat.

She would settle on lower Rice Street in St. Paul, raise three children, open a hair salon, command an armed robber not to come back until he could ask for money politely, and, over the decades, more or less dominate the social life of St. Mary's Romanian Orthodox church, both in her own mind and even to a great extent in real life.

But standing on deck, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, she was just Eva, thick featured, pregnant with her second son, holding the hand of 2-year-old John Lapadat, my future father-in-law, in hers.

It is the exact volume of one of those cupped hands that we are trying to quantify—four grown men in aprons, standing around a troughsized enamel tub filled with 60 pounds of coarse ground pork.

“Is this a Grandma Eva handful?” asks Eva's fifty-something grandson, Johnny, handsome in a broad-nosed, Jack Dempsey way. He holds out a thick paw containing a dainty-looking mound of coarse salt.

“A little more,” guesses his brother Pauly.

“A little less,” guesses his son Mikey.

Satisfied, Johnny sifts the salt over the pork, followed by five more Grandma Eva handfuls of salt, and four of black pepper.

Then, from a steaming bowl of water, he lifts a plastic colander half full of crushed garlic and lets fall an aromatic rain that splashes into the tub, filling this 50-degree garage in Minnesota with one of the world's great smells.

At his waist, held in place by a lowball glass of Manischewitz, lies a stained, handwritten recipe titled, “Romanian Sausage,” which begins, “Two handfuls . . .”

The conversation from the adjacent kitchen has risen a score of decibels. Dogs chase each other. Kids are screaming. The Vikings are losing again. It's like any other holiday party, except for what Johnny says next.

“Pull on your gloves, boys. It's time to mix some sausage.”

We plunge eight hands, which ache immediately, into the 35-degree meat, and, groaning, fold the garlic water and what we hope are the right quantity of Grandma Eva handfuls of salt and pepper into the 2014 vintage of Lapadat family sausage.

Variations on a Theme

The history of this sausage can be divided, like any great tradition, into several distinct eras.

There is antiquity, when generations of Romanian peasants teamed up at communal hog killings to process their winter meat.

There is the classical period, when, in dirt-floored Rice Street cellars during the mid-20th century, Lapadats put up sausage and made what we can only assume was awful concord grape wine.

We endured a 1980s Baroque, when such decadence as pouring cabernet into the mix, or using meat other than pork, or seasonings other than salt, pepper and garlic, gained traction.

But finally, John Lapadat, known to everyone as Papa, that 2-year-old boy in the New York harbor, the family patriarch and undisputed sausage king, stepped in, and in a semimythical moment in family history, ushered in our current Neoclassical era, declaring that we would return to Eva's original recipe, unadulterated by anything beyond the four basic ingredients.

He announced this with one of an endless supply of Now cigarettes
bobbing from his lips, which, during his proclamation, let drop an untended ash tip that bounced off the front of his sweater and into the pork.

Dictator for a Day

“More salt!”

Marianne, under her blond do, holds an empty toothpick in her right hand. She is this year's appointed “meister,” a title that rotates annually, and although everyone—her four children, their spouses and 11 grandchildren—will shortly weigh in with an opinion, Marianne is the day's acknowledged autocrat.

Everyone grabs a toothpick and samples a morsel of the pan-fried first batch.

Dee-Dee says more garlic. Roxy says perfect. Mary Jo says watch the pepper. Patrick says more of everything.

But none of it matters. What the meister says goes, and Marianne says more salt.

She leans affectionately toward her daughter-in-law, and smiles a little tiredly. This will be Marianne's second sausage making as John Lapadat's widow.

A former Hamm's executive, Papa Lapadat trusted me from the start because I had German in me, and Germans knew beer and sausage.

During one of my first sausage makings, he explained to me in a growling baritone how all the different cuts of meat that went into the grinder added qualities to the final mix, and just as you couldn't have good beer without good water—you know that, Stevie—you couldn't have good sausage without good ground pork.

That might have served as a tempting metaphor for a naturalized Romanian American, born on the Serbo-Hungarian border, who had processed through the grinder of Ellis Island. But he didn't want to talk to me about melting pots.

He wanted to talk to me—and did through four cigarettes and several backhanded thigh pats—about this family of his, and how everyone who joined it, by marriage, birth or friendship, came out of the experience a little bit Lapadat.

Being American was a privilege. Being a Lapadat was a gift.

Cranking Out History

The heavy black cast-iron sausage stuffer has seen its living quarters improve with the family's fortunes. From East Side root cellars, it migrated up Rice Street into John and Marianne's finished Shoreview basement, and now resides in the comfort of Johnny's two-story Lino Lakes colonial.

Now it's Johnny's responsibility—the care and maintenance of the ancient, hand-cranked machine, and by extension, of the tradition itself. It is Johnny who each year disassembles the machine, meticulously washes pork splatter the consistency of dried caulk from all of its edges and threaded parts, and oils it down again for storage.

It is Johnny, in a similar spirit, who taught himself to make
colac
, which he bakes every year, artfully braiding locks of egg dough with hands made to stack stone walls.

He always serves the first pan of steaming, golden-crusted bread straight from the oven to a family that falls on it with butter knives and devours it in minutes. The second pan waits on a trivet, because the only really acceptable bread to serve with Romanian sausage is
colac
.

In the garage, kids are blowing into the ends of 25-foot, salty white pig intestines. The final seasoning mix has met with the meister's approval and filled the cast-iron stuffer. A casing is threaded onto the aluminum spout, lubricated with a little crank of sausage meat, and sealed with an overhand knot.

We raise glasses of kosher wine to Papa Lapadat and, sacrificing taste buds in the service of tradition, choke down the grapey syrup that most closely resembles the homemade wine Papa remembered from childhood, with the exception that Manischewitz “tastes a little better.”

Hands are everywhere. Young kids grab the crank handle with both hands and with all their strength barely turn it. The hands of parents or cousins or uncles fold over the straining fists and help turn the crank, so that the meat is pressed out of the spout smoothly.

A pair of hands cradles the knotted casing, and applying just a slight back pressure, lets it fill and then spill slowly into a thick pink spiral in the catch pan. When the right length is reached, the crank pauses. A
hand with a shears cuts the casing, another pair of hands knots the cut end, and the cranking resumes, filling hundreds of feet of lacy white hog casings with a steady crackling sound.

We make 2-foot lengths for entertaining. Foot-long loops for family dinners. Links for breakfast. And patties for meatballs, cabbage rolls and stuffed green peppers. Johnny mans the bagging station, restoring himself with sips from his now smudged lowball glass while the vacuum sealer drones.

At his side, a cardboard box fills with vacuum packs that will chill down in a snowbank tonight, and then spend the winter in the freezers and on the tables of a tiny Romanian diaspora unfathomable economic circumstances removed from the kind of need that once made this a life-or-death activity.

The last person to know that need personally has just missed his second event in a row, which does not lend any sense of diminished importance to the squeals of reunited cousins, or the roar of shouted conversation, or the chime and clatter of dropped silverware and stacked ceramic plates.

A New Generation

It is generally agreed when dinner is served that the correct number of handfuls of salt have found their way into this year's batch.

I have hung up my apron and switched to something a little drier than Manischewitz. Standing next to my wife, Mary Jo, I have a view across the kitchen island into the dining room where everything is laid out.

Our daughter appears at the sideboard, grabs a bias-cut length of her own history, folds it unthinkingly into the still-warm pocket of a slice of
colac
, and slathers it, properly, with horseradish sour cream. She moves away across the dining room, munching, and is gathered into the compliant chaos of shouted conversation and several generations of bodies still partly shaped by the necessities of manual farm work in 19th-century Romania.

She is a strong and independent 16-year-old.

Her grandfather used to call her the Moldavian Princess.

Her name is Eva Lapadat Hoffman.

Monkey Eve
Monkey Eve

B
Y
C
AROLYN
P
HILLIPS

From
Alimentum

          
Blogger Carolyn Phillips (
MadameHuangsKitchen.com
) describes herself as a Chinese food wonk, partly due to her marriage to Chinese author J. H. Huang and partly to her own insatiable curiosity about Asian foodways. But in-law status is one thing—to truly earn a place in the Huang family, cooking turned out to be the key.

My Chinese father-in-law looks over his glasses at the oblique chunks of bean curd piling up in front of me. He frowns slightly and gently clears his throat, for unlike his small squadron of perfectly hollowed-out pyramids, my disheveled army is most definitely not up to his exacting standards. It isn't that he expects much from me, the inappropriately foreign wife of his eldest son, but I am definitely irritating him more than usual today as we prepare his annual Chinese New Year's Eve extravaganza.

“You are going too fast,” he at last says in his Cantonese-accented Mandarin. “Watch me.” I stop and take in his glacially slow movements, trying to rationalize why it should always take forever to cook a meal in his tiny apartment kitchen. The bustle of Chinatown's traffic vibrates thirteen stories below us, the strange flat blue of the Los Angeles sky casting harsh afternoon shadows on his brushes and pots of ink, the tan smell of sandalwood soap invading every corner. Firecrackers rip and rebound through the alleys, and wisps of gunpowder filter in through his living room window.

As always, I am on my best behavior with him—not as wary as when I am around my volcanic mother-in-law, just very mindful of our generational and cultural differences. He patiently shows me again what it is that I should be doing: a fingertip slips into the yielding mass and then scoops up microscopic bits as he carefully prods away, hollowing out the doufu triangle with infinite care so that its sides are not breached. He readies them so that they can be stuffed with marbles of ground pork seasoned in the style of his Hakka home town in Guangdong hill country. He was forced to abandon this ancient ancestral fold when civil war exiled him, first to Taiwan and then to the States with his wife and grown children. As he approaches his eighth decade, these deeply savory Hakka dishes tether him to the old country and in turn form the sole connections the rest of us will ever have to his former life.

He carefully arranges a finished piece next to the others and slowly picks up a new triangle. I silently start to time him; five minutes per piece. Each one still has to be dusted with cornstarch, filled, fried, and then slowly braised. And this is just the first dish of many. We'll never make it at this pace, and our ravenous clan will soon be banging on his door.

“Dajia jidianzhong lai?” I ask, already knowing the answer. He slowly turns toward the clock on his oven, adjusts his bifocals, and says softly in Chinese, “In three hours.” I look over the rest of the ingredients for the huge meal in progress—a whole rock cod, a fat plucked chicken, fresh pink pork, gray fish paste, aromatic bundles of garlic chives, a new bag of polished rice, a webbed sack of white eggs interspersed with a few pale blue duck ones, tangles of brown ginger, bunches of cilantro and scallions, a pile of coppery shallots, a pink bakery box that smells of his beloved sweets, and even more plastic bags filled with goodness knows what hanging from assorted door handles—and feel the first flickers of panic.

He patiently returns to the task in front of him while my eyes take in his spotted hands, which tremble slightly as he tries to coax the memory of his mother's cooking out of them. Ever since the last series of small strokes, he has lost his natural grace, the dancer's movements that were once the toast of Shanghai. Gone is the handsome tango partner and dashing fighter pilot who dazzled the city's fallen women in wartime dancehalls along the Bund.

I tell myself that he's an old man, that I must be patient, that I should just learn to breathe and relax as I watch him redo all of my efforts. Suppressing my desire to take over the kitchen, I try my best to transform myself into a submissive daughter-in-law, but my right eye twitches violently.

Murmuring something about the time, I let my husband's father work at his own pace while I settle into the grunt work: washing the vegetables and rice, scaling and prepping the fish, tidying the fridge and bathroom, wiping down counters, furtively recycling his massive stash of empty doufu boxes and plastic bags, and setting out a rickety assortment of borrowed folding chairs around his table on this eve of the Year of the Monkey. My hands stay busy while my eyes keep track of how he makes the family's favorite holiday dish. I surreptitiously allow my glances to wander up his arms to his shoulders and then to the back of his head, his stiff black hair much grayer than last year.

He seems so familiar and yet so strange. We never got to know each other much beyond these kitchen encounters because Chinese tradition forbade anything other than minimal interaction, and so he almost never even acknowledged my presence beyond what simple courtesy demanded. We never chatted, never shared ideas or thoughts, and never even looked each other in the eye. But we both liked to cook, and we had each discovered that hiding by a stove allowed us to maintain Swiss-like neutrality in our family's never-ending internecine warfare. Like me, he had no dog in those fights. Bowing out of whatever fracas was taking place, we found our refuge behind kitchen doors, the loudly whirring stove fan and whacking knives creating a bell jar that deflected all discord.

My beautiful mother-in-law had long ago gladly surrendered the kitchen to him and his endless stream of aromatic southern cooking, entering it only when this warlord's daughter longed for the foods of her northern birthplace in Tianjin, her plain steamed breads and hearty pork braises a stern rebuke to the sensuous dishes that customarily fed the family: simply cooked fresh fish spangled with green onions, chicken wings swimming in pools of golden fat and gently scented with vinegar, stuffed omelet purses, brilliant emerald mustard stems studded with crunchy bits of garlic, and bowl after bowl of steamed rice to sponge up all of those glorious juices.

His home readied for guests, I arrange some plum blossoms and forsythia in an old glass jar and center it on the dining table. Chopsticks and soup spoons are placed at each setting, and the holiday tabletop looks as it ever does. I sneak a peek at my father-in-law calmly working on the bean curd, oblivious to everything but the ingredients for this one dish. My pulse slows as I remember that this kitchen of his has become my safe haven, a place where I can screen myself behind the pots and pretend I am being appropriately dutiful.

Pausing on the kitchen threshold, I see for the first time the wisdom of his measured pace. His unhurried tempo advises me that the dinner will have to be gradually presented over several leisurely hours, that the cook and his helper will need to be regretfully absent from the festivities as they tend to woks and steamers, and that they will then have to spend an inordinate amount of time meticulously cleaning up the kitchen in order to guarantee good luck in the new year. With the clang of steel and the clatter of china drowning out all attempts at conversation, they will emerge sweaty and unscathed only when the last guests have left. With the cool night air seeping through the living room window and the traffic noises below reduced to only the occasional honk, these two will finally sit down at the cluttered table and contentedly nibble on leftovers while the eldest son tidies the apartment and returns the chairs. I wash up, take a sip of tea, and put on a clean apron. My hand reaches for a bean curd triangle, and I hum softly to myself while sedately scraping out a little crater. I tamp the edges of our bell jar down securely around us. We will not share another word the entire evening, but there will be no need for conversation.

After five minutes, my father-in-law looks over his glasses at the perfectly hollowed-out piece in my fingers and rewards me with the slightest of nods.

The Year of the Ram fades as the shadows on his desk lengthen. I pour my father-in-law a fresh glass of hot jasmine tea.

There is no hurry.